In Which Alan Goes Over to the Dark Side

11 ^AM March 18, 2004

Mac fans: please don’t read this. Please. It’s quite offensive.

Linux/BSD zealots stop now too. Really. Pages like this are the reason that all open source browsers have a back button. Use it.

It may also make BeOS users sad, too.

After a week of using heavy office-train-home-train use, I’m convinced that Windows XP Pro is a world-class OS for developers. Here is what I am appreciating about it:

Hibernate and standby-mode Just Work.
CRT Monitor + LCD when I’m at work or home. LCD only on the train.
Winamp 5. MAD Plugin. Works with the laptop’s play/pause/stop/next track/prev track soft buttons, so I can run it in the system tray.
Virtual Dimension virtual desktop manager. I have my train-time on one desktop, and my office work on another, so I can quickly swap between them, without closing any windows.
gVim is ever reliable.
Cygwin gives me all the GNU tools and a bash shell, which is way more useful than CMD.EXE.
FireFox is neat.
I am off-line caching my mp3 directories from my home network and my project document directories from work. It makes the files look like they are on the network drives, even though they mysteriously are not. Windows lets me decide when to synchronise.
Most drivers and applications seem to install/uninstall without a reboot.

From where I am now, it would take about a month to get an equivalent Linux setup, though this is partly due to the Linux-resistance of the HP hardware. No doubt the situation will improve with time. I’ll think about it again in six months or so.

The downsides? I have a bazzillion strange processes running, most of which I probably don’t need. MS Messenger insists that it can’t be uninstalled. I will probably have to pay for anti-virus software.

By alang | # | Comments (10)

(Posted to Software Development)

Comments

At 10:43, 18 Mar 2004 Daniel Sheppard wrote:

See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SecuringWindows - Antivirus and firewall need not put you out of pocket. (The "I" in question on that page is me).

Also, there's a damn good guide on which windows services are safe to stop that I have lying around here somewhere....

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At 10:51, 18 Mar 2004 Daniel Sheppard wrote:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm is the one I was looking for.

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At 14:28, 18 Mar 2004 Alan Green wrote:

Mmmmmm! Good links.

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At 02:38, 19 Mar 2004 Andy wrote:

Not sure why this is offensive to Mac fans - it just means that by installing a bunch of software you can get a Win XP box to work almost as well as a Mac Powerbook. Oh, except that Mac doesn't have the unremovable MS Messenger.
Didn't see anything that would make a Mac user even consider switching.

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At 08:04, 19 Mar 2004 Alan Green wrote:

So, it's only suggestions that a Mac user switch that offend them? It really is OK for non-Mac users to say to they are happy without a Mac?

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At 08:09, 19 Mar 2004 Richard Jones wrote:

As a current user of a Powerbook, I agree with Andy.

Though I personally have to also add that at my last job (a a bit over a year ago) I had a dockable Dell laptop that ran KDE out of the box and gave me all the stuff you just mentioned...

Well except the off-line caching - I'm not sure what that is. Then again, I generally have horrendously large disks in laptops and rsync :)

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At 09:35, 19 Mar 2004 Andy wrote:

Eh, maybe I'm just a particularly non-offendable mac user...you can suggest I switch and I'll just laugh. I've worked with plenty of different systems for different jobs, so I know people can think they are happy without a Mac :).

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At 11:05, 19 Mar 2004 Ricardo Niederberger Cabral wrote:

Regarding some MS tool you mentioned for offline file sync on your mobile PC: I'm really happy with UNISON (www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). Works really well, even when synchronizing dirs on win32 and *nix filesystems.

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At 23:43, 19 Mar 2004 Chris wrote:

The windows XP/Cygwin combo is really nice. The only problem I have is with my laptop's video card and driver (Inspiron 8200 by Dell). I think it's a hardware problem because my wife has an almost identical model which doesn't crash like mine does, but mine crashes every couple of days and the blue screen or problem report always indicates the video driver as culprit. I have upgraded the driver to the newest version twice, but it hasn't helped. Not really a microsoft problem, but with Linux I rarely see such enigmatic behavior. I think I may get a mac for my next laptop.

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At 00:18, 20 Mar 2004 Victor Ng wrote:

I'm an OSX user - I'll bite!

My last job was using a WinXP/Cygwin setup and although it was good enough - I was always aware of the fact that although Cygwin tried to make Windows look like Unix, it just wasn't.

Little stuff like javac and java taking different command line arguments - specifically for path and file separators. Then we ran into some weird maximum number of process incompatibility with Cygwin and AMD CPUs which I think was traced back to:

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/1998-01/msg00411.html

Mind you - little set backs like that were completely overshadowed by the fact that we had the Eclipse IDE. Eclipse _still_ doesn't run acceptably fast on Mac OSX which sucks hard.

I tend to use a lot more of the UNIX-y stuff now though - so I don't think I going back to Windows would even be an option anymore.

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