Man Bites Blog

There goes my weekend…

You know how when you’re having some trouble with your PC, like some driver for your printer not working correctly, or a DLL missing, and you Google for an answer? And you find some tech boards with similar questions, and invariably there’s a response along the lines of “Get Linux!” or “Get a Mac!” and you want to punch the guy in the face?

Well, I’m starting to become that guy.

A few months ago our family finally gave up on the Dell I bought in 1999 with Windows 98 and bought a new PC with Windows Vitsa (cue ominous music). We eschewed MS Office and installed OpenOffice with good results.

That worked OK for a while. But for a job I installed Ubuntu Linux in dual-boot mode, since my wife also uses the PC and I didn’t want to force her to take the plunge into Linux, and there were some things (games, iTunes) that I wanted to continue to use that were in Windows.

But Ubuntu soon became my default OS on my home PC.

Now, something else has happened.

My wife cannot open or save attachments in Windows Mail, and downloads from Internet Explorer disappear once they seem to have completed. (Thankfully, we had already installed Firefox, through which downloads work). This is mostly a moot point for me, since I use Gmail for all my personal mail, and usually use Linux and Firefox. But this is a pretty crippling problem for her.

I figured we must have flipped some switch or something that screwed us up, and I would quickly find a simple fix. But no. I posted to two different Windows groups and got no helpful response. Searching, it seems like these are both common problems with no workaround (using MS products, anyway), or any acknowledgment by MS or forthcoming fix.

The workaround seems to be to use Firefox and some other e-mail client, e.g. Thunderbird. If we do this, then our suite of applications will be:

• OpenOffice
• Firefox
• Thunderbird

Hmmm — remind me why we paid $100 more to get Windows again?

I’m not one of those immediate MicroScoffers. I don’t think they rose to prominence by shady business practices, but because they made good software.

But I think they’re losing. Not because they’re mean and terrible, but because I think Open Source is a better model for this type of software. I don’t think such a fundamental problem would persist in an open source product.

That’s not to say Linux and Ubuntu are perfect. If I weren’t a geek, I probably couldn’t get it to do everything I need it to do. I’m still not sure I want to foist it on my wife. I use OpenOffice presentation, and it crashes on me once an hour or so.

But for the first time in a while, using a computer is fun! It’s hard to describe exactly why, or how, but I get the same feeling when I first started using computers and programming.

So, if you see me pop up in a tech board saying “Get Linux!” try to resist the temptation to throttle me.