Microsoft
I've got nothing against Microsoft. Seriously. I've been using their product since their MS-DOS days. Even though their Windows 9x line was plagued by system crashes, Windows 98 SE is still the best platform for gaming, I reckon. Their Windows NT line, however had been generally very very stable. I especially like Windows 2000. However, in general, Windows has been quite unforgiving with incompatible RAM chips.
Another thing that bugged me is the fact that Word 2000 doesn't seem to like if we want to change the normal.dot template from US English to, say, Australian English. No matter how I tried, it defaults back to US English. The solution that I found was to put one space in the document (i.e. press spacebar), select all text, change the language to Australian English, and then save it as normal.dot.
Some of my other complaints are:
- When I add/delete section breaks in Word, the types of the other section breaks keep changing from "continuous" to "next page", and vice versa, in a completely unpredictable manner. This often caused me to redo all of the other section breaks.
- Picture moves randomly if I type some text around it in Word, even with the anchor set to stay in the same place. Plenty of headache and cursing ensued.
- Page sizes work differently in Powerpoint 2000 and XP. Page sizes in Powerpoint 2000 ends us being slightly larger than in Powerpoint XP. This also means the guide lines and object sizes are different in those two versions of Powerpoint. This resulted in plenty of headache when I'm making posters in Powerpoint, as I use Powerpoint 2000 at home, and Powerpoint XP at uni.
As I said, I have nothing against Microsoft. In fact, when I eventually use Linux as my primary operating system (I am waiting to get hold of Mandrakelinux 10.0), I will still keep Windows for some of those programs that work better in Windows. That way, I'll get the best of both worlds. In the mean time, I just wish these little nags would go away. I mean, how unreasonable is it to wish two versions of Microsoft products to be forward/backward compatible with each other!
Why Linux?
I am not a Linux zealot, so I won't bore you with all the "Microsoft is evil" speech. Open source also doesn't mean much to me. There's no point for me to obtain the source code if I can't make up heads or tails of what it does! To me, Linux is nice because it's stable, most of the applications can be obtained for free (usually under GNU GPL), and if a program crashes, it rarely takes the whole operating system with it. Also, need I mention the myriad of viruses, worms, and exploits that exclusively target Microsoft products?
In terms of visual presentation, Linux is also better than Windows, in my opinion. For starter, there are plenty of choices for desktop environments in Linux. I myself prefer either KDE or Fluxbox/Blackbox. All of them are highly customisable, with almost anything can be changed to your liking. Also, transparencies come as standard. Mmm… eye candy…
A GNU experience
The first ever Linux distro that I tried was Mandrake 8.1 (Vitamin). I bought the PowerPack edition from Everything Linux. At that time, I didn't have my own computer, so the only time I tried it was on my family computer back home. During the short time I used it, I had already liked it.
When I got my own computer, I acquired Mandrake 9.0 (Dolphin). Unfortunately, the nVidia driver didn't work, meaning I didn't have OpenGL acceleration. Normally I could handle this, but unfortunately, this also meant I couldn't use the full capabilities of VMD when I do work at home.
I went back to Mandrake 8.1, but there were some incompatibilities between it and my sound card (on board AC97), which I eventually figured out. However, the major drawback was that it couldn't access NTFS at all (it wasn't supported by the kernel).
That then led me to Red Hat 8.0 (Psyche). But unfortunately, Red Hat 8.0 didn't support NTFS out of the box, and when I did get it to work, the NTFS partitions were only accessible by root. Of course, this lead to some hassles, as my data are stored on the NTFS partition. Getting MP3s to work on Red Hat 8.0 also took a bit of work, as Red Hat didn't include it due to licensing issue. This is the reason why I never looked back to using Red Hat/Fedora.
After extensive search on the internet, I eventually figured out why Mandrake 9.0 wasn't working with my system. By adding the line "noapic" to my lilo configuration file, I eventually got it to work properly, along with my ZIP drive and all.
Nowadays I use Mandrake 9.2 (Fivestar) as my Linux system. It's almost good enough for me to use as a primary operating system. But, I've decided to wait until I obtain Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community before I make that commitment.
I also keep Knoppix around. It is a live Linux CD based on Debian (also an excellent distro) that can be used without installation. All you have to do is put it into the CD drive, and boot from it. It leaves the hard drive untouched, except if you set it to use a FAT partition to create a swap file. I still use it from time to time, either to do recovery, or to test out another computer.
Other than Knoppix, I also follow Quantian. It is also a live Linux CD based on Knoppix. The difference is, Quantian includes plenty of scientific applications. This is very handy to use, especially at uni where we are given Windows machines to use, and getting the software we need installed is too troublesome.
A good site with comparison of many different Linux distros is DistroWatch.
Browser
My web browser of choice is Opera. I like it because of its customisability and the all-powerful mouse gestures. The mouse gestures were so addictive, I even searched (and found) a mouse gesture program called StrokeIt which works for all other programs in Windows. Slightly dodgy name, but very powerful.
My second browser of choice is Firefox (or, if you installed the Firesomething plugin, can also be known as Firedonkey, or even Firebunny.)
What's wrong with IE, you might ask. Well, nothing except for the exploits, pop-ups, bloat, vulnerabilities, and non standards compliance. It can't even display CSS properly, despite it claiming to do so! Now you might ask, why should you care about standards compliance. Well, there are plenty of people who can give long and "better" answer. But to me, it means you can optimise your code for speed and ease of maintenance.
I hate all of those websites with "IE only" tags. I think the webmasters are living in the dark ages of internet. The information on the internet should be free for people to use, regardless of browser and platform. Most of the time, when the alternative browsers spoof themselves as IE, the site works fine. Hence, the reliance to IE is entirely unjustified and unnecessary. You can help by visiting the Opera's Open the Web website.