Saturday, September 19, 2015

Windows vs Linux Mint - some comments.

When I was first learning Windows, and reading all the hype about that and other operating systems, I thought people were picking on Windows just because Microsoft had the biggest game in town, and others were just grumbling about it. Now, after eleven years of Windows, and a few detours into open-source systems, I know those people weren't just grumbling for the hell of it. Sometimes, there's a legitimate complaint.

A couple of days ago, I installed PC-BSD on the #1 PC, expecting it to recognize the pre-existing Windows there. It didn't. It wiped out the Windows and gave itself the whole drive. As long as it was there, I decided to play with it for a day or so. Then this morning, I got out the Windows 7 discs, chose the 64-bit one, and began installing Win-7 over all that other thing. I thought. Not so fast, Buster! It isn't that easy. Four times, that install disc went through all the right moves to do the install, and four times, it got to about 80% done, and then rebooted, and began again from the very beginning. I'm a patient guy, but I tire easily at my age, so the fifth time it got to 80%, where it barfed before, I quietly removed the install disc, reset the boot loader to boot normally, and then sat back to see what would happen. I should have done that two hours previously. It continued on without the disc in the drive, finished the install, connected me to the Internet, let me activate the key codes, and begin the long and tedious updating process, which continues as I write this - seven hours since beginning all that. 

And that, Dear Reader, is why we sometimes get just a little annoyed at Mighty Microsoft. It seems to some of us that they've been in the business long enough now to get it right the first time, without requiring me to kick-start it to keep it going. I don't have that trouble with Linux. It just works. There's a moral there somewhere, if we look for it.

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