Sunday, January 06, 2008

Keep buying XP

Although my Thinkpad is Vista Capable, I'm so happy to have stayed with XP. In the last month, I've advised a friend and my girlfriend about buying laptops, and I've told them both to stay away from Vista. After reading this blog item I'm no less happy with my XP experience. In coming months I'll upgrade the hardware in my stationary gaming machine and guess what - no way am I going to install Vista on that one either.

Which is sad, really. Not that I lament the apparent loosening of Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop interface, but to think of all the hours I and others have spent learning to handle our current operating system and then think of how many hours we'll have to spend learning Apple OS X or Vista SP 2 if the latter is any good. A lot of that time will be wasted shortly after XP finally goes away by the end of June.

I have enough experience with *nixes to know how much time you can save if you have a truly multitasking, modular and tweakable OS at your disposal. GNU Emacs is available to anyone who wants to try that experience within a single program. Now if Microsoft was able to deliver something like that inside an XP-like exterior, that would be neat - much like Apple did with OS X, which is Unix under the hood. No wonder most of my tech-savvy American friends are buying Macbooks.