Win-don’t?
Last night I got around to installing Windows 2000 on my desktop PC, which is that slightly long in the tooth Dell GX240 but still a perfectly good PC. (£60 for a P4 2.4GHz, 512MB, GeForce FX5200 128MB, Wifi card, keyboard, mouse and CRT screen.) I put it on a spare hard disk as an experiment to see how performance is on this machine as it has only ever run Ubuntu 7.04.
Actually it’s very good and I think it’s actually faster. That might be my perception of it, Ubuntu was by no means a slouch but something just seems snappier. The fact that ACPI support works on Windows 2000 also counts for something but so does the fact that Windows 2000 is an eight year older OS. Which if any points at what a good job Ubuntu does (and Linux in general) of working on older hardware.
That said, I installed lots of open source software. Firefox, Thunderbird w/Lightning and Google Calendar plugin, Pidgin, OpenOffice.org 2.3 and LyX 1.5.2.
Now running Windows on this machine does allow me to embrace open source software that I really like but also potentially agree that on this Dell, Windows works best. (And the sound of the world ending is heard from the other side of Littlehampton.)
What I need is a good music jukebox that is fast, intuitive and all the rest of it and then I could have a decent enough Ubuntu replacement. But even Windows XP w/SP2 is pretty spartan in its default form compared to Ubuntu (Vista is a different case as that’s equally specified.)
There is a reason for this though, scanning. I mentioned it a little while back that as an owner of a film SLR ideally I would like to scan 35mm negatives and slides and post process them etc. but on Linux my options are severely limited. There’s plenty of scanner support but not scanners that have slide/negative scanning facilities. So the answer to that is spend an inordinate amount of a dedicated Nikon film scanner just to say, “I have it working on Linux,” or to buy a Digital SLR. Neither of those are really options. So the most pragmatic one is to run Windows.
So I think, I’m going to stick with Windows on my desktop as I have noted for a long time, I think 2000/XP are great operating systems (although Windows 2000 is a bit old now; but it works and I am licensed to use it on this PC) but I can at least still enjoy pretty much all of my software I used on Ubuntu on my laptop on here too; with the benefit that should I need a piece of kit or software that is Windows only; I have a viable way of running it/using it/installing it.
Would I go back to using Linux/Ubuntu full time on this machine if the scanning situation was better/not an issue. I don’t actually know to be honest. I think I probably would but I would also be a liar if I said that Windows 2000 sucks. It doesn’t. Neither does XP. And Vista isn’t that bad; although it’s a big resource hog.
Another thing is that I think Ubuntu needs to look at having a ‘business’ theme on their software. Something more pedestrian and toned down supplied by default that doesn’t have that goofiness that orange/brown attire the current generation has by default. (I use Clearlooks Classic, Tango on a blue background on my Ubuntu laptop which is definitely not going to Windows, ever.)
We will see what happens.
Edit: Amazingly I have installed The GIMP 2.4.2 instead of Photoshop 7. That said, Photoshop might be the only proprietary application I can see myself needing.
