Farewell to Microsoft

Disclaimer: This is based on my own experience, and your needs and experiences may vary

Introduction

I have been using Microsoft Operating Systems since 1990, first exclusively, and later as a dual boot with Linux, I hope today to be the day I will finally be able to say "Good by for ever Windows, please stay out of my life".

Some review of my experience with computers

I started my computer life with DOS, PC-DOC and MS-DOS back in 1990, I used Word Perfect and Lotus 123 or Quattro Pro to work my documents and my spread sheets.

Later I was introduced to Windows 3.11 and then to Windows 95, fortunately in 1998 I met RedHat Linux while working at the main telecom company in my country as Internet administrator, I continue to work on Windows 95 but also start working with servers like Apache, Bind, Tacacs, Radius and others. All of them running on Linux.

As my life went on, I switched to Windows Milenium (Really a bad version of Windows) and then to Windows XP, happily again in 2006 I met the Fedora project and switched from XP to Fedora 6 since then I have always had dual booting computers with Windows (Always XP, as I never liked Vista) and some Linux distribution.

First it was Fedora, then Ubuntu, later Mandriva, then Debian and Gentoo, to finally arrive to Arch Linux and Slackware which I use now, together with Debian from time to time.

I need to say that some 98% of the time I work on Linux and only switch to Windows when I needed to run some special software like iTunes, I own an iPod Touch and an iPod Shuffle.

It is incredible that with just that 2% of my time spent on Windows, Windows itself was the cause of 80% of my computer headaches. It is incredible how easily Windows takes your disk space with no reason, how slow it can be sometimes when it is supposed to be running nothing, also incredible is how many times you have some task hanged or worse, the complete system halted.

And do not think I'm a newbie at computers, I spent more time with them than with my family since I met them in 1990.

Unfortunately I had to keep working with Windows because of my need for some software that lacks on support for Linux, that simple fact was driving me crazy.

I want to share with everybody now that I have finally said good bye Windows, and I hope this time will be for ever.

I have bought a MacBook Pro, and now I have iTunes in this computer (my other two computers run Arch Linux and Slackware) I can also install some other software in this computer if I ever need them in the future, just hope not to need any Microsoft software. Well, I have to admit that I have installed skype on it as well as on the iPod :(.

I have Libre Office installed on the MacBook as well as Numbers (For just 20 dollars, I think it worth having this piece of software).

Mac and Linux, the perfect combination

To me this seems to be the perfect combination, you can use all free software out there in your Linux computer (or partition) and also run that special software you really need on the Mac computer (or partition), and at the same time you can forget about the blue screen, you can forget about the poorly done operating system that Windows is.

Considering that Mac OS X and Linux are cousins both based on Unix, both rock solid stable, and both easily to run and learn, you have support for hardware with no need to insert extra CDs or anything, mostly everything available from the repositories in Linux and now from the Mac App Store in your Mac, every piece of software carefully designed to run smoothly in your Operating system, not just a bunch of software sometimes not even tested enough to be released, trying to work together in your system.

Conclusion

I hope this is the day I can say Good by Microsoft Windows, hope to never see you again.

Just one more thing to note, I really like working on the terminal, I love vim, I love to write my documents in vim using Latex, I'm happy to have discovered that I have vim and a great terminal in Mac OS X too.

I can even use some perl scripts I need out of the box as Perl is already installed in the Mac.

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