I've finally had it with Microsoft Windows. Over the last couple of weeks, I've experienced the following on a couple of Windows boxes (Vista and XP):

• unprompted restarting as a result of an update being installed; this cost me an unsaved game of Hellfire
• hanging during operations involving large numbers of files (on Vista)
• Windows Explohder has taken to hanging when displaying new windows; often when I hit 'Win+E' I get a window title and border but nothing inside it
• BSODs on my wife's laptop when she plugs her iPhone in; not my iPhone, only hers

After restarting Explorer for the third time yesterday while trying to do a simple file copy, I decided that I would make my laptop a Windows-free zone, running only Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope (plus Wine for a few Windows games like Hellfire).

Now I have an extra 50GB space on my hard drive, and still have the ability to run my favourite Windows games using either Wine or DOSBox:





As far as modern software goes, I'm using the following Linux software in place of Windows software (in fact I've been doing this for several years now, for the most part - the difference is that I'm now using the Linux alternatives 100% of the time):

1. Evolution in place of Outlook
2. K3B in place of Nero
3. Rythmbox in place of iTunes
4. Emacs in place of ... well ... Visual Studio, SlickEdit, mIRC, IDLE, and RadRails for starters :-)
5. FlightGear in place of MS Flight Simulator
6. VLC in place of Windows Media Player
7. Grip in place of FreeRip

The rest of the programs I use on a regular basis - including Firefox, Skype, Pidgin, OpenOffice, and LyX - all run as happily on Linux as they do on Windows. In fact, they're happier, given how much more stable I find Ubuntu 9.04 is than either Windows XP or Vista. It's hard for a program to run well if the operating system on which it runs is misbehaving all the time.

I'll still be using Windows from time to time, as the client component of our forthcoming product is Windows-based (using .NET). But my laptop is now a 100% Windows-free zone and it feels good :-)