I’ve been a Linux-type guy for about a year now, and it’s been really good. Evolution is a great great GREAT email and contact and calendar app, Mozilla is a kick-ass browser, GAIM is acceptable for IM, and OpenOffice.org is all I need and more for office stuff.
Not to mention the fact that using the I’m-on-Linux-so-I-can’t-use-the-Borland-compiler thing has saved me on multiple programming assignments (the TAs mark assignments using the Borland compiler, which is crap).
However, as of late I’ve been using Windows a lot more. Reasons?
- Better battery life Even though Red Hat added Notebook Mode with Severn, it doesn’t get activated much, so the hard drive goes almost full tilt, full time. So I can get about 3 hours in Linux on my brand-new battery, versus about 5 in Windows (not doing anything overly disk intensive)
- Suspend and Hibernate These help with battery even more, since I can just hibernate the machine between classes and save about 10 minutes of power every hour – without having to wait for the system to start.
- Starts and shuts down faster
- Better .NET support – and since I’m joining the Microsoft .NET Student Community program to try and earn me another XBox or a wireless mouse or something, this will be an issue.
- More office software – because OpenOffice.org can’t read everything
- Better PIC tools
- Better WiFi support – not having to manually change profiles, letting me see what networks are available… *joy*
There are more reasons to switch back, but you get the idea – Linux basically isn’t made for running on laptops (especially mine, damnable Trident video chip…). The best thing is, this can be a basically zero-cost switchover with respect to changing software – since Evo stores things in fairly standard file formats, and since I’ve switched all of my email over to IMAP, and since cygwin can give me any software I need, basically… I’ll be set.
The only question is, when do I reformat and start anew? I mean, this XP install has rather gone to shit, and I need to repartition anyways.
0 Response to “To XP or not to XP…”