ALthough I have boxes running Ubuntu and Puppy Linux (the latter on nearly any box in the house at any given time–exceptiing only Bubba’s Box and his XBox 360) and even PC-BSD, for many reasons, much of my day-to-day stuff is done on an old box running Win2KPro, which, yeh, I prefer to the WinXP boxes (in fact, I scrubbed WinXP off a hard drive recently in favor of having a fresh hard drive and Puppy Linux running in memory on that box, using the hard drive solely for storing the pup.sys file and data files–no OS on the drive at all).
The only things keeping me on this box for much of my browsing and other activities are
- continued familiarity with typical Windows behavior (mousing, windowing, etc.) since most of my clients still use Windows.
- inertia: so many apps have format-specific data saved on that machine and even were I to run ’em using WINE under Linux, the app-specific tweaks necessary to do so are creating a mental logjam of “Nuh-uh–don’t wanna do that just yet.” *heh*
But that may come to a screeching halt, soon. Recently, I had the opportunity to make the switch complete on this machine and let the inertia of data-associated apps sway me to stick with Win2K. Yup. A physical hard drive crash (some of y’all may recall the incident) resulted in a moment or two of waffling… but then I mirrored the crashed drive onto another one (presription: freeze drive; install as slave; mirror–quickly! before it warms too much and starts sticking again! *heh*). All data and configs since the last backup nicely saved to new drive. Repair install of Windows and all that was needed was… *sigh* twaeking of install cos program registration of some installed programs screwed up, naturally (all this took much longer than it sounds like–actually involved TWO “new” hard drives, but that’s another story).
In the time I took to have a functioning Win2K system back up and working as I wanted it to, I coulda had an Ubuntu system up, my data transferred over and WINE installed for those apps I really don’t want to do without.
But I let M$ inertia take over for that machine.
However…
As Windows keeps bugging me, I may just set that machine aside as a Windoze Buggy Box and do all the scut work of getting my data (and those apps I don’t find near enough open source Linux/BSD equivalents for to suit me) working on either an Ubuntu or PC-BSD box. In fact, the chief deterrent to doing that NOW is just some time crunch on other projects. Not the only deterrent, mind you; I’m still at least partially in the clutches of inertia, but those grasping hands are slipping.
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