End of last week, Windows was kind enough to give me the annual “Blue Screen of Somehow I Screwed Up My Own Internals I Hope You Weren’t Doing Any Real Important Work Because You’ll Have to Reinstall the Operating System of Death.” Gasp.
We’ve all been there. What really bugged me is that when it happened, I sighed and just thought to myself that this is “the price of computing.” This had become normal and acceptable to me… Then I shook myself a bit and became determined to rid myself, as much as possible, of the OS from Redmond. No offense; I love Excel, think there’s some great usability in there, but it’s just not my cup of tea.
Eventually I’ll end up with a Macbook Pro; I feel the call of the siren as much as anybody. Until then, I’m on Suse 10.1 desktop and so far I’m quite pleased.
I’ll blog again later along on the specifics of the setup, but I’ll just say that the XGL desktop is both wicked COOL and very functional.
Hei Nick,
congratulations to your decision. I hope you´ll keep us informend when you possibly change your hardware to Mac. I´m also thinking about that since quite a while…. 😉
On the other hand…since I use Win2000 and XP I haven´t experienced not a single blue screen.
Nick, I know how you feel. ‘Tis amazing to me how often something in our digital “support” system screws up, and we sit back, sigh, and think “that’s the price of computing”. I also laugh when a UI is described as “intuitive” – maybe it is, for someone who has been using computers for years – but not for most people. I like to use my parents as test cases, since they’re in their late 70’s, and just aren’t that comfortable with computing and digital or IP communications. It will be interesting to see how your work progresses using the Suse desktop, and if the XGL desktop quells your longing for that MacBookPro. 😀 Oh, as an aside, PalmOS based touchscreen interfaces, such as on Palm devices and the defunct Ergo Audrey, are the only UI that came close to deserving the “intuitive” tag, based on my elders experiments.
I’m no fan of Microsoft. But it’s interesting that I can’t even remember that last time I got the blue screen of death. The only big problem I face now is Eclipse randomly locking up my CPU where it takes about 10 minutes to kill it and recover. So in my opinion it does just seem to be “the price of computing” as you say and is basically inescapable.
In my experience W2K still can show you the blue screen of death, but you have to be lucky or excersise some effort to get it. Two most probable reasons are a) hardware, especially hard disk failures; b) a virus or you own busy hands hack in Windows system files. Otherwise this has to be an art to get repeatable blue screen of death of W2K.
One thing I should warn about. Do not try to get into the false safety of installing several operating systems (say W2K and some Linux distro) on your computer. Independent of the bootloader (lilo, grub) you use, sooner or later you run into some sort of boot problems with either of the OS-es. So if you really want to be in both worlds, buy and extra hard disk and do your experimenting in separate clean environments.