It’s pretty funny that I paid good money to install Windows 7 and indeed paid far too much for the privilege, if one could even call it a privilege, to then not experiment or play with my new toy, apart from the odd looky here and there. It’s essentially collecting dust on my laptop. The problem is that it’s installed on a laptop that I don’t even need and only really use when I’m away from home visiting the folks down south. If I’d installed it on my desktop, it would then get a daily workout but I couldn’t be fucked upgrading my desktop rig because of the huge investment in time required, frigging around backing up files and reinstalling drivers and software, when I reinstalled Vista only a few months back.

The irony is that Ubuntu just released an updated OS called Karmic Koala which I didn’t hesitate in downloading and installing on my main rig, with minimum fussing about, backing up shit, because Linux has the ability to install the home folder on a different partition, which contains all the documents, music and video files, and comes with all the basic computing packages, so formatting and installing a new version is a breeze compared with Windows. Ironic because it’s free and because I’ve spent the last three days playing around with it rather than it laying dormant. To be fair, I’ve had to reinstall software but it’s all located pretty much in the one place, so I didn’t really have to go to too much trouble finding it. There are some things that aren’t working but that’s the fun with Linux, trying to find solutions. Although after a little while it does start to become a little tiresome and frustrating and I end up going back to familiar Windows. I’d like to be able to utilise Linux as my operating system of choice at home, but I always seem to get stuck with my limited knowledge and the limitations of the software, which is more than capable for a good portion of things but for me, Windows still has the edge in usability and functionality.

Because Windows is the more familiar I find it easier to operate and because it has the advantage of being the most used operating system it thus has the greatest hardware support, making it just that much more less frustrating getting things to work. Like right now Karmic Koala is still giving me grief in video playback due to my choice in graphics cards, video tearing using ATI hardware and installing the drivers guarantees that video playback will flicker with horizontal lines. I have no idea if it it can be fixed and it’s a problem I’ve had over numerous releases. Another problem is that because I’ve wanted to be legal with my codecs and purchased the Fluendo codec pack some wmv files won’t play and although a solution is to install the gstreamer-bad codecs it is disappointing that the legal way doesn’t work. I’d log a support ticket but because the files are videos I purchased there is no samples I could provide rto them if requested.

A part of the reason why I’ve purchased software for my Linux install is that I like spending money (read wasting money – as witnessed with my Win 7 purchase) and because I kind of hope that if enough people buy software, then major developers might become more interested in developing software that is easy to use and familiar and that it may pave the way for hardware developers to be more inclined to develop drivers and stuff as well. I’m probably dreaming but it would be kind of nice to switch operating systems without drama and for both user experiences to be as enjoyable and painless as each other.

So right now I’m not going to ditch Windows but maybe sometime in the future it may very well be a possibilty. Anway this post was posted using BloGTK 1.1 instead of the usual Windows Live Writer. So one small step for progression