Why I'm Not Just A Windows Basher

Ok ok, it's true, I'm an unabashed Windows basher. But look, that's not enough to dismiss my points about the OS. I feel compelled to give a bit of an autobiography that you might consider a defense of my MS Bashing position, or that you might consider a positive advancement of *NIX style OSes.

This rant is inspired by the fact that there are lots of Windows lovers out there who see any advancement of Linux as mere "Windows-bashing", and consequently see the arguments as dismissible. I hear such things as, "Oh, well you just hate Windows." Well yes, this is right. And I hate Windows for good reason.

This all starts with the TI-99/4A. When I was a kid, my uncle worked in R&D for Texas Instruments. One Christmas, all the cousins got Home Computers. This was a revelation. Our kids' world got a little brighter.

Then came the Commodore 64. This was a revolution. This changed everything yet again, with incredible power and graphics and speech and games. The kids were hooked. All of us were caught up and fascinated with what the machine could do. Thus the PC geek was born.

Some years later, the Macintosh started making news. My brother was an intern at Aetna, the insurance company, and they were starting to invest heavily in Macs. When I started working there some years later, not only were there Macs, but there were mainframe boxes everywhere (I worked in one of their data centers). These were the high end servers that did all the processing for this $96 Billion company. One night, we wrote a quick program in REXX to calculate pi to a few million decimal places, using a recursive series. It was beautiful.

The point is, a dozen years ago, the data centers of the world ran on mainframe machines with vast amounts of power. Home Computers were starting to make a dent in a consumer market. And the crossover to replace the typewriter had started (with Macs at Aetna).

Then Windows came along. Sitting next to a Mac, it was a dog. It was ugly. It was incapable. It crashed. There were no games. It couldn't even perform speech acts like the geek's little Commodore. And when OS/2 hit the scene (well, when it hit my scene), it crushed every other OS on the business desktop.

There's the thing: Windows came along as a typewriter replacement OS. There was no sense of networking, there was no sense of serving files or managing electronic mail (Aetna used pmail for a while: there was no standard at the time) or managing printers. It was a typewriter OS, and a shoddy-looking one at that.

Alas, more of these clunky squeak toys started popping up. I was mystified. Most of us, back in the day, were mystified. Why? Why was the straggler of the pack sitting on enterprise desks, crashing most of the day? To this day, I am mystified.

And then I started college. I started as a computer science major (but later switched). We programmed on mainframes, on a VAX machine. It was beautiful. It was powerful. But Windows started popping up at the university too. We avoided it. (I still wrote all my papers on a typewriter, and used the Mac lab whenever I needed a souped-up home computer).

One year, the university got a grant to develop a modern computing lab. They chose Windows. The network was intolerably slow and insecure. For example, when a machine crashed, it took about ten minutes to reboot and regain a connection to the network. Another example: one day we sat with a packet sniffer and grabbed a Mb worth of usernames and passwords on a floppy. That was fun.

What was clear to us was that this home-oriented typewriter replacement was just plain old not ready to do any serious work. There was no point in even trying to benchmark performance against something like OS/2.

Notice: by this point, I have not mentioned Linux. This is the case because by this point, I had not used Linux. Linux was just starting out in these years. I emphasize the point: I have simply never been a Windows user, for Windows has simply never been a performance OS.

So here comes the bombshell: in 1996, I started using Linux. I was a poor college student. A friend gave me a computer (a 386) and gave me Linux to play with. I was already accustommed to the VAX and such things: Linux was close to what I had already used. It was easy and elegant. And so I started learning *NIX. It was as beautiful or more so than any mainframe that I had ever used. I loved it. It was powerful. It was dangerous. It was edgy.

My friend who had set me up with Linux had a much more powerful machine: he had a pentium class processor. So, he had X-Windows up and running. He showed me. It was beautiful. Windows 95 sitting next to it looked like a badly-drawn cartoon. And the big problem with Windows was that you couldn't change the look of the desktop. And there was only one desktop. And it didn't seem to support high-resolution screens. And it crashed incessantly. We laughed at it. It was a funny-looking little thing, but I suppose it made a decent knock-off typewriter.

Time went by, and Windows started showing its (literally) ugly head in more than just the office desktop. This is roughly where we are now. This horrible- looking juggernaut has weaseled it way into our server rooms. This is a terrifying situation, for here we have what was a typewriter replacement trying to do the business of running the enterprise. And worse yet, this clumsy typewriter replacement is supposed to take the place of UNIX boxes and mainframes — machines that were designed for enterprise situations.

This is the origin of my Windows bashing. I am forced to use Windows at my job, and it is horrible. It is intolerably hideous and ugly and I rarely have the tools I really need at my disposal — and they are all costly to acquire.

Once, after an absence from the computer world for a while, I bought a laptop. It came pre-loaded with Windows 95. I used it for a while. When I was able to get an Internet connection and download the disks, I installed Slackware. That was better :) That was the only Windows instance that I have ever "owned". I hated it.

So I speak against Windows because I have always used high-performance OSes in business, and slick nifty ones at home. The joy of Linux is that it is designed well enough to scale for either of these purposes. These days, I use mostly Linux. But I miss BeOS. And sometimes I use FreeBSD, just for fun. And I have an x86 version of Solaris at home to fiddle with on what used to be a Windows XP box. (Wow, is XP an ugly flat-tired rusty pickup of an OS.)

Some particulars, for those interested: I hate desktop icons. I use the Fluxbox window manager for its speed and lack of silly icons. I hate having to reboot. When I change network settings, I prefer them to take effect right away. I absolutely need virtual / multiple desktops. I need a good web browser: Linux allows me to choose from at least five major ones. I don't think I should have to pay to use my CD Burner: Linux comes with no less than four CD burning programs that I use regularly (I change up for fun). Since the desktop PC is the typewriter substitute, I don't feel that I should have to pay a few hundred dollars for software that needs the Atkins diet (viz. "Word"): Linux gives me no less than three enterprise quality word processors, and THE ultimate text processors available (e.g., Tex). I should have security tools readily available to me, e.g., snort or ethereal (no M$ equivalents). I should not be able to replace kernel modules unless a) I am the system admin and b) I really intend to change them. Restated: my email client should not have the ability to change kernel modules. The list goes on: these just popped to mind right off.

In conclusion: I am, without question, a ranting luntic geek Windows basher. I am this way because Microsoft was never able to sell me on their product: I had already borne witness to greater power, greater flexibility, and deeper beauty. They have never had anything to offer me, except a great big price tag and a torn safety net. I assert that those who grew up on Microsoft products have been swindled. They should feel duped, because they have been. Microsoft has stolen their perceptions.

© 2004 Sorrell
July