Before anyone accuses me of being a Linux bigot, I would like to say that I’ve been frustrated by Ubuntu lots of times. Wireless networks on laptops have always been a bit of a bugger and my latest install on a partition of my laptop has been no exception. Getting an EEE PC has shown me how good Linux on a laptop can be, if it’s set up right by the manufacturers. Ubuntu does quite a good job at this but it’s certainly not for the impatient. Dell, Samsung, anyone, please start selling more Ubuntu laptops with all that boring driver nonsense sorted out!
Working with Debian servers at the command-line has never been anything but an unalloyed pleasure. I have a extremely complicated set of tasks that I want to achieve and the stable version of Debian has always done them quickly and painlessly. Some stuff takes research. I’ve no idea how much of my career has been taken up with reading tutorials on the syntax of UNIX config files, probably more time than I’m going to get back. But once you know something and it works it works well. On servers (which, at a glance, are indistinguishable from their counterparts from the 1970s), the bottlenecks have always been my intellect, knowledge and imagination.
And then there’s Vista.
At first I thought that it was a brilliant. Good look, nice fonts, WinKey+Tab 3D funkiness and so on. But then you use it and before long you need a shot of whiskey just to calm your nerves.
If I access an FTP server (even on a cheap shared host) or SSH daemon, logging on and moving from directory to directory is quick. Most programs, including Nautilus out of the box on Ubuntu, allow you to store previous connections. XP used to remember the SMB shares that I had accessed. However, in Vista, every time I go to the network window in the start menu, the list has to be refreshed. Why? And does this takes so long? Does the computer ping the whole of 192.168.*.* or something?
Eventually, you get a list of computers on the LAN. You start to move about but just going from one folder to another can take up to a minute. Eventually you get to a folder that just locks up the computer for a few minutes, Explorer tells you that access is denied and restarts Explorer.
You get a link to
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=937097
which tells you that an error occurred and gives you information on how to load up the event viewer that also tells you that an error occurred. Great! I guess that I better contact my system administrator.
I had hoped that the Vista service pack would sort this sort of nonsense out but it hasn’t.
I’m loath to spend an evening hacking away at config files on the Ubuntu partition of my laptop just to get the sodding wifi adapter to work but anything’s gotta be better that the soul destruction that is using Vista all day everyday.
People talk about Cognitive Surplus:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010218.html
I guess that any system where the bottleneck isn’t your intellect, like Vista and Ubuntu some of the time, then the thoughts that should be going into your work end up getting clogged. Hence, the need for hard liquor…