Windows 7

I had thought of writing a pointless article about the launch of Windows 7 earlier this week, but really, I couldn't be bothered.  The big news in the OS world for me is next week's release of Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala'.  I've been running Karmic in alpha and then beta for some time now, very happily.  It's running on a 2.5 year old Vaio laptop that was never really capable of running the Vista Business that it came with, and very nice it is too (last week I booted into Vista last week for the first time since January 2008, but quickly decided I'd had enough of interminable spinny "wait...wait...wait" type cursors).

Despite my dislike for Microsoft's bullying business style, I kinda hope that the gargantuan misadventure that was Vista may be behind them.  Certainly there's quite a bit of enthusiasm for Windows 7 out there (and I don't just mean the breathless puffery at the likes of the BBC website), but quite a bit of it seems to be based on the observation that "it's not Vista".  Many commentators are saying however that for many a significant hardware upgrade is still going to be needed to get the max out of Windows 7.

I doubt I'll be bothering with Windows 7.  At my workplace we've remained with XP, and my PC there is underspecced for the XP-corollary of extensive virus checking that it seems to need.  In fact most of my day to day work as I hot-desk my way from office to office is done on my trusty Vaio.  Whether my workplace will upgrade to Windows 7 in the fullness of time, I don't know, but I'd expect that would be an expensive undertaking, with many thousands of workstations needing significant upgrade.  At home we have a mixed network of Ubuntu Linux and XP machines.

So I'll continue doing what I do with Ubuntu Gnu/Linux, I'm happy with an OS that's sufficiently transparent that I can be aware of what it's up to at any time, and that I can figure out a solution to any malfunctions.  The star in the crown of modern Linux distros is the easy access to an enormous array of software, and the ease of installation is light years beyond the hassles in my first foray into the world of Linux (with whatever version of Red Hat that was current in 1999).  There's too much that's good about FOSS software to return to the closed source of Microsoft et al.

Oh...I guess this was a pointless article about Windows 7...