Just did it for the gazillionth time – re-installed the Windows XX OS on my comp. And I guess I’ll never get used to it and will have the same worries and commit the same mistakes as I always do while installing it, especially because I have been installing it along with an existing Linux installation in a separate partition, for the last few times. Now, you might be asking why I don’t install the Linux distro too freshly. Simple, ‘coz the Linux distros never throw up any errors unlike their more costly (less stable) counterpart, Windows XX. In spite of some really clean installations and well mannered usage of the M$ products, they have never seemed too happy for too long. Very soon some error crops up and leads to the re-installation. So much so, that it has led me to one good practice – of keeping my data (absolutely any data/file which is mine and does not come with the Windows installation) separately in another partition. Has saved a lot of pain and sweat during those re-installations.
Then you might be asking me why I care to install any M$ product at all. And here I have to admit – no matter how anti-M$/pro-FLOSS I sounded in the previous para, I am actually, at the end of the day, a compulsive computer user who depends heavily on this machine for his daily bread, his natural need to interact with other humans and be updated and of course, for his daily dose of entertainment. Yes, I belong to that rapidly growing species of addicted computer users. This machine, which was declared the 1982 Times ‘Man’ of the Year, has really become the closest mate of a lot of people including me who’d rather not wake up from their sleep than to spend a day without their comp.
And with such dependence on this machine, I find it difficult to see how you can ever do without the M$s. I know that you actually can. But lets face it – so many popular games will run on only M$s, so many web resources are available in M$ formats, so many web sites run properly only on IE, almost all USB devices will plug in easily on M$s without any need of any driver installation and well, even in the workplace, so much of the development/setups are done on M$s. You *can* do without all of them but at the expense of a lot of compatibility issues and having to do with lesser quality counterparts. Love it, hate it, you just can’t ignore it.
I like Linux, I support FLOSS and I’d love to have only Linux installed on my system. But till the day the whole cyber world is ‘cleansed’ of all M$s, I don’t think I’ll be able to do without it on my system. And while such is the situation, I’d rather refrain from any more M$ bashing.
Except when I’d have to re-install it again.
