jims musings

So, some months ago I move away from Win­dowsXP to 64-bit Ubuntu Linux, ver­sion 8.10. I liked it, lots.
Turns out, the rest of my fam­ily liked it… not so much.
What I liked:
Gen­er­ally faster sys­tem. Mem­ory and CPU used more effec­tively. All 4GB of mem­ory used, as opposed to only 3GB under XP.
The abil­ity to keep Win­dows in a VM through Vir­tu­al­Box, but have the Win­dows win­dows mix and min­gle with the native Gnome win­dows. Cool.
More flex­i­ble UI. Com­piz rocks.
Bet­ter secu­rity. I was able to man­age secu­rity for all users in a gen­er­ally bet­ter way.
More appli­ca­tions for what­ever I needed than I could shake a stick at. This came in really handy dur­ing those times when I needed to be a com­puter wiz­ard. The Win­dows ecosys­tem is just a small shadow of what exists out there in Linux Land.
Issues:
Kids games gen­er­ally didn’t work. (DirectX prob­lems, even with lat­est ver­sion of Wine).
My spe­cial photo-manipulation soft­ware (DxO Optics) likes to use GPU accel­er­a­tion, which wasn’t avail­able through Wine or Vir­tu­al­Box.
Some of the fancy beta-version stuff I had installed (try­ing to fix above issues) broke the otherwise-excellent sys­tem updat­ing tools. My fault, but I couldn’t revert with­out break­ing other things. A rock and a hard place sit­u­a­tion, and I didn’t want to go man­ual with sys­tem updates.
My fancy Canon Pixma printer didn’t print color. All I could ever get was the black level. I blew a lot of black ink try­ing to fix this. Worked fine from vir­tual win­dows. (My new HP Laser­Jet P2055dn worked great, though.)

So.. look­ing around for a solu­tion, I’ve decided to take a giant leap. I’ve installed Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate 64-bit, build 7057.
The ver­dict? I’m pleased. Bet­ter than Vista. Faster. Bet­ter secu­rity. Gen­er­ally smarter than Vista and XP, too. All my stuff worked out of the box, except the soft­ware for my LS5000, and I think that is merely a bug in the beta OS of Win­dows 7.
Now… if I could only find a nice 30″ mon­i­tor with LED backlighting.…

With respect to the two words ‘gen­eral wel­fare,’ I have always regarded them as qual­i­fied by the detail of pow­ers con­nected with them. To take them in a lit­eral and unlim­ited sense would be a meta­mor­pho­sis of the Con­sti­tu­tion into a char­ac­ter which there is a host of proofs was not con­tem­plated by its cre­ators.
–James Madi­son, quoted in Lib­erty Ver­sus the Tyranny of Social­ism
By Wal­ter E. Williams