Moving further on
The next step I took was installing the basic software I needed. Going through installing ClamWin and Opera was easy, but then hell kind of broke free for me.
For one thing, I was accustomed to having a number of utils available when installing my system. I'm used to having a few archiving tools for handling tar, gz, bz2 and zip files, and being able to uninstall the programs I no longer need by using something as simple as a package manager.
This proved to be a major problem when moving to Windows. First of all, I often found myself having to install yet another program for an easy task. Before installing Emacs, I had to download WinAce. After installing an mp3 player, I also had to install the OGG/Vorbis plugin manually. Installing an older ear-training program I have used required me to manually install the VB6 runtime. Installing LyX also meant manually installing MiKTeX. You get the pattern.
I haven't had to deal with manually resolving dependencies for many years now. Again, this is mainly a problem of licensing, but no matter whose fault it is, installing software is still slowish. On most Unices (and not only on Unices), installing a program is simply a matter of selecting it from the package manager and pressing OK. On Windows, I have to find the project's web page, download it and any dependencies it may have, then install them separately -- and installation is interactive, too.
On top of this comes the fact that the Add/Remove Programs... dialog is not always "updated". Install programs can bypass it, meaning that I still got stuck with some files and registry keys that I no longer wanted. This is, however, eased by the fact that each program has its own directory, in a MacOS-ish style -- although not nearly as polished as the system in OS X (which literally renders a package manager useless in most cases).
All these combined mean that it's quite easy to end up with a cluttered Windows installation. But this is by far the smallest software-related problem with Windows.
The thing I hated most was that I simply had to manually install everything I needed, and this is no small list. Only the development tools I needed took about 50 minutes to install, and this is simply because you have to supervise every single package being installed. In addition to this, Windows literally comes with "nothing" installed -- except for a few easy games, a set of rudimentary system tools and a few basic programs (like Internet Explorer and WordPad).
The hard part is realizing what exactly is that 1 GB of files Windows XP spits on your hard drive, when it doesn't essentially install anything meaningful. Take the example of BeOS for example. The Developer Edition installed about 2 GB of files as far as I can remember, but that included several development tools, a dozen of games or so, some word processing tools (including a competent WYSIWYG office suite), a complete set of basic Unix tools, multimedia-related software and full documentation. By comparison, the only "serious" piece of software installed by Windows XP is Media Player, which I didn't use at all since I installed VLC.
On the other hand, Windows does offer the widest range of software available for an operating system, as far as I can tell. There are free tools for just about anything, from games to compilers, and freeware (but closed-source) programs are often truly excellent and could even be commercially successful. By comparison, there are still areas where other operating systems are struggling to catch up. The only OS that offers a comparable amount of software is Apple's OS X, but with Apple switching to Intel, much of the software is confined to running through Rosetta, which is very slow.
Nevertheless, I couldn't help reaching the conclusion that in its default installed state, Windows is pretty much useless. Its initial configuration is very bare in terms of what it offers (not in terms of hard drive space). For example, after installing OS X, you get a good e-mail client, a good photo management application, a competent web browser with tabs, a handful of little utils, a serious CD burning module (the CD burning feature in XP is pretty much of a bad joke, really), a capable and complete set of administration tools, plus a set of basic development tools like gcc. When installing a Linux distribution, you can make up a complete desktop system right from the installation procedure. In Windows, this isn't the case. You need to install everything manually, because by default you only get a very bad web browser, a rudimentary set of administration tools, a resource-hungry Media Player and... that's quite about it. This is, literally, an operating system that Just Works (TM) -- because it does little else than booting up.
- "Back to Windows, 1/5"
- "Back to Windows, 2/5"
- "Back to Windows, 3/5"
- "Back to Windows, 4/5"
- "Back to Windows, 5/5"
