Shell Shock
One of the things that has always made Unices so popular and admired was the shells out there. In fact, most operating systems today have some sort of a competent CLI interface. This is for two reasons. Firstly, in order to offer a way to automate repetitive tasks. Secondly, because you may expect to login remotely, without having access to a graphical environment. And thirdly, because there are cases when you will simply discard the GUI, like when running a web server.
Windows sticked to cmd.exe, which is essentially a slightly polished version of command.com. Command.com itself is little more than a CP/M shell clone. So essentially, cmd.exe offers the same facilities which computers were offering 25 years ago, on Z80-based machines. Needless to say, this is very painful, and has had two consequences.
First of all, there are almost no Windows-based quality CLI tools. These are only meant to be used in extreme cases, like rescuing installations. The shell itself is so bad that it makes no sense to make CLI tools -- almost nobody would use them anyway.
In extenso, if you want to run Windows on a "passive" station, for a file server or an e-mail server, you will need both a VGA card and a monitor. You may dig out the monitor in the end (maybe by using VNC), but you're still stuck with the VGA card since Windows won't run otherwise. However, this means there's a serious resource consumption. My current file server runs on a 233 MHz Pentium MMX with 16 MB of RAM. Windows XP won't even install on it, but it does run FreeBSD 6.1 (which, ironically, is even newer than Windows).
This restricts Windows to a number of computers with the necessary resources. Although the requirements are fairly modest by today's standards, you should realize that it's impossible to surf the web using Windows XP on a 166 MHz Pentium -- which will, however, happily run Slackware.
Speaking of restrictions, this also applies for multitasking and multiusing. I never came to understand why having a multiuser OS is so interesting until I realized that I cannot do my work while my girlfriend does hers on my computer, logged in through a VNC session. That's because you cannot have two users logged in simultaneously on a Windows station. As for multitasking, the scheduling algorithm used by Windows XP is quite primitive. As a result, having 25 windows open in 6 virtual workspaces (an usual event on my Unix stations, since I rarely turn off my computer so I just leave everything running) makes my Pentium IV struggle evidently.
Restrictions also apply to other things. For example, Windows cannot read partitions like ext2/3 or ReiserFS without 3rd party drivers. Now, if it's safe to assume that most people won't use them on their computers, it is surely not safe to assume that I will reformat my USB stick using a primitive system like FAT32 so that I can use it on Windows stations. This kind of dictatorship (see below) made me sick enough.
Micro Dictatorship
The details above by themselves were certainly not sufficient to convince me Windows XP is not a worthy alternative to what I having been using for many years now. Unix systems have their own limits, like poor hardware support (in most cases), poorly-documented software, lack of standardization on some issues and so on. However, after only two or three days of using Windows, I ended up having a lot of minor annoyances springing up.
For example, the anti-virus had to scan for viruses. This implied looking up through a whole pile of files, without making assumptions. This is a rather resource-intensive thing, but it's also necessary. My initial reaction was quite unprofessional, I'd say, when I realized that the antivirus was crawling through my music collection. I obviously thought that's useless -- OGG files are surely not executable so there would be no way to hide a virus in there. Then I realized that, if you want, you can really make Windows try to run an OGG file as an applications. This would obviously be impossible on Unix, since my OGG files have their executable flag set to 0. The scanning added up to the whole maintenance thing. Without a decent scheduler, and since all applications were interactive (i.e. the defragmenting program asked me which drive to defragment, for example), I had to do the maintenance myself, a thing I've never done on Unix.
Then came the problem of the interface. I'm used to having the Minimize button in the upper left part of my Windows. I simply don't care that Microsoft's UI experts believe most users would prefer it the way it is now, I want to move it, which I can do in just about any X11 window manager, and, as far as I can remember, even on AmigaOS or OS X, with third party tools. I couldn't find a similar option on Windows.
Installing drivers also proved to be problematic. If Clueless Sue doesn't know what type of printer she is plugging into her USB port, I certainly know, because I purchased it and I don't need Windows to "search for drivers". I already know not only what printer I have plugged in, but I also have the driver CD, so I just want a dialog box that asks me for the driver. No wizard or anything else.
What I'm willing to point out is that if you want to do something that Microsoft has not tried or does not recommend, you're out of luck. The system will not only often act unexpectedly, but also consider you so dumb that it will try to stop you. For example, when clicking on the Windows folder in My Computer, you will be warned that those files are sensible and you should not alter them. Right, I couldn't tell that, I was absolutely sure my operating system was called Microsoft Doors. This adds up to other similar small things, like the annoying "Drive Space" alert (as if I didn't have a My Computer status bar to tell me how much space I have left) or the "End Now" button in the dialogs about not responding processes, as if I had clicked the Close button of an unresponsive window because I wanted to be asked a question.
In the end, Windows simply didn't prove flexible enough compared to what I was used to. Computers and operating systems are tools for me, and I don't adapt to my tools. I adapt my tools to my needs. However, I did learn a few valuable things.
- "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"
