06.29.08 - Goodbye Bill, Hello Windows!

As I was reading about the retirement of Bill Gates after a 30-something year career at Microsoft, I also found myself installing Windows on my home desktop for the first time in nearly 8 years.  While most of my friends would probably be shocked to hear this (I’ve been a staunch Linux desktop user for many years) I can’t help but feel a bit surprised that I didn’t make the move back to Windows sooner.  When I first started to experiment with Linux back in college, Windows XP was a brand new operating system (my last Windows was Me) with lots and lots of bugs (maybe not as bad as Vista).  Today, I’m returning to discover that it has grown into a solid and mature platform.

So, what really made me drop Linux in favor of Windows?  I suppose it’s about productivity.  If the past 9 months at a start-up have taught me anything, it’s that time is precious.  When I first started at EnticeLabs, I requested a MacBook but was given a Dell desktop with Windows XP instead (in retrospect, a smart move by our CEO, Ryan Caldwell).  As I re-learned to use Windows, I couldn’t help but to also notice how much the OS had stabilized over the years and how much it didn’t get in the way of what I was doing.  By contrast, my Ubuntu desktop always seemed to be consuming a lot more of my time than it should have been.

I’ll sum it up this way: In the past, I cherished an opportunity to roll my own Linux kernel; today, I’ve just got too much work to do.

I had been thinking about installing Windows for a while, but the straw that finally broke the camel’s back was an update (speaking of which, Ubuntu really needs to do something about the frequency of their updates) that prevented me from being able to start a GNOME session.  I’m sure there was a perfectly reasonable solution, but after about 45 minutes of trying the obvious ones, I realized that I just didn’t have time for this game anymore.

I wonder if I’m the only one.  Have I finally outgrown Linux?