I post way too many times in this category, perhaps to further prove that I’m a nerd and don’t have much of a life. I’ll attempt to make a conscious effort to write something non-techie by the end of this week.

I’m writing this post from a place that I may never write another – my bed. However, I was doing a last minute thing or two on the laptop that inspired a short rant. Windows is absolute crap. I really hope that I can get SuSE 9.1 Pro to run on this thing. Since getting WinME installed on here for the final time late last Thursday afternoon, I feel like I’ve done nothing except chase down little tools that I need to do ordinary things. For example, my plan tonight was to evaluate MediaWiki, a very powerful web-based tool for information storage and management as well as a good place for some online collaboration on tasks. I ran and downloaded the program just so I could browse the readme files and make sure I knew what I was doing, but no – I can’t read a .tgz compressed file on Windows without installing another application. It’s one thing after another it seems. Following is a list of applications and/or utilities that I’ve had to install just to make the laptop functional with Windows.

• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Gaim
• Crimson Editor
• PicoZip
• Remote Desktop Connection Client

CoreFTP Lite

• Winamp

Now I’m not including Apache because I don’t expect every operating system to be able to serve web pages out of the box. I also left off Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird because those are a matter of my preference to them and not the crappy defaults of Internet Exploder and Lookout Express.

I do realize that this release of Windows is pretty old, but thinking back to my Windows XP workstation at work, I’ve been doing the same thing for the past week on it. Every application listed above has a counterpart on my Xandros Linux box downstairs that is either as good or better than the Windows substitute. Call me spoiled if you want or a Linux snot, I don’t really care. But the fact is, the cd I used to install Xandros holds the same amount if information that my Windows ME and XP cd’s do, yet Xandros came with ALL of those necessary applications installed. Now that I’m back to using XP on the machine at the office and WinME on the laptop, I really miss Kate (text editor), gFTP or IglooFTP (duh), and XMMS (music). Not to mention the fact that a version of Acrobat Reader, a remote desktop client, and support for a bajillion compressed file systems (.tar, .gz, .rar) is practically built into the OS.

So, my dear Windows users, you should spread your wings and just try some sort of a bootable CD of Linux and see if you like it Now – that’s enough Bed Blogging to last for a while..