Separation Anxiety

People often ask me if I’d ever go back to Windows XP. For example, if I ever purchase a new system or laptop that comes with WinXP pre-loaded, would I just use it or would I blow it off of the machine and install Linux? After a brief ordeal yesterday, I can say no, I’m not going back.

I use my laptop running KDE on Slackware almost exclusively for my writing, my leisure surfing, and at my full-time job. It’s around four years old and has been through a lot, and the wear-and-tear is starting to show.

Yesterday it gave me a good scare: an entire column of keys, from F7 and F8 down through N and M, died on me. They’d been sluggish at times recently, and the touchpoint has been dead since last summer, but I’d always been able to resurrect them before. With the M key dead, I couldn’t even log in.

I discovered the problem at work, so I sat down at another workstation running Windows XP. After just half an hour I was ready to pull my hair out.

First, I immediately missed having four virtual desktops to spread my apps across. I don’t have a lot of apps running simultaneously, but I’ve definitely fallen into a habit of having them organized a certain way. Having multiple windows open with nothing tabbed (except Mozilla) quickly became annoying. I’m told there’s a download that can create the extra desktops, and if I find myself back on this box I may have to look for it.

Second, I missed the Linux terminal. I usually open multiple tabs in xterm to connect to various servers as well as perform local tasts, and on Windows I had to open multiple PuTTY sessions. As for the command line, the DOS prompt just doesn’t have the same power, even with Microsoft’s Services For Unix installed.

Third, I missed the “always on top” feature of KDE windows. There are several windows I’ll set this way, particularly active chat sessions or windows where I have to compare data or follow a series of steps in a given task. Being able to send windows to various desktops in Linux to follow what I’m working on is also handy.

Last but most definitely not least, spyware was killing me. We had Microsoft’s anti-spyware software installed to evaluate it for our customers, and it continually nagged me about a spyware problem that it couldn’t even remove. The nagging windows would pop up in the corner, taking the focus away from anything I was working on. What’s worse, the windows would stay in place while doing their job, twice concealing the Send button in my online email session and often covering text I was reading.

To add insult to injury, it told me I had to reboot to remove the spyware. Wonderful. In Linux I can kill any process preventing the removal of software or files, but in Windows you’re pretty much stuck. It then rubbed salt in the wound by not even being able to remove the spyware; upon reboot, it started throwing up alerts again. I uninstalled Microsoft’s software in disgust and ran Spybot Search & Destroy, which was also already installed. Unfortunately it kept crashing before it ran a scan.

And this is on a machine maintained by a competent tech!

One last irritation: my family stopped by for lunch and my three-year-old son wanted to sit at the keyboard, so I logged off and let him at it. He somehow managed to log in as our generic user and then mashed the keys. I don’t know what he did, but when I sat back down the cursor was constantly flashing in a busy state. Nothing was happening on screen, and the system wouldn’t respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del or Restart, despite being able to open the Start menu and some apps. In the end, I had to power the machine down to restart. He’s managed to do some crazy things on my Linux boxen when I wasn’t paying attention, but never anything I wasn’t able to recover from.

Toward the end of the day, I decided to remove the laptop keyboard and clean it out. Reassembled it, fired it up, and… I had my keys back! Woohoo! I ditched the Windows machine for the laptop for the last hour of the day, and the difference was immediately noticeable. My co-workers thought I was nuts when I proclaimed “Sweet, sweet relief!” and leaned down to hug the LCD panel, but I don’t care.

Bring on the guys in white coats if you must; just make sure they bring Linux along when they take me away.