In the past year and a half, I’ve had the misfortune of using Windows several times. Four times I have used it for nontrivial tasks:

  • Trying to get a Sony Audio recorder to download its files
  • Playing Final Fantasy VII
  • Running a program to interface with automotive telemetry devices
  • Playing Myst: Masterpiece Edition

Not a single one of these tasks worked as anticipated. The Sony Audio device—well, you can read about that fiasco—let’s just say it got ugly, and it ended up running better through a Windows compatibility layer on GNU/Linux. Final Fantasy VII installed, but wouldn’t play beyond the first few screens. Again, a Playstation emulator worked better.

Luckily I was able to avoid using Windows for a while until recently. My latest project for work involved a program that is written only for Windows connecting to my app. Windows mysteriously refuses to open a connection, even though it will connect via telnet from Windows. So we refactor the program to work around the problem. Ugly, but it works.

Fourthly, I figure since I already have to deal with the associated shame of owning a Windows machine, I might as well take full advantage of it and use it for the one thing Windows has a reputation as actually being good at: games. I just bought the Myst 10th Anniversary edition DVD collection, and wanted to relive my memories while stretching my mind.

Keep in mind this is a fresh install of Windows. (No potential program conflicts with other wildcard third-party software.) I installed Myst with the Quicktime and DirectX programs it requires. It crashes every single time I go to a certain room.

Now, I’m thinking to myself that GNU/Linux isn’t perfect. I can’t say I’ve had a 100% success rate on all the stuff I’ve tried. But when you look at Windows…. it’s like the horse-and-buggy of computing. Thanks to the Mozilla Foundation, most of my experiences with Windows have been bearable, but every single time I travel outside the haven of Firefox, I hit trouble. And that’s not even taking virus/worm problems into account. (The TTL is so low, I’ve never had to worry, if you know what I mean.)

Hopefully now some of my sentiments are more understandable. I guess it works well enough for most people. Either that, or when it doesn’t work, people have just been conditioned to accept it. That would be kind of sad.