I was a proper nerd at university. Not content with being a little too interested in all this video game lark, I also ran Linux on my laptop. Linux Mint, specifically, an offshoot of Ubuntu (which itself is an offshoot of Debian). The wired internet had some particularly weird security on it that interacted fairly poorly with my computer, and of course being 64bit things like Flash never worked properly and yeah I couldn’t run Silverlight so I had to boot into Windows if I wanted to use my Netflix subscription. Still, running Linux was preferable just because of its light footprint. I had a Playstation 3 for playing video games and would watch most videos on my iPad, so its primary purpose was for word processing and some light game development (I programmed my first game, in Space, entirely in GEdit).
Simply put, despite its problems Linux booted about three times as fast as Windows did, ran faster and crashed less often. I suppose it’s my fault for being a cheapskate and buying a budget, display stock laptop, but running Windows simply wasn’t worth the hassle. Another advantage of running Linux was that it’s essentially virus-proof, and when you’re doing a degree studying intelligence (spying) and future warfare (nukes, ASAT and cyber attacks) you end up on some fairly iffy websites. I remembering stumbling across an article on a website full of people who were convinced the world was about to end. The article discussed how the best thing to do after the Fallout-style apocalypse was to hunker down with a bunch of guns and protect your food supply from raiders, and I had the almost overwhelming impulse to write the guy a letter explaining every tactical mistake he’d made in the piece.
I didn’t by the way. I figured I was on enough Interpol lists already.
After I graduated, having being jaded to the whole political process to the point where I wanted to pursue a career in the games industry instead, I got a new computer. Well, I built one. I am a proper nerd after all. I wanted a computer that could play next generation games (not necessarily with everything maxed out), and that could run Unity really well. I was briefly tempted to continue using Linux, since this was around the time people were getting excited about Steam Boxes. In my experience with games that run on both Linux and Windows, they almost always run better on Linux. But I decided that the age of using a Linux box as a primary gaming machine was still some time away (and I wasn’t very fond of the idea of running Unity under WINE), so I installed Windows 7.
I thought getting used to Windows again would be difficult, but coming back to it I realised just how interchangeable operating systems are becoming. Since the vast majority of my time on a computer is spent within a web browser (I’m even writing this article in Google Docs), the only practical difference is that Flash doesn’t crash as often, and since we live in an HTML5 utopia now that isn’t really a big deal. The only main annoyance is fixing problems. The best thing about Linux is that it lets you tinker with every aspect of the operating system, so there really are no problems that are unfixable. In Windows 7 everything’s hidden behind needlessly obfuscated control panel menus, and there are aspects of your experience that it simply won’t let you change.
Then again, back when I used Windows 98 or even XP the operating system was full of bugs and nonsense that it would break if you so much as looked at the wrong registry item, whereas these days things are a lot smoother. The days of having to go through carefully cleaning Windows, clearing and defragging hard drives and regularly doing day-long virus scans that would slow your computer to a halt are pretty much over. I remember when I was a kid there was a popular song called something like every OS sucks. Well I’ve used modern versions of Linux, and Windows 8 and even whatever this months version OS X is, and the fact is that assuming you’re not using a crappy second hand laptop, they’re all fine. Most things are done within web browsers these days and the only reason you’d really want to use one over the other is if you need a specific program. I guess Every OS is Perfectly Adequate doesn’t have the same ring to it.
