Archive for July, 2009

Microsoft Hatred is a Disease

WARNING: Personal opinions abound …

After all the furor about Microsoft contributing 20,000 lines of code to Linux and Microsoft’s “Community Promise” regarding C#, a language I use professionally, I recently read this article and I have to agree with Linus, in particular “I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

Open Development were everyone is welcome, no matter who you are or who you work for, is the main reason I love the open source world. As a professional programmer I’m bound by “Trade Secrets”, NDAs, and closed source software. I realise there is a business need for such things yet even still we can deploy Linux servers and rely on the open source world to help us provide the best we can for our customers.

I’m not going to make any judgements as to whether Microsoft’s intentions are good or bad, I will say this being able to write C# at work on Windows XP and come home and continue to write it on my Ubuntu PCs is brilliant, that is the true beauty of open source. I personally prefer Ubuntu to any of Microsoft’s Operating Systems, even Windows 7, and  keeping my professional skills up to scratch is a priority.

So, until such time where all the nay-sayers triumph, please enough with the Microsoft bashing and the Mono slating, it’s not clever and not very productive. Open source lets many people, like myself, work freely and professionally on the Operating System of their choice.

2 Comments »

Alan Doyle on July 27th 2009 in Ubuntu, Windows

Windows 7, not bad but …

… I’m sticking with Ubuntu.

Recently I’ve been trying out Windows 7 RC on my Samsung NC10 netbook, mostly out of curiosity. I have to say after being unimpressed with Vista it’s not bad. It’s new taskbar reminds me a lot of KDE 4, Aero Peek, Aero Shake and Snap are quite nice and the fact it was able to install drivers for all the NC10 hardware, even if some are quite basic. All-in-all it’s quite pretty.

Installing all the software I prefer took an awful long time. Finding the official websites, downloading the installers and finally running the installers. Compared to simply issuing an apt-get command this is hell.

After a few weeks of using Windows 7 as my main OS on the netbook I can honestly say I won’t be switching to Windows 7 any time soon. In fact now that I have tried it I want to wipe my netbook and try Alpha 3 of Karmic on this little netbook and see how she flies. I love the power and freedom that Ubuntu has to offer in automating daily tasks and neither the Command Prompt, PowerShell nor Scheduled Tasks can offer me the flexability, simplicity or power of bash and cron!

I’m pretty convinced now that Windows no longer has the features I require from an operating system and I’m happy I made the switch to Ubuntu over a year ago.

Aside: If you’ve got an NC10 then a good guide to update the drivers and software on the NC10 can be found on Ade Millers blog.

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Alan Doyle on July 26th 2009 in Ubuntu, Windows