abestic9

When it comes down to it, there’s only 4 clear choices in my world of operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, and Gentoo Linux.

Don’t get me wrong, all four of them are worthy candidates which I enjoy pretty much equally (for different reasons). Unfortunately, I’m not so keen to dual or even triple-boot, for many reasons, so there can be only one.

I’ll start off by explaining why I wish to run only one operating system on my primary computer (my laptop).

First off, space. My laptop’s little hard drive (250 GB, to be precise) has just enough room to snugly fit my operating system, development and design programs, music and games on it. By snugly, I mean I have crossed into the “red-zone” on my C: drive many, many times – resulting in a hesitant sigh and spamming the Shift+Delete keys across the file system. Shrinking my Windows partition to fit another operating system on (20-40 GB) would be a very inefficient and tragic loss of space.

Secondly, alternatives. I’ve got a perfectly good copy of VMware Workstation at my disposal, and with that I can customize and install almost any operating system that would work on my laptop (as well as a few others that won’t), without repartitioning my entire hard drive. I understand that there is a noticeable loss of performance within the virtual machine, but that doesn’t really matter to me. An added bonus is that if I ever need to reinstall a virtual machine’s OS, I can simply do it in the background rather than waiting on my entire laptop.

So now that we’ve determined that I only wish to use one operating system, but why Windows?

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Ubuntu. The incredible community-powered support coupled with amazing open-source applications and packages make it a real contender to the proprietary Windows market. The simple problem here is that I rely on proprietary software (some of which doesn’t like to play very well with WINE) for my line of work, and the alternatives just don’t work for me. Other than that, I would use Ubuntu and/or Debian in a heartbeat.

Microsoft Windows. There are many things that make Windows an operating system to avoid. None of these things apply to me. I avoid using Microsoft programs when possible (with the exception of Office) which keeps me sane most of the time. I use Windows is because I’ve never had a problem with it that I couldn’t fix myself. In that sense, it is an idiot-proof operating system. Another good reason is that almost every company I’ve worked for uses Windows/Windows Server in most or all of their computers/servers, along with my customers – the more I know about it, the more money I make. With those two reasons aside, I still enjoy my computer games.

Regardless, I use VMware quite a bit, so Ubuntu, Debian and OS X still have a place somewhere in the chaos that is my hard drive.