OneAndOneIs2

With ntfs-3g, you can even access your Windows NTFS drive/partition very easily and (finally) without worries. :)

My new HP Pavilion laptop has Vista installed on it. Vista needs so much RAM and CPU processing power... Even old Windows games run much slower in Vista (maybe because of the 32-bit emulation layer).

Microsoft seem to be moving backward in some ways, but they will always have a market.

I'm not removing Vista because (a) it's a genuine OEM version and (b) I could resize the Vista partition and install Debian alongside it and dual boot - which I was very doubtful about.

Vista is great eye-candy, but to be productive I need Linux and all its apps - not the other way round.

> My new HP Pavilion laptop has Vista installed on it

Traitor!



Seriously, tho - you should post a review of it when you get a minute. I only played around with the beta versions, on hardware that wasn't assembled specifically for Vista. Did they manage to improve it much?

If it's still as bad as it was before... Well, I suppose it was free, after all...

Well, I will review Vista when I get the time and inclination.

It's not half as bad as people make it out to be although the biggest drawback is its hunger for system resources. I should probably remove Norton Internet Security though - installed as a 60-day trial version by the manufacturers. That might improve things a wee bit.

I'll tell you what the common user has to lose - time. That's basically it. Their mindset can be summarized very simply like this - "Why should I waste my time installing Linux if I can get the job done 100% of the time in Windows, and only 80-85% of the time in Linux? Why should I have to dual-boot to an operating system that will just eventually require me to boot out again to another operating system (Vista/XP?)"

That's how I perceive the common user's thought process to run. And it makes some sense - people are naturally lazy, slothful beings, and they don't want to do any more work than is necessary to get the job done. I also sympathize with them because when I was running Linux recently (GParted screwed up my MBR and I can't run any distro easily anymore), there were a few apps that I just couldn't find equivalents for. However, I solved my problems with VMWare, virtualizing my copy of XP on my hard disk, That worked for me.

However, what these users don't realize is that the overhead of using Windows in terms of resources, money, and time are most definitely more than the overhead of Linux. Sure, Linux is hard to set up at first, takes some configuring, and can consume massive amounts of time in the beginning. However once you're set up to par, you're done. Very little in way of modification will need to happen after that. Upgrading to a newer OS version suddenly becomes a lot simpler, for starters. Etc, etc, etc.

That's the problem with these people. They aren't willing to invest the time into something that could potentially reap them rewards in the long run.

I switched back to windows. Yea I suck. I didn't 'delete' Linux, but I might as well tell you all the long story.

I had Arch Linux that was extreemly customized. I could do pretty much anything on it and the only thing I couldn't do that I could on windows was play Touhou games. But I didn't have them with me at that time so I was fairly happy.

However I had 2 problems that I couldn't fix. My terminal program couldn't support Japanese, it did but it froze randomly when I typed it. Also Chinese fonts were fighting with Japanese fonts. (ie, In Chinese text some of the characters use Japanese typefaces because my computer is primarily Japanese and this makes it look really weird since the Chinese fonts look different from the Japanese ones.)I later learned that this problem happens with all computers, even windows.

I decided that ubuntu would solve all my problems. I used to use ubuntu and I was fairly happy with it actually. I had a few things here and there I didn't like about it but I remember that when I went to try Arch Linux I wasn't seriously trying it. But for some reason once I tried it, everyone helped me install it and it ended up with a working system so I used it. (I'll admit, I like Arch much more than ubuntu though. Much easier to do things I guess.)

Now installing ubuntu was probbably the stupidest thing I could ever do. Not really ubuntu's fault, but my partitions got screwed by GParted. (Or is it ubuntu's fault?)

I ended up with ubuntu on one 10gig partition. (took the space that Windows used to be on) I still had access to my old home partition but it was weird. I could see it on ubuntu, and touch the files, but anything else says it is corrupt and won't touch it. (Even GParted does. ArchLinux's cfdisk, I think it was cfdisk, would not open, saying something is wrong with my hard drive.)

So then I go on ubuntu and live like that for about a week. But I don't like living with a corrupted partition. So then I just backed up my important stuff and then put the windows factory CD in my computer. Luckily, the CD had an option to make the partition smaller, so I made a 30gig windows partition this time. If I ever wanted to install Linux again, I won't have to resize the partition and kill windows.

However, since that day I went to China. I then lived with windows for a couple of weeks because at the time my internet was really slow and downloading Archlinux was out of the question. I then pretty much made myself home with windows.

Now I finally got normal internet, and I don't feel like installing Linux so much because I can do most of the stuff I do now fine on Windows. I have to make a few sacrifices with ssh using putty, slower speed, no commandline(I don't know how to use the windows commandline and everyone says it sucks anyways), uncustomised desktop(unless you count a wallpaper and a cursor), worse browser (Kazehakase is Linux only), no workspaces (windows has some ad-on programs to do that, I tried it but it is as slow as hell),no word processor(I don't have word, I know I can get open office, but it is weird).

(Now that I try to count them, quite a lot come up)

In fact, typing this message kinda makes me want to return to Linux. I have a summer holiday now and if I don't set it up now I'll never have time to get a good setup with school.

Yes, i've noticed waay too many of these kind-of posts.
my story? i'm a programmer, i study informatics (dunno if that is the correct term in english, that's because i'm dutch myself). so i love open source ;). but hate to not be able to open up MP3 files etc. so Ubuntu is now my main OS, on the laptop (UbuntuStudio -> http://ubuntustudio.org/) as well as the desktop. have to keep a dual boot on both (for the occasional lan gaming etc), but i really don't reboot to windows much. summed up i think i have had 5 years or so learning to work with linux, and i must say i love its concepts over windows'. this is the fourth year in my study, and i've come to see more and more manners by which microsoft is trying to push its OS to people, and trying to make it harder and harder to use something else if you want to be able to "do everything" you can with your pc (like invade in management circles of UK's BBC and try to fsck everyone who's trying to watch online stuff from them using a non-MS OS http://www.last100.com/2007/08/14/free-software-foundation-protests-against-corrupt-bbc/ )
at this moment i've almost become a 'ms hater', but on the other side i figure it's a problem that will eventually 'solve' itself. my ideal view of the world is that salaries of IT people will be reasonable according to their abilities and skills. and that domination like this one so evident right now, would not exist anymore, or at least not so extremely. and people have a choice instead of paying somewhere between 20 and 200 euros (who knows?) to microsoft with every PC.
we've seen open win over proprietary in other areas, such as encryption (nobody will try to secure his stuff with DES anymore right? ;P), also very few companies try to host their website from a MS-based server (unless they have a *very* nice special contract with microsoft)