Its not the OS, idiot. Its YOU!

Last Sunday I boarded SpiceJet from Bangalore to reach Mumbai. As I sat in the flight i couldn't help noticing that every tom, dick and harry was carrying a laptop, including me. Laptops have become comparably cheaper to the desktop nowadays and given the form factor and the ease of carrying it around, people go for the laptop instead of a full fledged desktop. (I must be an odd ball who still thinks of building a dream desktop from scratch using state of the art components with an ultra wide screen for entertainment and experimentations with more than enough RAM (4 Gig+) for running 64 bit ubuntu flavour.) I remember the laptop prices somewhere near the range of 1 lac when I was doing my B.Tech. Now you get a decent one much powerful and at less than half the price compared to those that existed back then. The kids who sat in the adjacent row to me had one each. They were much younger and by the looks belonged to the NRI brigade. Their parents can afford any stuff but the point is this - laptops have replaced desktops. In a big way. Companies also provide laptops to people so that they can work from onsite or from home or anywhere, adding to the number of people who carry around a black leather bag.


There was a gentleman two rows ahead of me on the other side sitting on the aisle seat who had his laptop opened and he continued to work on his presentations making notes in his diary now and then. I couldn't hold myself from becoming a peeking tom when the letters on the presentation were in 36 point bold and spoke of hiring techniques. He was running office 2007 on XP on an IBM machine. I saw that his task bar was choc-a-block with icons. I wondered why do people need to run so many services when you don't require most of them. They can be disabled in a snap and avoids the cluttered look. Same with the desktops. All the important and non-important files and shortcuts and setups dumped on the desktop. And when the system feels bogged down with so many things and responds slowly people wonder whats wrong. My funda for using windows is to keep the desktop clean of everything except the recycle bin (i once removed it by editing the registry in my first company's machine). Run minimal services required by turning off services from control panel and msconfig. Never allow any software other than the ones i cant do without at the moment to have a taskbar icon or even have a desktop shortcut except quick launch. I used my XP like this once and was happy with the performance. I kept the system crash free from viruses (i crashed it by other means) without any anti-virus. Later my machine slowed down with AVG but it was still ok to use. But the AVG was a big letdown after it let Antivirus 2008 and Antispyware 2008 to infect my machine and make it completely unusable. That was when i turned to Ubuntu completely instead of dual boot and have been a happy Ubuntu user since then. Even with Ubuntu I keep the desktop clean and close down apps which I dont use for the timebeing. And the best thing, no need of antivirus softwares and I can always keep my USB stick virus free by just deleting the unwanted files in there which you dont get to see under windows. You can get all the free softwares that you want in linux world and experiment in so many ways to achieve that ideal desktop that you can just dream with windows. And it doesn't slow down over time like windows.


One of my friends who had lost his XP because of some freak recovery partition behavior, had installed Ubuntu on his laptop. Infact, we installed ubuntu to get the XP to boot via GRUB which lay there stubborn refusing to let us in. All the efforts failed and I finally posted this issue in Ubuntuforums - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=940526. Just when we had a faint chance of booting the XP by editing boot.ini he went and erased everything except the recovery partition and put XP over it. Disappointing will be lowkey to what I felt at that point. I was sad not only about the loss of Ubuntu but also about the chance of getting an OS to boot by tinkering with it. I was sad about what I could have learned about boot.ini file and missed. I was sad about the impatience he showed just for one day while he awaited a whole two months using Ubuntu and doing fine with it. He ever lay all our efforts to waste. He always wanted XP. He thought he couldn't recover the XP ever and installed new XP over the Ubuntu partition. The desperation to have all the things back how it was earlier. He is by no means a linux hater. He is an RHCE and knows more about linux than me. Infact, he worked in linux on some project. Actually, a large part of population do not care what goes into their machine. They install all kinds of toolbar without thinking they don't need it and it will clutter their browsers. They install apps with icons in taskbar which they dont even bother to click like Winamp agent, Quicktime, WinZip. For them, its fine if they can edit occasional word document, play mp3s on winamp, watch movies, play DVDs and CDs and browse the internet. And it doesn't matter if the desktop was cluttered or not. It doesn't matter if the disk was fragmented or not. It doesn't matter if they pull out the USB or eject it coz windows will recognize it next time. It doesn't matter to them how the desktop is themed. Things just have to work. And its hard to shake off the perception that with XP everything "just works". My experience with Ubuntu have been much better. I required no drivers in Ubuntu to make my hardware work compared to XP where I had to install separate drivers for display, memory card reader and webcam. Everything worked out of box with Hardy. Its a perception ingrained in most of the users which is difficult to shake that some things wont work in linux. It just takes Google and little patience to find out how to get around the problem. One would do the same with windows too if they encounter some problem. But still there is a familiarity to windows that is just hard to shake off. People need their Start button and Control Panel. The blue sky and green fields to dump their files. Linux beats Windows in all areas except this. Familiarity. The erasing of Ubuntu to get back to XP shows a desire to be back in the familiar turf.


Once I used to be a Windows hater but over the time I realized that its not about the OS. Its how you use it. With Windows also you can be safe and sound from viruses, provided you take adequate steps, and have the snazziest desktop that you can imagine (I like the slickness of Vista). Use Linux without any proper care and it will harm your system. Use a command foolishly in Linux and your machine is dead. Use your windows registry foolishly and see the BSOD. Load any OS, Windows or Linux, with too much apps and it will slow down. The funda is same. Take care of your OS properly and see how it flies.