[geeks] Desktops

[alex j avriette]

On Thursday, May 9, 2002, at 04:35 PM, Ryn wrote:

> Anyone completely  moved away from Winbloze? I am debating ousting
> Win2k and converting to Gnome on Linux.

I have never used windows as a desktop. My employer won't allow me to 
install some form of unix (I'd be leaning towards OpenBSD) on the one PC 
that is "mine", and all it does is run outlook. And poorly at that. When 
I switch from one of my other machines via the KVM switch, I get an 
"ntoskern32.exe" BSOD. But I digress. Anyhow, so I have never had a 
problem using Linux and MacOS as a desktop. I can export wordish 
documents with a mac flavor of word. I do all my other tasks in some 
form of unix. My primary machine of late has been a powerbook G4 (I 
think I'm going to be replacing it with an 800mhz model). I find that I 
have Darwin underneath, which is kind of sucky, but has perl and vim, 
which is just about all I do. I have postgres for database needs (and I 
have a few pretty monstrous databases).

The thing that saves me is important. I don't really use "desktop" 
machines, per se. I have servers. I have a fileserver and a database 
server. I also have a server that stores my cvs repositories (yes, I am 
a programmer and admin, so I keep my shell scripts and perl applications 
in a cvs repository). This way I could be using any OS out there for my 
"desktop" machine and it wouldnt matter. I would still be using a big 
old black and white terminal and interfacing with a remote server. 
Keeping things on a desktop is unportable and unsafe. Also, I find that 
I wind up changing "primary" machines every year or so, for various 
reasons (new job, new development environment, "gotta have" hardware, 
etc).

I think the best solution is to just move away from the concept of 
having a "desktop" machine. Theyre really all just terminals pointing at 
what you want to be working on anyways. There isnt a reason on earth to 
be concerned about the relative shittiness of windows; what you should 
be concerned about is finding a good terminal emulator.

alex