Blogging Ottinger (tim)Another week with Windows
Well, I spent another week in windows (with a week-long gap between the two windows weeks) and I didn’t die or catch a disease or anything. I did relearn how much harder and less consistent it is to get things done (installing software, editing, etc). I think it’s easier to stand if the environment you use includes Resharper along with MSVS, so it’s not so bad. From the command line, we have cygwin (yay!). Messaging is done with trillian or gaim, and browsing and email use those wonderful mozilla products., and of course a copy of gvim. Let’s not forget version control through subversion (svn) and acceptance testing through Fitnesse.
Trillian, Resharper, Nunit, svn, cygwin, and Fitnesse are standard parts of our environment. We’ve also added TestDriven.NET, which is pretty convenient most of the time. Overall, it’s a pretty decent environment. I’ve only had to reboot a few times(!!) and have crashed Visual Studio twice. That I know of.
Well, I suppose that’s fair. I generally like Linux mostly because of all the good tools present there, not just because of the kernel (which I really don’t know much about). In fact, I tried to make a pretty major kernel upgrade and messed up my laptop. I am typing this via the Mepis Live CD while backing up the selfsame laptop onto a larger computer prior to fixing it. Since I’m running on a live CD, I’m not worried about using it while backing up and preparing. The big difference between Linux and Windows is that I had to do something risky as the root user to crash Linux. Windows dies in normal use.
Anyway, I made it. I am learning an optimization pyramid of sorts. The worse thing is to use the mouse. The second worse thing is unnecessary keystrokes. It seems that following these rules helps you to develop a bit more navigational speed and efficiency. Heh, who knew that Emacs and Vim were right all along?
Some more nice things that make Windows almost useful…
Portable Apps. Apps that run directly off a USB drive, so you can have them when you want them, set up your way. They have Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, and Nvu as of this writing.
Emacs for Windows.
Putty, a ssh for Windows.
Comment by Jeff Licquia — 2005-November-21 @ 06:24