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Why Windows doesn’t work for me

Here’s one of the reasons why Windows doesn’t work for me (besides being proprietary, evil, and belonging to Microsoft :-). It’s called CLI and that’s one of the most powerful features of every *nix.

For each tip listed here, you would need those annoying little freeware applications that overload your harddrive with crap. For example, in order to securely delete a file on a *nix with GNU tools, one could do shred -u -z -v file. Doing this on Windows would require an external application. And that means searching for one and wasting time doing it.


5 Responses to “Why Windows doesn’t work for me”

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  1. Rob
    Published at December 26th, 2005 at 11:31 am

    Are useful, graphical-based freeware utilities crap? Well, that’s a first.. AFAIK Linux also has freeware like, that you must install on your own, so what’s the real difference? The fact that some distros install them by default? Even then an update is almost always needed, so time is wasted also! Windows has great freeware utilities and they provide more features and usability than ‘nix ones. Want an example? Video players: Media Player Classic on Windows has tons of features, including one i did not found on ‘nix ones, the ability to open a variety of subtitle formats, including subtitles in dvd’s. On ‘nix you have MPlayer that reads some subtitle formats, but it turn it’s menus are GTK-butt-ugly. I could carry on, but won’t ;)

  2. mlopes
    Published at December 26th, 2005 at 1:16 pm

    The question being: if you want to do easy things like shreding a file you need to seek for and download a freeware utility to manage it. How much freeware comes with some spyware or adware bundled in? Countless.

    While on *nix, you have the GNU userland tools installed in almost every single *nix distribution. For those who haven’t (some BSDs, OpenSolaris) you have other tools that do, without carrying any extra danger or requiring you to download “File Shreder 1.0beta”.

    And that’s the real difference between them. At least, for me. You open a console and you have your computer at your hands. While on Windows, the operating system has you on his bytes. Bloody different! :-)

    Talking about MPlayer, I found it to read much more video codecs than Windows Media Player. Obviously that you must not forget to install those very same codecs, which is a package named w32codecs.

    As for updating, it’s a matter of apt-get upgrade. And everything, if available, gets updated. Windows can’t stand for this job.

    So, for me, *nix suits better the job ;-) And I repeat, for me!

  3. Rob
    Published at December 27th, 2005 at 4:42 pm

    I would gladly use ‘nix but it still needs a lot of polish to become a user-friendly alternative to Windows. I must say that i managed to keep away from M$ until ‘98 approximately, i was a hardcore Amiga-user, and nowadays i look at ‘nix as having much in common to that platform, especially the grassroots user-base which really appeals to me but.. i will wait a while longer.

    As for the whole spyware issue, Windows is affected since it’s the most used OS and, of course, due to fundamental design issues, the most important being people just using administrator accounts by default, which is stupid since they could still use the sudo-alike command “runas” and keep all the crap away.

  4. mlopes
    Published at December 28th, 2005 at 1:55 am

    :-)

    Today I had to use a Windows machine. I needed to mount an ISO. So, I had to download DaemonTools (or any other freeware utility) to mount the ISO.

    On the other hand, doing this on any ªnix is a matter of

    mount -o loop file.iso /mount/point

    And doing the other way around, ie, creating an ISO from the CD, it’s a matter of

    cat /dev/hdb > /tmp/cd.iso

    Unbeatable uh? ;-)

    And it’s funny though that I mainly use two operating systems, Linux and Mac OS X, but I have plenty of experience with Windows XP. And apart from the bells and whistles of Mac OS X, I really like Gnome and I find it to be quite usable. At least, it fits my needs :-)

  5. wrs
    Published at July 9th, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    @Rob #1:

    The difference ist, that there not really is a Windows distro at all. But several of *nix ones.

    All the tools/apps available by a distro, e.g. Debian, are integrated with all the other tools/apps one might install - somewhat. That I see as a huge plus over any system that comes with only a barebone like OS where you have to search for, pick up, set up and fine tune all the gear yourself.

    Debian, for example, knows the application interferences beforehand, warns about that, solves that where possible. On OSes where you have to collect the apps yourself from the web, none of them really can be integrated with all the other possible apps, hence need to take their share of your OS, each adding a flaw here and there — and you end up with a broken OS and blue screen of the day.