Musings from The Software Underground

Reading Andy's "rant" on the perils of Windows really brings back to me a lot of why I'm a Mac user/developer, and why I ditched Windows long ago...

...what I’ve endured over the past few months is the equivalent of a weeklong road trip with someone whose company you’ve always enjoyed, but never really known as a true friend. Windows has propped its bare smelly feet up on my dashboard and told me the story about how he was so hung over during his aunt’s funeral that he threw up into the coffin a little.

I never trusted my Windows box, and having worked with computers for many, many years, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable. Windows, even now, always seems one "installation gone bad" away from giving you a REALLY bad day, or week even. They call it "DLL Hell" for a good reason. Accidently install or uninstall something, and boom, you could have an unstable or non-working Windows box. You just don't see that when using a Mac.

It’s just a fundamental truth of Windows. A once-stable OS installation slowly grinds itself to pieces over time. Hour after hour, week after week, hundreds of bits of poorly-designed software each leave their individual dings, scratches, and fingerprints in the system directory. Unless you’re fairly knowledgeable and extremely aggressive about preventative maintenance, the only truly successful solution is a clean re-install.

So, very, very true, at least in my experience.

Anyway, for more, ready Andy's full "diatribe" over at MacUser: Ihnatko: Harsh Words for Windows