Eigenmumbles

My primary computer is a MacBook Pro. It’s a couple years old now, and it is still running OS X 10.7, but I’m still quite happy with it. I’ve been using a Mac laptop as my primary machine for about eight years now; prior to that, I spent many years using Linux as my main OS; and prior to that, I used Windows (and at one time DOS). But I try not to be dogmatic about things, and have been running with at least two different types of operating systems – sometimes on the same hardware, sometimes on different machines – since I was an undergrad.

A few weeks ago, I decided that we needed a family desktop at home, something that my wife and I could both use for record-keeping and word processing, and that I could also use as an additional box for building and testing code. Both because J will be using it and because I already have access to OS X and Linux boxes elsewhere, I went with a modest-but-not-puny refurbished HP with Windows 8 pre-installed. I thought about running Ubuntu and using KVM (or some other virtualization layer) for running Windows, but… meh. I’m sure I would have learned something from setting things up that way, but it would take more time than I really wanted to invest to fiddle it into a shape that I liked. Also, that time would have to come out of the precious few evening hours that I don’t devote to work or family. So a Windows 8 box it was on arrival, and a Windows 8 box it has remained.

And what have I discovered? Well, for one thing, I’ve discovered that I find the Windows 8 UI intuitive, and the odd bits of friction in the system seem mostly to do with places where old and new metaphors are forced to coexist. I will still be happier once I’ve figured out how to do more things with the keyboard – I’m faster typing than I am mousing – but I’ve had little trouble figuring out how to do the things that I want to do. I wouldn’t say that I like it more than my setup under OS X, nor more than Ubuntu, but it’s not obvious to me that I like it less either; it’s just a little less familiar.

Now, I’m unlikely to switch from a UNIX-based system as my chief development platform any time in the immediate future, despite having a fairly comfortable setup with Cygwin 64 on the new Windows box. But I like having a Windows box to play with at home. I like to see that desktop user interfaces are being forced to evolve, and I like to see that different operating systems are not all going in exactly the same direction. I also like the idea that I won’t draw a complete blank when asked to do something with a machine running any one of the three major desktop OS flavors du jour, and that I can build and test my software on each of those three systems.