When I was doing my renders of the mancandy mesh/rig, it seemed to me that Windows was taking forever to render the scene compared to my previous Blender renders on Linux. A quick investigation on the Blender FAQ stated that, indeed, the Windows version was faster than the Linux version. However, this didn’t make sense to me. My Windows machine is a 3 Gz Computer with 2 GB of RAM. My Linux box is an AMD (2 GHz, I think) with 512 MB of RAM. The Linux version couldn’t be THAT efficient, could it?

With Windows Vista requiring a computer more powerful than the majority of computer users have, many have touted Linux as the savior of these PCs. Do not throw away your PC because you must upgrade to Vista. Get all the graphical goodness and latest software with Linux. It has modest hardware requirements and will even ressurrect Windows 98 PCs. Then they talk about Compiz/Beryl, the 3D desktop. All of this is true, but I think it’s a bit of a half-truth.

One of the biggest trends over the last few years has been customization. People customize their cellphones, myspace pages, websites and computers. Via the popuplar widgets system on the Mac OSX, SuperKaramba for KDE, and gDesklets in Gnome, people customize their desktops to make them unique to their vision. Even Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon recently and introduced a widget system of its own. All of these customizations would have taken place on the computer no matter what.

….that my wife, who hates the idea of Linux on her computer, told me that when her computer dies, rather than have Windows Vista on her computer she wants me to install Linux on the computer for her. That’s right, she’d rather have Linux on her computer than the next version of Windows. Why? First of all, she’s heard all the problems of how Vista doesn’t have any drivers for any hardware. She’s also heard about how they’re already getting virii and other exploits and even Forbes recently recommended not updating because of the digital restrictions management and how that messes up your system. Specifically it causes your CPU to use up cycles trying to make sure you aren’t doing anything disapproved of.

My brother upgraded and now his MICROSOFT brand mouse does not work. Specifically, the extra buttons no longer work. Way to not support your own stuff Microsoft!

Dell has introduced (or, if it’s been around for a while, it was just recently brought to public attention) the nSeries Desktops. These are computers that have no installed operating system - so you don’t have to pay for windows. It comes with a Freedos disk. So you can install Linux, *BSD, or whatever you want onto that clean machine - without having to first get rid of windows!

DO NOT UPGRADE! There are many reasons, but here are the most important ones - Norton Antivirus does NOT work with Vista as of now. It will make some graphics and sounds cards work at reduced capacity. Finally, they are ALREADY talking about a Service Pack 1 - meaning there are flaws they know about. Wait until those flaws are fixed. Service Packs mean big flaws, not little ones as are in every piece of software.

Borys Musielak, has published an article on polishlinux.org on his top ten reasons why Linux should be used instead of Windows. I have just finished part one, which is what the previous link goes to. Although he claims that he is purposely being biased against Windows, he’s actually quite fair towards Windows. For example:

What’s the difference between the security policy of Microsoft compared to GNU/Linux and even better, BSD systems? It’s the defaults, idiot! Technologically, both systems can provide a similar level of security, actually. The difference is that most GNU/Linux distros make it much easier to have a secure OS by providing reasonable default settings, usually secure enough for home computer users.

Today, The Linux Extremist, posted his attempts to compute what we in the Linux world call “The Microsoft Tax”, this is the extra cost of a computer with Windows as opposed to a computer without an operating system. His numbers are not all that surprising with an extra cost of 323.67 British pounds for Windows, Office, and Paint Shop Pro. In my eyes, the true purpose of his article was not so much to document the extra cost of Windows, but rather highlight that the Windows user must pay 323.67 in order to gain the functionality that us Linux users take for granted.

VMware has relased their VMware Player player for free. This product acts as a virtual machine (as opposed to an emulator) and is, therefore, supposed to give you much faster speeds than a program like QEMU. You could use it to run Windows on Linux or Linux on Windows. I will go over putting Linux on Windows. First go to http://www.vmware.com/products/player and download the player. Then download the Browser-Appliance. Of course, the easiest way is to download a Linux image which has already been created for you. They have Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, and a few others. However, as I already have CDs of Fedora Core 5 test 2 downloaded, I don’t want to waste bandwidth (and time) downloaded the vmx image. Therefore, I will go over a slightly harder way, but, according to the PDF at this site, it doesn’t appear to be that hard.