Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

I felt the need to clarify some things with this article that discusses so-called “Ubuntu Web Browsers”. The fact of the matter is that those browsers are in no way tied to Ubuntu. Likewise, Ubuntu supports browsers other than those.

Browsers like Firefox and Opera run on many different operating systems, from Windows, to Linux, to Mac OS X, to Solaris, to FreeBSD. Check out the Opera FTP site for proof of this. Look at the wide range of platforms they support. And don’t forget that some of those directories, like the “unix” directory, themselves contain several platforms.

I feel lucky that I do not really have to deal with Windows on a regular basis. Unfortunately, most other people are not so lucky. Those who have to fix malware-infested Windows computers are perhaps the worst off of us all. Windows computers are notorious for getting infected quite easily, and then being a major hassle to clean up. I’m talking about a scenario like the one described in an article at Slashdot.

Today I was pointed to an article giving 10 reasons to use Windows Vista by a topic over at OSNews. I have read the reasons, and they may very well be factual. My opposition of them mostly derives from the fact that the capabilities listed are nothing new or special. Many of them have been around for a decade, if not more, on existing systems.

One of the main uses of the System Restore functionality of recent Windows systems is to return a system to a working state after installing some new software. That is the sort of scenario that is discussed in an article I read about why System Restore should be used.

I recently saw a post about mission critical systems running on Windows at Slashdot. That particular post is about the use of Windows on computers running or involved with various medical systems, and it suggests that Windows isn’t a suitable operating system for such uses. I’d tend to agree.

I read an article today about using Internet Explorer 7 on Linux. I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems to use WINE in order to actually run the web browser.

I can see how this would be very useful for many web developers. It would allow them to develop their sites on Linux, test with Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera, and other browsers that run natively on Linux. Then they could immediately test with IE7 from the same computer, all without having to reboot into Windows.

I have really started to look forward to the release of KDE 4. For a number of years now I have used KDE as my primary desktop. My main reasons for using it are that it is very well integrated, and it otherwise is of a very high quality. I haven’t performed any formal benchmarking, but I do think it is more responsive than GNOME. One study have indicated that KDE actually uses less memory than GNOME in many cases. Perhaps this extends to its need for CPU resources, as well.