Windows Vista sucks!
I think I'm going to switch to using Linux on my home computer, seriously. I have Windows XP now like the majority of people, but I've been using Windows Vista at work since December. Maybe it just needs a service pack release but as it stands now it sucks. I couldn't imagine spending $200 for it. It has some cool eye candy like the translucent window frames, but the windows have to not be maximized to get this effect and since my windows are almost always maximized I hardly ever get to see this eye candy. The sidebar it has is nifty, but again I never get to use it since my windows are always maximized so they cover it up. User Access Control needs some tweaking, especially if you're a developer like me who regularly edits files in directories outside your home directory. My biggest gripe here is when I double-click a file from Windows Explorer and open it in Notepad and try to save my edits. Whoops, you don't have permission! For Crist sakes, I'm the administrator and I don't have permission!! See when you login to Vista you get two user tokens if you're an admin, one an admin token and the other a regular user token, the Explorer shell is created with the regular user token which means nearly every program you launch has regular user credentials, including double-clicking a file to open in Notepad. You can create a Notepad shortcut that opens with admin credentials, but double-clicking a file doesn't use that, of course, so Notepad still has regular user permissions. Crud, what a mess.
So since Vista sucks so bad I'm not really inclined to switch to it at home; and I need to wipe my hard drive. See I got a virus on one of them last year, a root kit no less, so even though I thought I cleaned it up I decided to pop in another drive and use that one as my main drive. Bad bad bad. My 120 GB drive is a SATA drive and my other drive is a 20 GB PATA drive. For some reason Maxthon freezes a lot while I'm browsing and it's because my hard drive is constantly spinning. I never had this problem until I started using this PATA drive as my system drive so I'm going to get rid of it. But, since my SATA drive is suspect I need to wipe it first before I switch to it.
So I have about 50 GB of data, give or take, to backup! Ha, I haven't done a backup in ages, I've just been moving data between drives over the years. But it's time I bite the bullet. I've decided to finally clean up my mp3 collection so that when I do backup everything I'll have a permanent collection of my mp3s. This is taking me a while actually because I have a lot of stuff. Pain in the ass to look up all this artist info... MediaMonkey makes it easier since I can lookup data from Amazon and get cover art and other info really fast.
So I was thinking if I'm going to wipe my hard drive why not try Linux. I've tried it every now and then over the years and it didn't seem too bad, but the user interface always put me off for some reason. Recently a friend of mine has been showing me Sabayon and Ubuntu Linux distros and they look really cool! Sabayon had this nifty 3D cube desktop whereby if you dragged a window to the edge of the screen it would flip to another desktop. Also, dragging a window at all makes it jiggle. It's all eye candy; but hey, it's what I like. :) Overall I just like the fact that I'll be using an OS that encourages modification, gets bugs fixed fast, etc. And it's just something new to play with. It's probably more secure than Windows but I don't really care about that since honestly my Windows system isn't that insecure. (I did get a virus, yes, but it was my fault for messing around with questionable programs from questionable sources. ;) )