Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="Zseni"]This is the end tally for X number of months of the OS dance: Computers involved: 4. This include the nucleus two (a pair of P4's, one is my legendary (now) Blue Box and the other my brother's almost-as-l33t Black Box), my ex-laptop (sold to Bro, soon to be sold back to me) used to build virtual setups etc., and Pooty's comp (Pooty, the last remaining Hong Kong Cavalier, generously donated a lot of masturbation patter and his box for a few days to manage windows driver downloads when everyone else's comp was busy or broken.) Operating System installs - total across the Blue and Black Boxes: Slackware 10.0: 3 times, current on Black Box. NetBSD: 3 times. FreeBSD: 2 FedoraCore 2: 2 Win XP: 2 Win 2K: 1, twice if you count my initial install wearing down as the motivator for the whole thing in the first place. Assorted Linuxes: 5, I can't even remember them all. What Actually Happened: Linux/BSD hates the hardware on the Blue Box. The Black Box was designed for Linux, but we tried putting Windows on it anyway. It was totally fucked up, yo. The Black Box came into play when Bro decided he didn't need his desktop now that he was using the laptop for everything, so some way or another one computer would be The Computer and the other would be The Media Machine and we just kept switching off. Don't ever do that dance, by the way. Win2K worked fine on this machine until the media player started fucking with me, and it didn't even start fucking with me until I started fucking with regressing the version to creatively, um, announce to the machine that I was a registered user or something. I don't even know. Anyway it was complete ass and now the Black Box is the Linux box, which gets used for everything like PIRATING and PIRATING and also word processing and anything that doesn't require dual monitor output, and the Blue Box gets to do just what I wanted it to do: play movies and emulate Seiken Densetsu 3 and <s>Morrowind</s>. What I learned: Linux isn't so bad! Even the scary terminal commands are easy once you get used to them. It's a much healthier enviroment for a lot of everyday computing tasks, involving none of the I-don't-control-my-own-machine frustration you get with Windows. But it's also a fucking prissy bitch about hardware and what have you. Sometimes Windows isn't so bad, especially when it comes to handling exotic hard drive configurations and Really New Video Cards. Also, Hackers is an <i>awful</i> movie. <b>Linux or Windows?</b> Yes. While I am <i>legitimately less anxious about everything</i> now that I have Win2K back, seeing as it's the only OS on the planet that I'm actually comfortable with, I also know that it's a big sloppy mess about stuff like resource allocation and permissions - although not a big sloppy ANGRY mess, like XP. You have to stay on the ball administrating a Windows box. It's a horrible OS to use if you like security and privacy and control of your own system. But Linux is a horrible OS to use if you like fun and stuff that works without too much intervention on your part, and it doesn't play well with muscle memory held over from your days using DOS. Since I have the luxury of two computers and a KVM switch, I don't have to pick. I don't even have to dual boot. So I can cheerfully recommend that you use some kind of Linux/BSD for all your internet-related activities and most applications, and use Windows for everything that requires high-end hardware.[/quote]