Nostalgia

I fired up a virtual machine running Windows tonight.  I wanted to have a look at some windows only CNC software, and since I don't have any machines that run Windows anymore, the way to do it was to create a Windows image and run it on a virtual machine.

Years ago I used Windows for running Photoshop and various music software.   Commercial stuff for which there is no good open source substitute.

Getting a Windows machine to run law-latency audio software reliably is about as easy as convincing Richard Stallmann he is being an annoying turd when he tactlessly, and rather ignorantly, insists on calling Linux "Gnu/Linux".  So I ditched Windows in favor of OSX for running commercial software (and discovered a wonderful world of reasonably priced, non-tacky software in the process -- in addition to being able to run all my open source stuff on the same OS).  Eventually I grew fond enough of OSX to use it as my main workstation OS.  I still have various machines running Linux and FreeBSD, but on the desktop I now run OSX.

In any case, tonight I fired up Windows.

Two things struck me:

1. Windows is really annoying.  How can people use this OS every day for their work?  It is like an attention-seeking little kid that keeps tugging at your trouser leg and throwing temper tantrums ALL THE FRIGGIN TIME if you try to ignore it!
2. I had forgotten about what a terrible program Acrobat Reader is.  Holy crap.  How is it even possible for Adobe to so actively sabotage arguably the most important product they have ever had?  Adobe, if you are reading this:  have a look at "Preview" on OSX.  No really, do have a look.

All these memories of how painful Windows was kept coming back to me -- but do you know what was great?  Running Windows in a virtual machine you don't need to shut it down properly.  You can just kill it, not have the VM commit the changes and start anew every time.  That way you can avoid the terrible mess that any Windows system eventually turns into.