REACTIVEradio

Before I go any further, I’m going to don my flame resistant body armor with diamond shielding to protect me from the hordes of anti-Microsoft fans, anti-Vista fans, and anti-nexxai fans.  I’m going to secure myself in a bunker 20 stories underneath the earth and bring down enough rations to sustain me until 2010 or thereabouts.  I’d also quit my job, but those of you who know me know that I don’t actually have one, so that one will be easy to accomplish.

Now, here I go.

I like Vista.

There, I’ve said it.  Hell, I’ll say it again: I like Vista.  How do you like them apples?  A little bitter?  Not quite ripe?  Thought so.  But here at Chez Flawedlogic, we aim to displease.

Before you attempt to storm the gates I’ve erected around my fortress of ineptitude, please let me explain my reasoning.  If you don’t like it, fine, I can live with that.  But at least give me the chance to back up my claims before the rampant fanboyism (Linux fanboyism, XP fanboyism, my sister fanboyism, whatever) engulfs you and you start foaming at the mouth.

First, let me say that there are things in Vista I would change (if I was a developer.)  I am not heralding Vista as the second coming of Christ, or anything even remotely close to perfect.  With that said, in my opinion, there are a lot worse choices when it comes to operating system choice, and God bless the internet and freedom of speech because I’m finally able to explain my decision.

It looks great.  Yes, I’m sure that there are components of Vista that may (or may not) have been copied, or at the very least inspired, from other operating systems.  I’m not debating that.  But I want you to think long and hard about how often that actually happens nowadays.  Take Google’s latest Street View option in their Maps service.  Everybody is ranting and raving about how awesome it is.  Good for them.  Microsoft has had this feature in their Local service for quite some time.  People use good ideas because they’re good.  It happens everywhere from clothing design to building construction – companies look at what one company is doing and emulate it.

It just works.  Sure UAC is a pain in the ass until you disable it.  That doesn’t make every aspect of the OS garbage.  When I upgraded from XP to Vista a few weeks ago, I didn’t have a single problem.  It installed, detected all my hardware without a hitch and had me up and running with in 30 minutes.  The only issue I had (although I knew about it going in, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise) was that my digital camera (a Canon Digital Rebel 300D) wouldn’t work in the normal USB mode but rather required to be set to PTP mode.  The change was accomplished by spending less than 10 seconds in the camera configuration menu to select the new mode.

The amount of software available for Vista beats the amount available for MacOS or Linux.  Sure, given enough time and energy, I could probably find similar releases in the Portage tree or kludge together the packages from SourceForge, but I am a typical person, which for those of you who don’t know me, means that I’m lazy.  I know that if I go to Google and type in “image editing application”, the first 100 replies (give or take) are going to be Windows applications.  Yes, I could type “apple image editing application”, but that’s more work, and as we already established, the less work I have to do, the better.  It boils down to the fact that there is a chicken-and-egg effect in motion: not enough people use them, so the software doesn’t have enough penetration, and therefore enough marketing.  They don’t have enough penetration because not enough people use them, and therefore tell their friends.

I am not against people using MacOS or Linux at all, in fact I think it’s great that people are branching out from the norm.  MacOS is arguably the “prettiest” of them all which is great for people who just want to look at a beautiful flower, and Linux is obviously the cheapest which is great for the 35 year olds who are still living in their parents’ basement.

I kid, I kid.

Honestly though, I can see why certain people like certain operating systems – the features outweigh the benefits in whatever task they’re trying to accomplish.  Hell, if the software was more readily available, I would probably be using one of them too.  I guess you could say that I’m a victim of circumstance more than anything else.  Be that as it may, I’m not going to cry over the situation.  I (almost always) enjoy working in Windows; I know how to get around and I know how to fix almost any problem that I encounter.  Whether that’s because of Microsoft’s history of releasing sub-par products has forced me to learn a lot more by the very nature of its instability or whether I just like breaking things, we’ll never know.  What I do know is that for the time being at least, Microsoft can count me as a faithful user.

Now where was I?  Oh yes – I was about to hide.