The straw has broken my back, the tipping point has been reached. I want Microsoft products entirely out of my life. I’m tired of fighting with Windows, of spending so much of my time keeping things just working at baseline. I don’t have to do this with my Fedora Core box, I don’t have to do this with my numerous OS X boxes, but I do with the Windows. I’m aware that it will definitely cost me extra effort in compatability with the rest of the world, but I’m willing to pay that. I’m already paying all kinds of time and energy on Windows now, and if I’m going to be expending blood sweat and tears anyway let me expend it on living Microsoft free. In pretty much every way possible, dealing with Microsoft products makes me unhappy and makes my life more trouble. Enough is enough, let me move forward without it.
A Life without Microsoft
Published by
Good to hear. I’m about 95% MS-free. Still stuck with using MSN and Hotmail (but not MS’s Messenger app).
As for compatibility with the rest of the world, you’ll find this a minor inconvenience at best, and you can pretty much eliminate it if you invest into Office:Mac, which I understand to be pretty good as far as MS products go, although I haven’t needed it an 7 out of 10 people I exchange files with use Windows.
Part of the Nelson household Y2K compliance program was to eliminate all the products of the evil Redmondian empire; we bought our first iMac, and we’ve never looked back. As far as compatibility is concerned, we’ve told all those who wish to communicate with us that we don’t have, nor do we plan to acquire, any Microsoft products. They are amazingly understanding. OpenOffice has managed to open any spreadsheets and word processing documents that we’ve needed to examine. In short, the effort is well worth it; for proof, just wait until the next M$ virus infestation. Rock on!
can’t ever see the day when i would be able to make the same proclamation as you dave – needing to use msft w/in corp-usa is just a fact of life…
however, my household is completely mac-based & couldn’t be happier…
since i’m level 1, 2 & 3 support for my family – going all mac was the only way to bring my technical support calls way down 😉
I read this and got this image from 2001: A Space Odyssey, with HAL calling to Dave: “Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. ”
Of course, this comes after HAL says to Dave: “Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.”
Oh my, and you would have been 1 or 2 when this film came out! How prescient!
Why Seachange? From my blog entry here: <http://homepage.mac.com/lesposen/blogwavestudio/LH20040822004609/LHA20040926161320/index.html>
I did the same about two years ago. You won’t regret it.
What exactly are the problems you’re having with Windows? What’s it doing wrong? What is it that you’re trying to do that you can’t do?
Mom is well on her way to getting MS out of the house, though I can’t get the airport to work right. I’m starting to wonder if the G4 actually came with an aiport card (or whatever) because the ibook surfs the Internets just fine plugged straight into the modem, but when I run the airport setup and it says everything is good to go, no internets.
I’m with CoolFactor, with only Games and Video Editing on my windows machine. Everything else is done on the Linux machine.
you’ll have to keep us update on your move.
Same boat here. I have 2 windows boxes that I keep around. One is a workstation that my kids play games on and I use Quicken (Quicken on the Mac does not support online banking with my bank, I hope that will change) The other one is a win2k server that is my FTP server. I simply have not had the time to build a Linux FTP server (It’s gonna be SuSe 9.1 when I do) but I look forward to doing so!
Welcome to sanity!
I have been MS free since 2003. I went Mac years ago, and never looked back. I use the built in Mac apps and Open Office. If Open Office gets easier to use, and better with every release. And it’s free.
Next target: Adobe. Someday we’ll get rid of all of the bloated arrogant companies and the stupid, bloated, arrogant software they produce.
Dang, that post really seems to have lit up the comments! To clarify the situation, this is not as huge as it could be. Windows and MS tools are not the primary tools for anything I have. I used to have 3 different Windows machines in service, I reformatted one and converted it to Fedora Core. I’m keeping one desktop for the time being for work purposes, but I’m serious enough about all this that in the future that will inform my work choices. I don’t want to have to touch Windows again in my life, and I’m committed to in the long term making sure I don’t have to.
Mark, the things I can’t do with Windows? Get IP addresses consistently, run Office without system errors, have the OS not shit itself by corrupting system files. You know, crazy stuff.
only waiting on a linux release of Photoshop. then I’ll be ready to jump off the MS ship. or, as I sometimes like to say, “then I’ll upgrade to WindowsFO!”
Dave, I agree with you on the Win problems. Sometimes at work I feel like putting my foot through the monitor!
After working with UNIX in college I know the power that the Linux OS possesses. I too have been contemplating going over to Linux with my PC. What kind of work will it take to do a full switch over on a machine. What tips do you have Dave, as you go further? Maybe you should have a separate Podcast with your progress!
Pedro
The more people get fed up with the rubbish put out by Microsoft the sooner they’ll realise they have to stop foisting their rubbish on the world. As for compatibility, the more people that go for alternatives, the sooner there will be alternative for people to use. People should tell all Microsoft users that if they are sending a word file it has to be saved as RTF etc. There’s no need for Microsoft’s bloated bug-ridden rubbish
… you haven’t mentioned what made you so miserable.
I’m a web developer and Linux/OS X user so I can do front-end design on OS X with Macromedia Fireworks and Mozilla BUT there’s just one nagging dependency keeping an XP box running on my LAN – IE browser testing. I have IE6 with the system and Virutal PC running IE 4, 5.0 and 5.5. I just can’t think of a way round this one. VPC on OS X isn’t the answer as it’s still Windows.
I’m a web developer and Linux/OS X user so I can do front-end design on OS X with Macromedia Fireworks and Mozilla BUT there’s just one nagging dependency keeping an XP box running on my LAN – IE browser testing. I have IE6 with the system and Virutal PC running IE 4, 5.0 and 5.5. I just can’t think of a way round this one. VPC on OS X isn’t the answer as it’s still Windows.