Some of you already know that I’m running a dual system setup at home. I have a Windows box (running Windows XP SP1 on a 1.6GHz Celeron with 2GBÂ of ram and a 17″ CRT) and a Linux box (running Ubuntu 9.04 on a 1GHz Pentium III with 640MB of ram and a 15″ LCD). However, the Windows system is barely used these days.
I’ve come to quite enjoy the Linux way of life (which is far more superior and modern than Windows will ever be), and as a result my Windows box has slowly been linuxified. I have always had the GNU toolset installed on my Windows machines (that is, the command line utilities that are standard in any Linux/UNIX setup), but I have recently also extended it with Cygwin as well as a few other tools that allows the Windows box to actually play along with my Linux setups (I have two Linux servers running as well).
The most obvious thing about Linux, and also the “feature” I enjoy the most is without a doubt the fact that it’s more or less “borderless”. It doesn’t matter where a program is, or where a file is, or for that matter where an entire drive is — wherever you are it is accessible to you right away.
I spent hours trying to get the Windows file sharing to work. However, Windows just wouldn’t let me log in nor mount any of my shares over the network. So, I set up the Cygwin SSH server (something Windows has always been lacking — it comes with a TELNET server tho, but that should be considered more of a security hole than a feature, especially since it’s unencrypted) and like that I could instantly access all my Windows drives from the Linux box. All my files, all my music, instantly available over the network using FUSE (so called “user space file system drivers”, another thing that Windows has always been lacking).
Linux is far superior Windows. It works. It works well. And it works like I want it to. I chuckled a lot to the latest episode of “Security Now” where Steve Gibson stated that “Windows is a steaming pile of crap.” – Well said!
