slaingod

So I’ve thought more and more in recent months about why I still use Windows, as opposed to Mac OSX or Linux.

In my grand tradition of bulleted lists, here are the main reasons I am sticking with Windows currently:

• Newsleecher: Best USENET client period. I could give 2 shakes about the Supersearch feature, but for raw indexing speed, download speed, unRAR and PAR checking, etc., Newsleecher has no competitors.
• uTorrent: Best BitTorrent client period, though I could probably find a suitable replacement on OSX if necessary.
  
• mIRC: Best IRC Chat client out there, though I could probably find a suitable replacement on OSX if necessary.
• Microsoft Office VBA (Visual Basic for Applications): I have a number of VBA macros/forms for Word I’ve created over the years that I use. I believe that some older versions of Mac Office may have VBA support, but have never looked into it.  I’ve tried out Open Office, and it just doesn’t have everything I need or look as nice as Office 2k7. I know a lot of people hate the new Ribbon interface, but I actually like it.  With just a couple of customizations, I rarely have to leave the ‘Home’ ribbon now to do anything.
  
• Abbyy FineReader OCR/Omnipage Pro: Still the best  platform for OCR period. 
  
• HP Scanjet Drivers: For some reason my ADF scanners drivers cost $10 to get a CD from HP for OSX. Retarded.
• Directory Opus: The best file manager on the planet. Hands down.
  
• G-Force Visualization Software: The best audio visualization (trippy lights) software on the planet.
• Hardware selection: I build my own systems from the various parts suppliers out there for cool and quiet yet powerful systems, such as custom cases, top of the line motherboards, good memory, etc.
• Occasional gameplay: Windows is still king when it comes to games. Wine/Cedega may be usable, but that isn’t enough for me.
• Overall familiarity: I just have a lot more experience solving problems on Windows than on Linux/OSX.
• No official support for my Logitech diNovo Edge.  Supposedly most features can be made to work in OSX using ControllerMate, but I haven’t seen mention of the scrolling features, which would be a deal breaker.
• It is nice that TV Guide data is built-in to the Media Center (though obviously it is also theoretically built-in to the price of the Windows).

Updated:

• AutoIt automation script language: a great way to do some things people never intended you to do with their programs…I’m sure there are others out there that do the same, but AutoIt is a great piece of software that can do almost anything, even if the code is a little ugly at times.
  

I would like to get off of Windows for a number of reasons:

• Tabbed consoles/command lines: Windows doesn’t support tabbed command line prompts properly
• Cost/DRM: Windows is getting more and more expensive and paying for a product laden with restrictive DRM is counterintuitive. I don’t trust Trusted Computing initiatives.
  
• Virus whoring: Windows just has more security issues than I would like.  I haven’t had too many problems personally, but the way things work on Windows, it is too easy for garbage to get into the registry/startup folder/services that you don’t want or need.
  

It is possible to run OSX on typical Windows hardware if you are resourceful. This would almost certainly be more palatable to me than Linux:

• Nicer interface than say Ubuntu, although the gap is narrowing.
• All of the benefits of Linux software generally (through MacPorts).
  
• Adobe CS3 Products: Flash, Photoshop mainly… It might be possible to use these with Wine on Linux but I just couldn’t trust critical developer apps to Wine at this stage.
• True Microsoft Office, although the latest Mac Office gets rid of VBA support, so there is a limited timeframe of say a couple of years before the one with VBA becomes completely outdated. Again, MS Office is supposed to work in Wine, just not sure I would trust it completely.
  
• Non-alpha version of Adobe Flex Builder (though this will obviously get better once it reaches full release build, but I’m just not sure how committed they are to a Linux Flex Builder).
• Safari:  I use Firefox almost exclusively because of Firebug, but being able to test on Safari is helpful as a developer.
  
• G-force Visualizer: Apparently there is a Mac version.
• Drivers are at least available for my HP Scanjet scanner, even if they do cost $10.

In either OSX or Linux, I could set up my system to be Dual bootable, meaning I could say put aside 20-30GB of harddsisk drive space just for installing Windows and a couple of apps or games that I needed to use occasionally.  Or I could look further into Parallels/VMWare on OSX which let you run full Windows applications inside a ‘virtual machine’, typically with better compatibility than Wine, though with lower performance historically. I have a dual boot MacBook now, and it spends about half its time in Windows XP simply because my Vista x64 doesn’t support my HP Scanner.

Maybe when I get a free weekend, I will look at putting OSX on my Windows hardware, just to try it out. And I do have multiple systems, so I could leave one as Windows and move the others as needed.