Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

How does this grab you?

Bizarre, isn’t it? It feels bizarre. I use Windows almost every day at work, but having it on a machine at home is strange.

Why torture myself, you ask? I’m troubleshooting a Flash-driven kanji practice program that should work fine with Linux and Wine, but for some reason isn’t displaying character sets properly. I want to make sure I’m not misinstalling it, so if it doesn’t work in Windows I can blame something else. This brief return is a very, very temporary arrangement, and not one I enjoy.

On the other hand, it does give me the opportunity to poke around with the Windows-compatible OSS front, with things like the ext2 filesystem driver for Windows, MPlayer for Windows, and andLinux. I mentioned that one a long time ago, and when I was preparing for this facelift I thought maybe I should try it out. I don’t like it when people just talk about these things, without first-hand experience. …

And the experience tells me it works, but it’s not particularly appealing to me … much like I originally predicted. If you really need the KDE applications, or if you just want to use your favorite software with your second-favorite operating system, it will do the trick. Setup is painless, and you get the best of both worlds, so to speak.

But I’ll probably be reformatting this soon. Windows feels like a strange world to me now. I couldn’t even remember where the Add/Remove Programs application was. And I almost ran aground trying to get proper video drivers installed for my video card. And I miss multiple desktops. And I can’t do anything on a plain Windows installation. And downloading everything from the Internet is so inconvenient. And I need a separate application to mount an ISO image. And. …

Anyway, what I predicted so long ago was 100 percent true: Windows just doesn’t do it for me any more. I have different expectations from an operating system now, and Windows can’t fulfill them. Maybe I should be more disappointed than this, and maybe if I hadn’t found Linux I would be. But then again, if I hadn’t found Linux, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. 😐