Last night I got a call from my father in law. He recently bought a new laptop and wanted to get it on his wireless network. Rather than talk him through it over the phone, I went round and helped him directly.
I wont go into the details, because it’s not remotely interesting, suffice to say the Acer wireless and wired LAN connectivity tool is a pile of crap compared to network manager under Linux. The user interface is slow, bloated and inconsistent. On a brand new dual core laptop, it takes almost a minute at times to decide to do something as simple as bring an interface up. Anyway, enough of this.
Whilst there I learned that this new laptop came with XP Media Centre edition, but a token was attached for a “free” (as in cost) upgrade to Windows Vista. My father in law started filling in the online forms, making notes of his (mentally long) serial number and Microsoft COA number to fill in on the website.
Once he’d filled in all the details (and entered his credit card details to pay (~15GBP) for shipping and handling of his “free” (as in cost) upgrade to Vista) he wanted to save the html summary page from the browser for reference. The browser hung after issuing the command to save the page. Now bearing in mind the PC is brand new, and has every single update installed, and is visiting an official Microsoft web page I was more than a little disappointed and equally unsurprised.
It was at this point that I decided that I will not touch friends or families computers if they run Windows Vista. This pushes the onus onto them, if they decide to run Vista then they are choosing to get support from somewhere else. I have just had enough with closed-source, broken, poorly written, badly supported, inconsistent, bug ridden crap.
2 Comments
I stumbled upon this in the Planet Ubuntu feed, and I have to say that I cannot agree with this any more.
I’ve been working in the field as a network technician for almost 4 years now, and a major part of my job is supporting end users with their desktop problems. About a month ago, I basically snapped and said “That’s it! No more Windows for me! I can’t take it anymore!”
Since then I’ve transitioned entirely over to Kubuntu, and haven’t even been tempted to look back. I tell everyone to consider switching to a user-friendly distro rather than investing in the steaming pile of garbage they call Vista.
Keep spreading the good word! =)
I didn’t tag this one for inclusion in the Ubuntu Planet because it was somewhat “ranty”
Figured it was inappropriate.