OK – after 15-20 years of being a tech enthusiast, starting in the late 90s with PC assembly and experimentation with the Linux OS, I find myself at a crossroads, or more like the intersection at the middle of a figure 8, where it seems that the Windows OS/ecosystem will fit my needs the best.
The Windows OS comes pre-loaded on most performance computing
If you have a $250 budget – you can get a very competent performance mini-PC (why would most people need/want anything else?), and $500 for a performance laptop with Windows 10 included. These price points are very reasonable for the hardware alone, so the OS being baked in and pre-installed is the lowest resistance path to getting up and running.
Additionally, my work dictated that I be able to quickly create reasonably scaled 3D objects. Sketchup is a program I have used in the past, and was a natural selection. Sketchup does not put out a version that runs in Linux (that I am aware of). You have to run it in a simulated or virtual environment, which is a drag…I aspire to learn Blender, but that is no joke and right now results, even imperfect ones, that move me towards my goal quickly, are preferred.
I can’t seem to adjust to Gimp in Linux. My preference is for Photoshop, which I learned to use back in my microscopy days. Never great with either its
Finally, Windows is better now. Having been in and out of a handful of different OSs at different companies over the last 20 years, I’ve tinkered around and configured computers in just about every version (fuzzy on Win2K or ME, but I think I played around with them some at least) of Windows.
Most rarely want to make the leap because people don’t like change and a new OS usually has some growing pains until you reorient yourself to interacting with your computer in a different manner. Depending on your business type, most are usually delayed slightly from the latest/greatest Windows OS because it costs money and uncertainty to do.
So after being on a Win 7 machine on work computers for the last 3 years, and on Mint Linux at home, I was surprised to find Win10 to be easy to
Windows moving towards a cloud-centric approach also helps, even if you are going to use a different cloud architecture as your data backbone (I’ll write another post on why I believe this method is better). The OS seems to me more of a nicely setup basic workstation designed to integrate easily with cloud based services, other computers, and wireless devices.
Lastly, while open source solutions are often very good, they rarely achieve the polish and overall integration that you can achieve when teams of developers work towards one polished final product, that is then distributed in large volumes to create a virtuous feedback cycle financing the next round of improvements.
The one caveat, or holdout on my part, is my personal data repository and working at my actual desk. I have had a standalone desktop computer like always. When setting up my new IT work environment, I bought a laptop and had a capable Azulle stick PC. My initial thought was to run a stick or mini-PC for my desktop, supplemented by the laptop for working anywhere else. All relevant data stored on google drive, synced/linked to both machines. I had that setup running OK until the first time I ran Sketchup and couldn’t load the model because stick PC was running 32 bit OS, which is no longer supported by Sketchup. Grrrrr…..
So to work around that, I just went HDMI out of my Laptop and extended my desktop over the 2 screens with wireless keyboard and mouse. Wait,…. what….., I think this might be even better than having 2 well aligned separate systems.
Which leaves one dangling detail – my personal data repository. Currently, it’s housed in a (2) 5TB RAID array which is physically like the size of a large portable HD. It’s a great little solution with full RAID 0 mirroring. I occasionally like to access this repository remotely. I think this will bring me full circle back to my Linux device, which I will likely use as a file/web server that will provide consistent remote access locally and remotely, and a Linux play machine where I can experiment with different versions of Linux for kicks.
Thats my story and I’m sticking to it.
-jl