Desktop, Sweet Desktop

One of the great disadvantages of my most recent stint in grad school is that I had to switch my main home desktop machine over to Windows XP in order to run some of the tools that I used as part of my NSF fellowship work. So I made some backups of my existing system, bought a copy of XP (these guys tend to have pretty good pricing and you actually get what you pay for), and installed. Sigh.

I will say this: of all of the MS environments I've used, I like Windows XP Pro the most. My use of MS produced or influenced OSes includes

• Xenix on the main processor of the Intel Scientific Hypercube.
• Not bad, really.
  
• MS-DOS in various versions
• Adequate, I suppose, but I prefered CP/M (Xerox 820 model II), and even Apple's DOS on my ][e
  
• OS/2
• starting with 1.1 I think. I do recall that the TCP/IP stack up to around 1.3 was abysmal and crashed the entire machine.
• Windows 3.1
• Surely you're joking. I had used a Lisa and a NeXT Cube years before this.
  
• Windows 95
• Really. It's a joke, right? I mean, sure, it looks better, but ....
• Windows NT
• At this point I actually took notice of MS' OSes. Here was something that had legs. Legs with thick ankles, but legs.
  

XP was functional. I sorta knew where somethings were in XP. The truth of the matter is, though, that I had been running Linux (or GNU Linux, as some would prefer) for many years before that. So last weekend I bought a new hard drive, dug out my backups, downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, and re-took my desktop from the capitalistic forces that would seek to destroy... erm, nevermind. I re-established a desktop that I enjoy and can be productive on. Or at least that's the hope. I'm still remembering things, some in my fingers and some in my head.