The Claustrophobia of Microsoft Windows

Microsoft wants us to believe that "Windows" stands for something beautiful and ethereal, a view into our work, a way to see the future, something that lets light into our world so we can do everything we want. But Micorosoft Windows is no such thing. Microsoft Windows is nothing more today than it was when it was first introduced: boxes for programs to run in. That's it, boxes on your screen. Empty boxes.

That became abundantly clear to me when, after years of not using Windows, I made a fresh installation of XP on a VMWare virtual machine on my new Intel MacBook Pro after installing Freebsd 6.2 and Debian earlier in the day. I have to say that if you haven't done that in a while, please do it because the contrast is stark and experiencing it back-to-back is the best way to grok it.

After the installation of Debian and FreeBSD I had full powered, responsive computers which were both ready to accept thousands of software packages without cost or complaint. Both of these systems easily connected to my network, even the Windows domain that still remains, and found their way onto the Internet. I could run them remotely and even forward their desktop GUIs to my MacBook. Nothing surprising there.

Then I installed Windows XP. When the installation was finished I was at the desktop where I found.... nothing. Nothing at all. Windows was completely impotent out of the box. There's no decent software to be found when the installation CD stops spinning. No, Solitaire does not count as an application - especially if I can't even find something with which to write a decent memo. Clicking Start, Run and typing 'cmd' gave me a command line which I thought might help (it's been a while), but I might as well have been scratching my name in the ground with a stick as use the command line with its anemic command set and only about 20 viewable lines. Windows had trouble finding the network, even the other Windows boxes. It's downright claustrophobic to use Windows because there's no way out.

I know none of this is news to anyone, but I was so struck by how empty the view was out of Windows' windows.

My step-son has a computer in his room that runs XP. The box is only a couple of years old but was running like a dead dog. It had obviously been compromised by spyware, but I kept my distance out of respect for his privacy. Then it tanked and wouldn't boot. Now, since he had gotten a very cool Alienware laptop for his gaming, the old XP box wasn't doing much except running tax returns and iTunes. My wife asked me to see if I could fix it. I said I would install FreeBSD on it and it would be like new.

First, I used FreeSBIE and Knoppix to boot the computer from CD. Either of these would do, but I wanted to try both. (They're both great tools for rescuing other systems, so if you haven't tried these, give them a whirl.) Once under control of a Unix operating system, I was able to mount a 4GB USB memory stick to hold my wife's files. Rather than go through the muscle cramps of clicking and dragging the files and directories, I just wrote a quick script, ran it, watched some TV and checked it out later. It worked. I yanked the USB stick and sat back to figure out what to do with the now utterly unimportant and compromised box.

Long story short, I decided I wanted to try PC-BSD for this machine. I love FreeBSD and have set up some very nice servers and even a couple of zippy desktop machines using it, but I'd read some great things about PC-BSD and DesktopBSD and thought this would be a good time to get my hands on one of them. I chose PC-BSD because I thought my wife and step-son might like KDE more than Gnome.

The installation was a piece of cake. There are plenty of step-by-step accounts of how this gets done, so I won't bore you here with the details, but I will bore you by repeating that this computer probably never ran faster than it does now. I actually compared the CPU load on this machine running some software with my step-son's new Vista loaded laptop running nothing. The Vista laptop was breathing harder sitting still than the FreeBSD box was at a long, light jog.

So, it looks like Windows is a dog. It's anemic, triggers claustrophobia, catches more diseases than a tarted-up street-walking crack-whore and doesn't have enough energy to get out of its own way.

The reasons for this sorry state of affairs is because Microsoft doesn't know what it's doing. And it was made abundantly clear to me last night.

Before leaving on a business trip for the week I moved some Word files off the PC-BSD box to one of my PowerBooks for my wife to use. Copying was easy, but when my wife tried to open the Word files, Microsoft Word on my Mac complained that it couldn't read the file because the file format was no good. It was late, so I took the bait and tried to figure out what the problem was with the file formats. Geez. It turns out that I had simply forgotten to change the owner of the files once I had moved them into my wife's account on the Powerbook. So Microsoft Word couldn't distinguish between a file permissions error and an unknown file format. There's something deeply distrubing about an important piece of software that can't properly interpret fundamental information from the operating system.

Microsoft really doesn't know what it's doing, does it?