Walk like an Egyptian

Saw the nice people at Fracture Clinic again yesterday. The consesus is that my leg wasn't broken. Probably. Either way, I'm free to walk, if I can. Basically, the general idea is that if it hurts when I do 'this', don't do it. I can sort of walk without crutches, in a slow, hobbling kind of way, and the doctor guesstimated that it would probably be at least a month before I can start trying to run again. Nevermind.

I got a new laptop, by the way. As a die-hard Microsoft free Zone, I've taken the plunge and got a wintel machine. Why? Well, after a few days of aquainting myself with the machine, I ask myself the same question. Don't get me wrong, the machine itself is a model of lovliness as all Sonys tend to be, but compared to the sleek, good looking efficiency of Apple's OS/X, or the industrial bullet-proofness of Solaris or the clean minimalist lines of FreeBSD, Microsoft's latest OS is just dire. Just dreadful. Why do people accept such brokenness in software that they would never dream of accepting in other engineering disciplins? Of course, I used windows at work for a long time, as a developer when I was forced to, but I had hoped that as a home machine it would be acceptable, but it just isn't.

I can live with its ugliness. I can probably learn to cope with its long-windedness in getting anything set up, and the constant reboots (why in this day and age of modular kernels do people accept this?). Possibly, I can overlook the constant 'handholding', the 'are you sure' and 'do you know what you are doing' pop-ups. What I can't live with are the little broken details, how things just not quite want to play together. Why do I need a mega-application (Norton Internet Security came pre-installed) just to stop the box from getting hacked, 0wn3d or overrun by spyware? Well, *I* don't, as I know how to secure a machine, primarily by not using any application written by Microsoft, ever. Why should one trust a software company that expects you to run a 'live update' such that they can install a constant stream of patches to correct bugs and software insecurities?

I'm itching to put a proper OS on this box.