“groovy mother...”

Windowidow

I had a surprising realisation this afternoon: I don’t use Windows much anymore.

(OK, I use it all the time at work: But that’s because we’re building a site using Microsoft Commerce Server, so switching to another OS isn’t much of an option.)

At home, I tend to sit down in front of my Mac to do anything intense, or use my crappy old Laptop running Gentoo Linux in bed to catch up on email and blogs.

There are three things I do on my Windows PC:

1. Keep track of our finances in Microsoft Money
2. Print postage using Stamps.com
3. Surf the web/check email when I’m running something processor intensive on the Mac.

Indeed, if you look at the list of software I install as soon as I get a new Windows machine, it’s mostly either: Stuff to access files over a network, or ways to make Windows act more like a Unix box.

This really drives into me the point of Joel Spolsky’s latest article—Windows has little lock-in for me now. I can access all my important data from multiple places—IMAP for mail, Bloglines for bookmarks, Wiki for notes and TODOs, and rsync’d M4As for music.

I don’t need to keep throwing $$$s at Redmond—Any machine capable of giving me a web browser and a command line prompt is 95% of the way there!