If you have not followed this series from day one start here: DAY ONE 

Right. I have reached a tipping point in this series.

Honestly my experience with Windows 7 has not been all that bad. Has it been good enough to lure me away from Linux and open source? I honestly don’t know at this point. There was a few times that I wanted to throw in the towel and go back to my Linux install. Right now I am willing to wait and see what Karmic Koala will offer before I switch.

Switch I will, but not because I feel that I NEED to, but because I can.

You see, one thing these last seven days has showed me is this: Good as Windows 7 is, there is nothing it has on offer that is not at least matched by the current Linux desktops out there. Shocking as it may seem to those who have not made the switch yet – Linux has caught up. The fact that I am surprised at how good Win7 is should be telling, it should be the other way around. And it isn’t.

And if you think that this has stopped being about proprietary software and only about Win7, here are my thoughts on the other software that I used for these last few days.

Internet Explorer

I can’t wait to be rid of this. The add-on store almost gave me a virus for crying out loud! The lack of addons that work with my various social sites like twitter and so on is really telling. The interface needs improvement – for instance the reload and stop buttons being to the right of the address bar and the back/forward buttons to the left is dumb.

Firefox is better. Chrome is better. Safari is better. IE8 has new features that makes it better than IE7 and 6, but it is playing catchup – and still falling behind.

IIS

I used IIS to host pages locally, and working in a server environment on it on a day-to-day basis has made me familiar with it before this series began. It has one feature that Apache lacks, and that is the GUI. That said Apache has more to offer than IIS. Also, the version of IIS that came with Win7 has a new interface that seems to have been changed only for the sake of changing.

If Apache would gain a (sane) user interface that would open up its plethora of features to the average user IIS would quickly fade into the annals of webservers past.

(I have to restart now to install some updates, not going to just noting the neccesity)

MS Office

I used Office 2007 Enterprise with all the bells and whistles and I can honestly say that if someone figures out a way to work with Access databases in an Open Source program like OpenOffice Base the world will be able to say goodbye to MS Office. It is good, Office is a good product. But as is the case with Linux OpenOffice has drawn level. In fact OpenOffice offers more than MS Office. For the sake of comparisson I wil treat Outlook as a seperate product, as I believe it should be.

Ms Wordpad has improved by leaps and bounds. So much so that you can get away without MS Word – and that is telling. The average office clerk no longer absolutely needs MS Office. For more specialised task sure there are niches where it is still the best choice – but it is no longer the best office suite out there.

MS Outlook/Live Mail

For corporate users Outlook + Exchange are still the leaders. For the average user Thunderbird or Evolution is better. If only for the cost and being able to trust that your mails will still be accessible years down the line. Evolution can import Outlook .pst files for a while now so there is no reason to switch.

Live Mail has a calendar included now. That is great. As negative as it is that Win7 no longer includes a mail client I think Live Mail is a great free download. I am not sure if the version I got will be offered for lesser versions of Win7, I sure hope so.

So still the leaders by a very slight margin – watch this space, Evolution and Thunderbird are gaining fast!

Putty

Putty is Opensource. I tried a few closed source clients and immediately switched to Putty. I still find being able to work in terminal with my SSH sessions more intuitive, but here it is simply down to personal preference.

Bing Search

Useless. (Windows just nagged me via popup message to restart…)

I am sorry but if I type in “Samsung R509 DVD Drivers Vista x64″ and the first two pages are links to where I can buy a laptop a search engine is utter rubbish. And this seems to hold true for most searches – the results are skewed towards where you can buy stuff. If it was coincidence I must be the most unlucky guy on the planet.

Google is streats ahead. Even Yahoo search or Ask Jeeves returns more relevant results.

(OH MY GOODNESS I SAID I WILL RESTART LATER!!!)

Right. Enough for now. I need to go and start babysitting servers…

(And AGAIN I get nagged – then I spot the time option next to the “postpone” button.. sigh…)

12:40

My contact at Bitdefender told me that they are aware that BD 2009 has issues. So he gave me a link to download and install V2010.

Right now it is stuck at 0% updates and does not allow me to do anything else… okay done updating.

Interestingly there is only the old BitDefender toolbar installed… maybe after another reboot or IE restart I will get the new one to see if it breaks as much as the old one.

15:28

The more I work in this environment the less intrusive it feels. Sure there are philosophical reasons for only using FLOSS, but the truth is, I will never look at the source code of anything. So in a real world scenario for the end user the argument “but you can look at the source code” is null.

On the other side it is good to know that there are people out there who can and do look at the source code of the programs I regularly use in Linux.

You see, the Microsoft security track record is so bad that I am constantly worried about viruses and my personal information.

Do I put my trust in BitDefender to protect me? What if they decide to put code in their product to track what I am typing, right now (I know you guys are watching btw…), who will know?

In the world of closed source software, who is watching the watchers? In the OpenSource universe – everybody can, and a lot of people do.

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