Two weeks without Windows

I have set myself a target of 1 month without booting to windows.
A little history --
1) I use Windows 2003 at Office.
2) I have tried many Linux distributions including Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu and openSUSE and now have the perfect windows replacement at home -- PCLinuxOS.

The day I installed PCLOS, I was so impressed that I decided to refrain myself from booting to Windows. However, I had to make a few changes to PCLOS to make it workable. I'll go over them one by one.

1. The usual multimedia codecs installation. Though PCLOS comes with many codecs, but I was not able to play wmv files, so had to install win32-codec. Strangely, now Kmplayer was able to play the wmv videos, but it was not clear. A little googling made me install VLC player and I was home. VLC plays most files as good as Windows media player.
   
2. Office. I am a home user and have very limited needs from Office suite. OpenOffice perfectly caters to all my needs. Well I cannot say the same for Office use, where we have to integrate all the documents with sharepoint, but thats another story.
   
3. System upgrade. PCLOS uses synaptic, do I need to say more. I think after "Adept", from Kubuntu, this is the best GUI based package management tool. Windows can never come even close to keeping full system updated in such an organized manner.
   
4. Internet chat. I use yahoo chat and Kopete provides a very familiar and intuitive interface. Two major issues here
1. PCLOS does not have the drivers for my webcam, which runs perfectly in Windows. So If I want others to see my video, I have to boot to windows. There is no other way.
2. The Linux version of Skype ( at least the version that comes with PCLOS) does not support video. I cannot even view others webcam. Now this is really bad.
   
5. Web browsing. I use Firefox even on windows and PCLOS install it by default. I do not feel any remarkable difference between the two. The same extensions that work on windows, work on PCLOS too. Well at least the ones I tried, like webmail notifier, video downloader etc.
6. Online Video. PCLOS has default support for videos from Youtube and similar sites. No issues here.
   
7. Online radio and streaming media. PCLOs ships with Real player version 10.0.8 which fails to play songs from some sites like www.raaga.com. I had to search and manually install Real player version 10.1.0 to make things work and now I can play song from any site.
   
8. Connecting to Digital camera. The moment I plug my camera ( Sony DSC-H9) to USB interface, I get a pop-up on the screen which allows me to view and download the images from the camera. The default camera application is digicam, which has basic editing features and the ability to upload the pictures to flickr. I had to install Gimp for advanced editing of photos, but normally I do not use it.
   
9. I can burn my photos to a CD using k3b, well I must say that k3b is very feature packed tool for CD burning. I found it very similar to the Nero utility that came with my CD writer driver. All the interface, procedures to select and burn are very similar.
   
10. Using Bit-Torrent. Ktorrent is arguably the best torrent software. I find it to be much lighter and less resource hungry than Azeurus and does not lack in features. Specially I like the ability to download selected files from a huge list of files in a single torrent.
    
11. Games. Oh with "wine" I can play most of Windows games like "Quake", "Diablo- LOD" etc. However, Linux games are good too.
12. Google desktop search. Though Linus has an open source desktop search in form of Kerry/beagle, but I have read at many places that they crash a lot and slow down the system. Again GDS is from Google and hence trustworthy. The search interface is same as that of Windows version and is equally effective. However, we do not have the cool Google gadgets.
    
13. Citrix desktop client. I connect to my office computer having Windows 2003 using the Citrix client for Linux and have not encountered any problems as yet.
    

PCLOS provided me with a system which auto decets almost all my hardware correctly, set the optimal screen resolution, requires minimal command line configuration and has all the software required for normal house usage. I really do not feel the urge to boot to windows. Its only during my free time when I want to talk to my friends through video chat that I start missing Windows. I know even if I Google a lot and somehow find a way to make my webcam work, still the current Skype version will not support Video. Just hope it will improve in future.
One major problem I have with PCLOS is, though I always keep my system updated through official repositories, many applications crash on their own. Kicker, konqueror and kmplayer have each crashed at least once. Specially the new kicker menu ( copied from SUSE ) crashes a lot, though it restarts on its own.
I am resisting the temptation to boot to windows as video chat is not that important to me.
I'll try to complete the remaining two weeks of no Windows on my home desktop.
If I succeed for one month, I might as well set a new target of 6 months. Maybe that will happen when SUSE 10.3 or Ubuntu 7.10 is released.

Is Google secretly helping M$ ?

I know it sounds bizarre, but I do have a theory to substantiate this. Don't know how to formulate it so just listing it.

1. Google is a closed source company. Ok, to begin with, Google internally uses Linux ( all that hype about Gooobuntu ), contributes to MySQL and supports Mozilla foundation. However, how many of Google own software are open source ?? Zilch!! Zero. Its like Google loves to take advantage of open source technologies, for its own benefit, but refuses to make its own products open source. Even its Linux products, like Linux Desktop Search and Picassa, are closed source. In todays world, Google and M$ are two biggest technology companies for desktop users. As they both promote closed source, are they not helping promote the notion that closed source is not evil -- one of the biggest motivating factor for people using Linux.
2. Most, if not all, of Google's applications are on Windows. Google has just started porting its existing applications to Linux, the first being desktop search. Picassa for Linux is just a "wine" adaptation of windows version of Picassa.
   
3. Most Google web applications are written with IE in mind. All Google web applications supported IE7 within days of IE7 releasing. At the same time Google supports Mozilla foundation, still some Google applications do not work well on the Linux version of Firefox. For example; in picassa web album, the option to upload multiple images at the same time is disabled in Linux version of Firefox. Here I am talking about Firefox 2.0.0.4, which is fairly recent. Whereas, picassa web albums work great with the same version of Firefox on windows. and Lastly ...
   
4. Linux is all about open source software. Lets take Ubuntu, the most famous distro. Ubuntu by default has only open source softwares, some other essentials like flash, mp3 etc form part of "restricted media", which are exceptions but necessary for normal desktop use and have no other open source alternatives. We already had good desktop search application in the form of beagle and then Google introduced its closed source desktop search. As this is a Google application, so people will trust it and use it. This way they will think that Apart from cost factor, windows still costs some money and Linux is free, what is the difference between the two when it comes for normal desktop usage. The purity of Linux is gone, many common applications on Linux are no more open source. Couple this with the fact that most hardware vendors write drivers for Windows and not necessarily for Linux.

Now we have a situation where Windows supports more hardware, has access to more free desktop applications from Google and the normal free open source applications. In some countries like china, M$ is offering windows at ~7-10$ and that is negligible when compared to the cost of entire Desktop/Laptop. On the other hand we have excellent Linux distributions like Ubuntu/PCLOS, which support less number of hardware, have the same open source applications as windows, have less applications from Google and lastly not all the applications/drivers used are open source.
The open source battle is lost.
Long Live Windows.

Evaluate on Windows, deploy on Linux

I recently read this article Evaluate on Windows, deploy on Linux and was amazed by the sheer number of people actually using Windows to develop the code. A little googling for this phrase ,develop on Windows, deploy on linux, lead to a huge number of sites.
I was stuck to Linux Gains Windows Muscle and windows + linux?.
People actually take the trouble of running Cigwin or using samba to connect to Linux server, just to remotely edit the files.
Someone mentioned basic editors like Notepad++/Notepad2 to edit Ruby files.

Just wondering even after such good GUI development IDE's like Kdevelop, Netbeans, Eclipse, RedRails, jEdit, WideStudio and above all "vim" and "(x)emacs" etc. all having Linux version, why would people still develop on windows and take all the trouble of porting and deploying it on Linux. Come on, why not take a shorter route and develop and deploy on Linux itself.

I can understand that some Linux Servers do not have GUI, but we can still develop on Linux workstations and deploy on non-GUI servers, at least we will save the trouble of porting windows code to Linux. I also understand that we can write platform neutral code and then porting involved will be minimal, but my point is why to have it at all.

Please share your views and possibly enlighten me.