Today's blog is written using an Asus EEE PC with Linux. I have hardly used Linux for at least five years, and I had almost forgotten how ghastly it is. Not only that, there hardly seem to have been any improvements when it comes to usability. It has taken me hours to set the keyboard to English instead of French. On Windows the same thing takes less than a minute. On Mac OS X less than 3 seconds. It takes slightly longer if you count the time it takes to figure out how to do it, but it will hardly take longer than 5 minutes on a Mac and 15 minutes on Windows. On this "simple" version of Linux, it has taken me about an hour just to figure out how to do it. And then it has taken about one hour of umpteen restarts and trial and error to get it done.
I have not bothered installing Japanese and Chinese keyboards, even though I have heard that Chinese keyboard supposedly is installed by default.
I had to fight with a new installation of Windows as well, a few months ago. Last time I got a new Windows machine it had a minuscule screen and a Japanese operating system. At the time I blamed my frustrations on my limited abilities to read Japanese, but when I now got to see a new European version, I discovered that it was equally bad.
Using a Macintosh is not a pleasure - it just happens to be a decent tool for whatever you happen to want to do. But it is not such an absolute pain and loss of time as using Linux and to some extent Windows.
Update: I have now spent another day on Linux, and I would like to moderate the above: Using Linux is not painful. Using Linux can be almost as acceptable as Windows and Mac OS. However, configuring Linux is painful. Editing configuration and startup files in Linux is like going back 20 years to DOS and autoexec.bat and config.sys.
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