Slashdot | Useful Apps for First-Time Windows Users?:

Living off the grid -- easier than you think.

(Score:5, Interesting)

by Yaztromo (655250) <yaztromo@jsyncma ... rg minus painter> on Wednesday April 12, @01:15AM (#15111440)
(http://www.jsyncmanager.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 09, @07:47AM)

Let's take a realistic point of view. We have a computer user who seems to be well experienced. They even have a nicely designed blog online where you can write in your favourite Windows-only applications. Yet they claim that they have never been a windows user before (Making me wonder where they have been for the past 10+ years where windows has been the ubiquitous consumer & business software platform.)

I'm a software developer. I've worked for IBM. I maintain and develop several Open Source software applications. And I haven't been a Windows user since Windows 3.1.

I always have to laugh when some Windows user thinks that it is simply not possible to exist in the computing world without using Windows. However, it's quite a bit easier to live outside the Windows world than you think.

How did I do it? Long before Windows 95 existed, I used a fine 32-bit, pre-emptively multitasking operating system called OS/2, which I used for most of the 1990's. Towards the late 1990's, when OS/2 was on the decline, I started working for IBM as an OS/2 developer, where I also did a lot of Unix/Linux work. Around the same time frame, I started running Linux at home in parallel to my OS/2 machine as a way of running software through X that I didn't otherwise have access to.

With the serious decline of OS/2 in the 2000's, I moved over to Mac OS X (along with running a lot of Unix systems). For the last number of years much of my paid work has been in Java comsulting, where I get to pick what platform I use.

So I haven't had a Windows machine since 1993 at this point. True, I have encountered them here and there over the years, but I've been able to avoid being assigned to a Windows machine in my home or at any place of work I've held in all that time. The trick is damn simple for the most part: be so freakishly good at what you do that people will be happy to comply with your platform requests, and let them know up from you have no interest in working with Windows. So far, it's worked every time here.

Yaz.
Windows Free since '93.