Help me choose

From: I.C. Koets (i.c.koets_at_student.tnw.tudelft.nl)
Date: 01/31/05 

Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 06:42:30 +0100

Alea iacta est; in the same way I was forced to abandon DOS, I am now forced
to abandon W98se. My new computers hardware is no longer compatible with the
old OS. Now I have to choose a new OS, and so far everyones' opinions are
running counter to each other. I have a few choices, all have their own
disadvantages:

I could go with:

* Windows XP. It is the current standard, so drivers and program
compatibility shouldn't be a problem. My new machine should run it easily.
Running with the masses makes a lot of things quite a bit easier.
However: I tried it some time ago, and I wasn't impressed by the amount of
overhead running. I knew how to strip 98 down to its bare minimum, but XP
proved very resistant to such measures, and after it sat on my machine,
smugly unperturbable, without me being able to stick my hands in the
workings, I wiped it off. Not only that, but I have loads of DOS, W3.11 and
W98 programs that I want to be able to run, and that didn't go smoothly at
all. Also I got the distinct impression that XP is as open to hackers as a
drunk whore is to sailors. If I go with XP, I'd have to find ways to get
past these issues.

* Windows 2000. Not standard, but still supported, perhaps not for long.
Stable, businesslike.
However: I never tried it, so I have cold feet. I heard its DOS support was
even worse than XP's, which would disqualify it. I also heard it doesn't do
games very well, and even though I don't game a lot, that doesn't sound
nice. Furthermore, I have been warned that W2k is 'difficult', although I
don't know if I'd mind that.

* Some flavour of Linux. Finally free from Redmonds' shackles, open source
software by the shipload, often for free. Great choice in different
flavours, active community.
However: I tried SuSe 8.2, and it really annoyed me. Buggy, complex, help
system was useless for a novice like me [if it didn't crash on me!], I never
got any work done on it. The only thing I ever got to work was OpenOffice.
Hurrah. The Linux newsgroups, forums etc. weren't very helpful at all. Half
of the scarce answers I got were of the order "That's weird. Never heard of
it doing that before." and the other half was "RTFM". So I'm sceptical. I've
seen other peoples' systems running well, but I don't feel like having to
become as involved in Linux as them in order to get it to run. Knoppix
impressed me, when I saw it on a friends box, but I am wary. Not only would
I have to know that it has good emulators for my old software, but I'd also
have to choose a distro, which is not trivial for a newbie like me. And then
there is the problem that my job requires me to work with certain standard
programs, which might not have a Linux edition...

So here I am, stuck without enough knowledge to make an educated decision. I
just need to get my machine running, being able to run DOS, Win 3.11 and W98
applications (mostly CAD, Algebra software, MatLab, FEA, graph generators,
office apps, other miscellaneous engineering and scientific software), but
also a few games, some video and audio, and web browsing as well as a bit of
data pumping on P2P networks. That's about it.

Advise me, please!

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Derivative effects.
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