I’ve been a Linux fanboy since the age of 12. I installed Slackware on my top of the line Pentium 75 mhz computer and my life was forever changed. I became a coder and a geek and fell in love with the idea of an open source operating system. I learned 4 different programming languages and really got to know the insides of the computer.

Linux, was a great learning tool for me, but it’s never been a very effective working tool.

You see, I used to do a whole lot of programming work in Linux. The LAMP architecture is the quickest, cheapest way to learn programming on the web. Being able to run your own webserver with built in MySQL and PHP on a home machine makes testing so much easier. But now that’s all been ported to Windows, and it works with a whole lot less headaches from broken libraries and esoteric drivers.

But I started doing more graphics work than programming, and graphic programs in Linux pretty much suck. The GIMP has one of the worst user interfaces ever. Just so counterintuitive, and such a hassle to get things done. I used to think that if Photoshop and Illustrator were ever ported to Linux, it would be the perfect desktop environment. But now, even if Photoshop and Illustrator are ever ported over, they still wouldn’t be the killer apps for me to make the switch back to Linux.

In Windows, all my hardware works, and I don’t have to worry about broken packages. I can even still view (and write to) my Linux drive (ext3) in Windows using this driver. There isn’t the time draining process of installing 8 libraries so I can install my one program. Everything in Windows just works.

And that’s what’s most important to me, as a business owner and entrepreneur. I don’t care about the purity of my tools, I only care about the end result. I don’t spend hours wondering why this package won’t compile. Working within a Windows environment is the quickest way for me to achieve the end result I need, at the lowest cost.

And after spending a while doing graphics in the simplicity of Windows, I started looking around for replacements to the awesome development environment that is LAMP. And I’ve found I can get rid of my Linux partition completely.

With WAMP I really have no reason to go back to Linux ever again. I can develop and code and then switch back to graphics work without a reboot. Sure, there’s no bash in Windows, but I can do just about everything bash does with Perl. Voila, a stable, aesthetically pleasing development environment without the headache of packages.

Wait a minute, am I saying I like Windows now? Yes, unfortunately. Getting things done and producing top notch work comes before any software ideals right now. In a perfect world, I would have the time to fix all of Linux’s problems. But I can’t spend a few hours every day implementing fixes, especially if there isn’t even a real place for them to all go. So for now, Windows it is.

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