If you look back to around 15 months ago in my blog entries, you'd conclude that Linux triumphed on my desktop, and I never looked back. Yet, last night I logged onto my Linux partition and noted it had been 60 days since my last use of my Linux install. I've been living in a Windows-only world (Vista on my laptop, XP-Korean at work).
Does that mean I love Windows? I've always felt OK about XP (which is basically a desktop version of Server 2000/2003), but not a day goes by when I don't mutter "F@##$% Vista" to myself under my breath. Vista’s Windows Explorer (File Manager app) still crashes sometimes for no apparent reason, on an almost weekly basis, for example. So why am I not only tolerating Vista on my laptop, but basically committing to it exclusively, now? I have three main reasons.
First, there is the problem of language support. Once I started taking my efforts to learn Korean seriously, I found myself having to use Ubuntu Linux's clunky CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) support. It's an add-on. There are several choices of add-on, but all are terribly integrated to the desktop, and all are completely incompatible with several of the applications I wanted to use. I couldn't figure out how to name files in Korean unicode, and switching between western (US), western (Spanish) and Korean keyboards seemed unreliable and inconsistent, if not downright difficult. With at least one application (the game Second Life, Linux version), when I would run the CJK Input engine alongside it, it would lead to a full-blown system crash. No forum seemed to offer a more reliable alternative to the input engines I found and tried. In comparison, Microsoft's CJK language support is well-integrated to the operating system, and once I discovered that my right-hand ALT key could function as my Hangeul/Roman switch (since my laptop has a made-for-US keyboard that doesn't have that special Hangeul switch key to the right of the SPACE bar, the way that Korean keyboards do), I was very happy. Of course, even Microsoft's language support is sometimes weird: despite now being in service pack who-knows-what, every time Vista pops up that little "please authorize me to scratch my butt" warning, the language bar unlocks from the toolbar, parks itself somewhere near the top of the screen and floats out to foreground for half a second. That's buggy-looking, the sort of thing you'd think some developer at MS would have noticed before it even got into beta, not to mention two years after going live. I doubt it impacts functionality, but it's downright unprofessional-looking from a design/aesthetics standpoint. Overall, though, at least language support is fully integrated and relatively painless, if not always aesthetically pleasing.
Second, there is the issue of media files and media players. I could never find a media player and media organizer in Ubuntu that worked seemlessly with the materials I had: my Samsung MP3 player, my 35GB of music files, my downloaded Korean TV shows and movies. Each media player I tried would end up doing something strange. Once, one of the players (I forget which) placed all the music files onto my MP3 player with gobbledygook names (probably some freaky interaction with a few of my Korean unicode-named music files). Another time, I swear another player corrupted a set of 16 episodes of a TV show I'd spent weeks downloading. I also frequently got frustrated with visiting internet radio sites, where I would allegedly lack the proper codec, etc., to be able to play the stream I was trying to play. Many online streams are optimized for Windows and Mac environments, and seem to forget the Linux user out there. In any event, I now alternate between Realplayer and Windows Media Player when using Vista, with zero problems. Both work fine in the Vista environment.
Lastly, there has been the problem of the fact that Korean internet websites are often incompatible with Firefox (and Opera, to the extent I experimented with that). This is not, strictly speaking, Ubuntu or Firefox's fault, obviously. South Korea, more than any other nation on Planet Earth, is married to Microsoft at the hip. Microsoft has a 98% market share here, which is by far the highest in the world. Most Korean-national websites are written in non-ISO-compliant extensions to HTML (especially Flash and Silverlight) that seem to work only in Internet Explorer. I didn't ask for this type of environment, but I must accept the reality of it: that if I want to spend time on Korean websites (and in some cases, such as work-related tasks, I MUST spend time on Korean websites), I have no choice but to be using IE. And that pushes me into Vista, too.
Some people have said, for these compatibility issues, why don’t I use WINE (a Windows emulator for Linux) to encapsulate the problematic programs so that I can continue to run a Linux desktop? This is possible, although it doesn’t solve problem number one: lack of integrated language support. But furthermore, at least in my limited experimentation, WINE encapsulation is slow. And clunky. Ultimately, it seemed more trouble that it was worth, relative to possible benefits. It leads to a pyrrhic victory over Microsoft, at best.
So, sadly, the vista from here is murky. Ubuntu has a lot to accomplish before I can feel comfortable adopting it as my primary OS, as much as I would like to. My plan for this weekend is to delete my Linux partition, so as to be able to use the extra gigabytes this will free up. Ubuntu, it's been good to know ya.