Digital Oasis

After years of dual-booting between Windows XP and Mandriva, I made the decision to bring the hammer down and get rid of the former. My original intention was to make the switch when I bought a new PC but my hand was forced as I came home from work on Friday to a locked-up Windows XP desktop that never came back.

Fear not: no data was lost as Mandriva can read Windows drives. I backed up my things onto my /home partition and waved goodbye.

It’s been a roller-coaster past with Windows XP. When it first came out, I irrationally hated it. Once I got used to it, I found it actually worked pretty well. Mostly. Sure, it lacked some of the neat features Mandriva had (rotating cube desktop, wallpaper playlists, etc.) and you never quite knew when the next time it would fail was, but it got the job done. Formatting was a bitch since most installs didn’t have a separate files and settings partition from the system partition and going through the hassle of calling India to promise them you only had one copy of it installed was always a treat.

When Vista came out I was put off by even more Digital Restriction Management (DRM) but wanted to see how it performed nonetheless. I can honestly say after using it at work for the past year and a half that it will never come close to being installed on my machines. So, that leaves us the little engine that could: Mandriva.

It’s been just over 2 days since breaking up with Windows XP and I have to say, I don’t miss a thing.