Okay, coming from a mostly Linux/BSD background, with some limited Windows experience, I’m surprised so many people whine about Vista. Granted, it’s apparently slower than Win7 on most recent machines. However, I found the UAC default settings to be tolerable. I rather like being notified if something nasty is playing games with my system. For the most part, once stuff is install and permissions set on things which require it, I don’t see the UAC at all.
I’m a little annoyed there’s no Slate theme, and I’ll get sick of this baby blue. Otherwise, things are tolerable. The desktop widgets are pretty cool. The display is better than anything you can get from an X server. I’m still getting used to not having the mouse clipboard, but I’ll get over it. Naturally, I’ve enhanced the experience by bringing on-board some great freeware.
Firefox and Thunderbird, of course. I’ll use IE where it’s required by MS for official website stuff, but otherwise it stays in the closet. I also use Opera solely for email and sites I visit regularly with logins. For sites I don’t quite trust, there’s always Lynx text-mode browser.
Lynx can be gotten in several versions, but I found a copy of 2.8.7 which runs fine. After extracting, I moved it under the regular 32-bit “Program Files”, fixed up the lynx.cfg as I would under Linux, as well as the lynx.lss. Then I simply linked the executable to the desktop and set the proper icon. It seems to work best in WinXP compatibility mode, and I set the fonts bigger, and the screen at 80×50.
I also have PuTTY for SSH to my static website. I took the time to install that under the 32-bit “Program Files” as well. It logs in just fine and all works as it should with proper setup. I can also run Lynx and Elinks from that server over the SSH link.
For text editing, I keep two different applications. Plain text formatted files and HTML works best in Cream/Gvim. I got it setup as a standard right-click option in spite of it being 32-bit running on 64-bit Vista. Sometimes you need a file formatted without line-wrapping, and I got Emerald Editor (formerly Crimson Editor) for that. Both have spell checking as you type, which is good for catching typos.
That pretty well covers almost everything I do. All in all, it’s worth running Vista until the Win7 upgrade kits arrives.
