So I finally had to admit that running linux on my laptop at work was actually becoming a productivity issue.
I use my linux desktop for development & ssh'ing into the Sun boxes - no dual boot there. My laptop is primarily used for e-mail and some 'work-from-home' type activities and I've had a dual-boot environment for a while now.. As I think I think I mentioned before, our development ticketing system here is a proprietary Windows app[1]. So that means that I have to re-boot into Windows everytime I need to view tickets assigned to me or add my 2 cents & development notes to a given ticket.
You can imagine how frustrating it is when someone asks me to 'just bring up this ticket and have a look at the analysis notes with me for a second'. So I exit out of Evolution, exit out of Gnome, wait for linux to shutdown, wait for Windows to boot, launch the ticketing app. Phew all that for a 5 second peek at a ticket.
There's more. Living in the corporate asylum means I'm surrounded by excel spreadsheets, word documents etc. Now, Abiword/Gnumeric & Sun's Staroffice do a decent job at trying to display those documents correctly - it's just that they don't display them correctly and that's a shame. In fact I almost missed a very important piece of info on a design document because Abiword left a line out! I only caught it because I asked a co-worker to print me a copy just before going into a meeting. I remember saying "wait a minute, that line is not on the document I read". Of course, it was there all along but Abiword did not display it for some reason.
I played with VMWare so that I could at least try and still use linux. Unfortunately, my corporate laptop is not 'top of the line' and running VMWare is a little resource intensive and running certain apps slowed my laptop to a crawl. Either that, or the windows apps wouldn't run at all(the ticketing app for example).
So last night, while waiting for The X-Files to start, I removed the linux partition. It was a sad event.
Still, I can make the whole windows experience somewhat bearable. Obviously, Mozilla will be the browswer/e-mail client of choice. I'll install Cygwin so I can have a *nix ish environment. And litestep will replace the damn Explorer shell. Actually litestep has some cool themes, my current theme is plastik and there's even a ximian gnome theme that will help make me think that I'm really not running windows.
[1] - As mentioned before, this ticketing system was purchased by some genius with leftover Y2K money. Prior to that a predecessor of mine had written a nice web ticketing system with a MySQL backend, sigh.
I realize Solaris ain't Linux, but it'll save you the hassle of rebooting.
