At least that is the case for me. I’ve been suffering for a couple of months now under the iron-handed rule of Vista (Business 64-bit) at my work PC. At some point in time it must have seemed like a good idea to me. But I certainly can’t remember why. The problems I have encountered are not big on their own but as a whole they disrupted my work-flow quite considderably.
◦ Unable to print on network printers (Driver issues)
◦ Computer becomes unuseable after it has been RDPd into
◦ Slow, Slower, Slowest (how do you build a fast machine? You take a lighning fast machine and install Vista)
◦ Endless problems with diverse unneeded Vista “security features”
◦ No more d&d of folders into the DOS window
◦ Explorer window has become too confusing and unmanageable
◦ and many more…
When Vista then complained I had an invalid license I thought that I have put up with this long enough. I want at least XP back. The Vista migration was a failure. So I went and installed Mac OS X on the HP DC7700. It worked and I deleted it again. Can’t have something dubious like that on a work PC 
.
Before I then sent the PC off to internal LAN to get it rebuilt with Windows XP I thought that I’d give Ubuntu 8.04 another chance at cracking the work-life Windows-monopoly. My first attempt had failed mainly due to the fact that Evolution could not access our company’s global addressbook.
This time round I thought that I would not kick-out the M$ Apps completely. So I’d need some kind of emulation. There’s two ways of doing that. Emulate all of Windows with something like VMware or semi-emulate the APIs with CrossoverOffice. Crossover (www.codeweavers.com) is the commercial side to the Wine project and was my first choice as I woulnd’t need to emulate a whole OS just to run some software. My attempts at using Wine were short lived as I’d gladly pay for saving me fiddling around to get things working. Especially in a work environment I have to make sure things work (well OK, by that rule all Windows versions would be disquallified….hmmmm). My worry though was how compatible this approach would be.
So I installed the 30 day trial version yesterday and had a first go. I installed the Office 2003 suite (bar Access which is known not to work). Then started Outlook and connected to our Exchange server. And to my extreme delight it worked right out of the “box”. I imported my valuable PST files and was all set-up. Word and Excel also started up in record time (about a second or less!). So there’s now absolutely no reason to go back to XP at all! What a happy chappy am I now?!?!!
I will still need VMware and Windows for some of my testing tasks but that is just on the odd occasion and I am sure I will miss some of the programs on Windows (can’t really think of one yet…). I’ll try and live with that.
Ubuntu gives me all the that I need for doing my development and testing work and with Crossover I am able to run all the things I need to from the Windows world. The next weeks will show how stable and usable the apps are under Ubuntu. I hope I won’t be disappointed. So far I can only give Codeweavers big kudos for a great product.