Vista: The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" pretty much sums up how I feel about the upcoming release of Microsoft Vista.  While the choice made in the poem isn't certain if it was a good or bad choice, Vista is the fork in the road where I'll be choosing a different path as others  have already done.  I'm just not happy with Microsoft's new licensing strategy as well as Microsoft 's restrictive DRM features (Apple isn't much better).

Excerpt from "The Road Not Taken"

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost  (1874 - 1963)

Ubuntu made the decision for me.  I've played with Open Office and GIMP before, but the seamless install of Ubuntu with these applications is a no-brainer.  Ubuntu should make any startup business think twice before investing huge bucks in a Microsoft installation.

I've switched OS's before and I'm not opposed to switching again.  I used to be an "Apple" Bigot and ended up switching over to Microsoft due to work demands.    My current development skills are not significantly tied to the Microsoft platform and Adobe's support of the Linux environment for Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion along with a great development platform such as Eclipse, makes it that much easier.

I'm currently using Windows Media Center XP as my main system and it's doing the job quite nicely for now.  I plan on staying with my current main system awhile longer, most likely until Microsoft stops supporting it, then I'll probably start using Ubuntu as my main OS (other than in a VMWare session) and if the hardware isn't up to my current need for the latest and greatest, get a new system and push the current system onto the obsolescence queue, waiting for its' eventual demise of being handed off to a relative or becoming E-Waste.