Goodbye windows, you weren't very good

Bye Windows. Not missing you at all. Already.

Not overly blessed with patience, windows just isn't the operating system for me. It leads to drumming fingers, and muttering curses under my breath. Audible curses over my breath, too. It can start off manageable, but invariably, after less than a year, it becomes so clunky and ponderous that you may as well resort to pen and paper and abacus and whatever the early forms of powerpoint and you tube were.

It's commercial, windows. You pay for windows. So windows has a vested interest in you buying a new pc, because that comes pre-loaded with their rubbish, and you have to pay for it. That's a great business model. Convince your punters that you're the only show in town and that any alternative is way too techie for the likes of them, then trash their machines so they pay you more money. I struggle to understand. You wouldn't drive past the free petrol distribution centre to pay over the odds for inferior fuel that wrecked your car so you had to buy a new one.

Take an out of date, hopelessly slow, take it off my hands before I throw it on the skip computer running windows whatever flavour, slam on a slimline Linux distribution, and you're sitting in front of a flying machine giving years of fast, stable performance. It's free, you see. There's no incentive for any of the people behind the various distributions making your computer borderline unusable before the warranty has expired. Funny how poor performance has underpinned commercial success through de facto market dominance.

It can be a bit techie to start with, mostly because it is free, so you download a version, normally as an .iso image file, and there's a little bit to do to burn a bootable DVD or usb stick, but then that's it. Restart (ok, you may have to reconfigure the boot order in the BIOS settings, but how hard can it be? I've managed it on any number of pcs) press a few buttons, set the time zone, a user name and a password, and Linus is your penguin.

You can't get Sky Go (a Moonlight / Silverlight / lack of will on Sky's side to do the right thing); not all games will run. Other than that there's all you need and more. All for free.

The Kills

I'm onto book two (of four) and back in time to the dodgy company deciding to man the burn pits in the desert. It starts by chronicling the deaths of those men. It is a huge, sprawl of a novel, with even more to it in the on-line stuff, but it's also gripping and tense and, I'm sure, pretty accurate on the murky civilian side of the wars and peacekeeping missions in the middle east.

Crystal Palace...

...are not very good, but their fans are superb and they don't deserve to suffer that odious little thing Tony Pulis. He sets his teams up to pay a sort of anti-football, as you would expect of a creature that is an undersized orc. Like a cross between an orc and a hobbit, but wit the orcs looks, charm and temperament. Clubs should recognise that these long-ball, hoof it / throw it / launch it a long way and gather a bunch of 6'5” freaks under it can only take you so far. Usually out of the Championship, at best. As much criticism as tippy-tappy football attracts, that's exactly what has seen Spain dominate international football, and the top clubs that have dominated the Champions' League do just that.