A simple matter of…

Well today I’ve been testing Zimbra as a replacement for out useless outsourced Exchange provider. I’ll leave Zimbra for another day. Today was “why do people use windows?” day as I was doing a lot of testing with Outlook.

Problems hit so far today:

• needed to reboot to install some updates (wouldn’t let me get more updates)
• kept bugging me every 10mins to reboot (even though I’ve told it to shut up using gpedit.msc)
• restarted anyhow
• more windows updates…
• 650MB to install outlook (according to the installer)
• and you don’t get the latest version, oh no, you have to jump through various screens and webpages to get that
• in fact, I have to reboot as the new outstanding windows updates won’t let me check for outlook updates
• reboot
• 200MB update for outlook…
• can’t even edit a file easily - I have to hold down Ctrl then right click, select “select program” and _finally_ can select an editor (must setup a “sendto” link again)
• the Microsoft site to download the update uses a self-signed SSL certificate (bad!)
• in fact, the Microsoft _licensing_ site also uses a self-signed SSL certificate - come _on_ guys
• and outlook crashed once and hung several times on me (it might have just been _very_ slow but windows said it had stopped responding..)

Linux package management runs rings around this - simple one click installs, latest version automatically, all updates automatically. No reboots (bar kernel changes). Window managers which cope with more than one window on the screen.

I’ll almost certainly have to spend one more day in Windows, but that will be next week. At least that gives me the weekend to recover!