My new laptop came with XP Home. The darn wizards kept getting in my way. I put up with it for three days before making a decision: either the OS has got to go, or the laptop has got to go, so I wiped the HD clean and put Win2k on it. I refuse to use XP.
The dumbed-down-ness of XP and the WPA crap have driven me to a decision: Win2k is the LAST MS OS that I'll use. I specifically bought the laptop so I could dedicate my older laptop to Linux, for the purpose of learning to use it. I bought Lycoris Desktop/LX and Crossover Office. I can run MS Office, Visio, and about a third of my Windows applications on the Linux box, and from what I've seen, within the next twelve months I anticipate that that fraction will climb tremendously.
Is Lycoris XP? No, and I don't want it that way. That's not to say it isn't easy to use. I tried Mandrake before, and Lycoris beats it silly in that department. I'm not a Windows newbie, and I neither need nor want all those wizards. If I wish I can use KDE3 to make the look and feel 95% the same as XP, which I don't want to do anyway (I use the Liquid theme instead, which looks more like OS-X). In that sense Linux is infinitely more customizable. There was a learning curve, to be sure, but once I got the hang of file ownership and learning where confguration stuff lives it got a lot easier.
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