General

Today, I got a shiny new notebook (a Sony VGN-A115Z) for doing Symbian development while being off-road. It came with Windows XP Home preinstalled, which I deleted and replaced with Windows XP Pro. The next step was to set all the color settings to sane defaults, i.e. the "classic" Windows 2000 look.

Of course, what I had to do was installing all the software that I need. For Symbian development purposes, this is

• Metroworks Codewarrior for Symbian OS
• Nokia Series60 SDK
• SonyEricsson UIQ SDK

. Besides that, you need some software that you generally need, no matter what you're doing. I will name the most important ones:

• PuTTY (ssh client and terminal emulator)
• Mozilla Firefox (browser)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (mail- and newsreader)
• Feedreader (RSS/ATOM aggregator)
• VIM (the editor)
• TortoiseSVN (Subversion client)
• Cygwin (Unix-like environment for Win32)
• Apple iTunes (music player)

I mean, this is the standard set of software every computer should come with. Why doesn't Windows? Anyway, guess which of the software is not open source/Free Software (besides the Symbian stuff)? Right, Apple iTunes (which is still free as in beer). IMHO this clearly shows that open source software is in many parts superior to their proprietary counterparts (at least on Windows): most of the time, the open source alternatives have a higher quality than the "original" (if you may call it so).

Good examples are Firefox and Thunderbird: both came out of the Mozilla project, and both are clearly better (faster, smaller, more secure, more features, less bugs) than their Microsoft counterparts, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Does Microsoft even feature an RSS aggregator? AFAIK no. A good editor? Definitely no (Notepad is a very good example for an editor totally lacking features). A good Unix-like environment? No. A Unix-like environment. Yes (but using it hurts badly). So, IMHO, Windows is not failing in the geek "area" of people only because of its poor quality, but more because it's lacking even the most basic tools you need for your every-day work.