Saturday 1 February 2014

Windows 8 really does rock

This post was from 2013 but I forgot to post it. Still valid though.

I decided to spend some time setting up a machine with Oracle Express. For years I has used Sybase and MS-SQL Server but my new project at work uses Oracle and I felt a bit lost.

I downloaded a 4GB VM from Oracle's website that used Oracle Linux (a Redhat variant and RH is what we use at work) and had Express and all sorts of things installed. I loaded it up in VirtualBox and got to work.

It was awful: old browsers, poor driver support and extremely slow.

Ok. Let's try it in Linux. I didn't want to use Ubuntu because it was slow in Parallels. I thought I'd try Linux Mint. I had it installed already and it wasn't slow! By now it was late and as soon as it started warning me about problems with using Open JDK in Intellij I gave up.

I downloaded a 64bit Ubuntu and it really was super slow in a VM. I added more video memory and it was a bit better.

Installing Java was another faff. Oracle downloads come as RPM and Ubuntu doesn't like RPM. Converting RPM to DEB seemed to work but needed lots of manual setup.

OK. lets quickly try Windows 8.

Easy. Peasy.

Updating Windows 7 ran smoothly.

Installing all applications using provided installers was easy.

It was fast.

Why on earth did I even bother with the mess that is Linux.


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