happiness in slavery
I’ve been using Ubuntu as my primary OS for several months now, but I’m finding myself booting into Windows more often than not lately. To be honest, I blame my new WoW guild – Poison Arrow.
Back when I originally migrated to Ubuntu I really wasn’t using my computer all that intensively. My WoW gameplay had greatly decreased due to guild politics, so most of my time was spent simply surfing the web or reading email – both of which are very nicely handled by Ubuntu. The migration went very well and I was quite happy for a long time.
Recently, however, I’ve become concerned about running WoW through WINE. Blizzard recently banned a number of accounts because they were running WoW through WINE/Cadega… I got nervous and started playing WoW through Windows again, and noticed that it really does run better in Windows.
Then we left our old guild, switched servers, and wound up in Poison Arrow. Where I was logging in for maybe 4 hours a week before, I am now playing that much in a single night. Raids were always an issue in Ubuntu…the slight decrease in performance through WINE was ok in small groups or solo, but raids were simply painful. Where I used to be lucky if I attended a single raid in a week, now I’m attending three or four.
So, I find myself constantly rebooting into Windows. Initially it was just to play WoW… Reboot to Windows, play WoW, log out of WoW, reboot into Ubuntu. But then I found myself trying to alt-tab out of WoW to look up information…except that my bookmarks were now old an out of date… So I updated my bookmarks in Windows, and then found myself doing most of my web surfing in Windows as well.
The last straw came over my recent four-day weekend. I used my computer daily to play WoW… Before too long I simply stopped rebooting into Ubuntu when I was done – odds were good I’d simply reboot it into Windows again later to play more without ever actually logging in to Ubuntu for anything. Saturday I realized that I hadn’t booted into Ubuntu for over a day… And it occured to me that I would have to log in to Ubuntu if I waned to check my email.
In that moment Ubuntu became a hindrance. If I wanted to read my email I would have to go to extra effort. Rather than making my life easier dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu had just made it harder.
So, I am now migrating everything back to Windows. I re-installed Dreamweaver and Fireworks, I’ll re-install Microsoft Office tonight. I’ll export everything from Evolution and import it back into Outlook. And by the end of the week I’ll likely remove my secondary HDD and be booting exclusively to Windows again.
I wouldn’t call this a failure of Ubuntu… The OS was actually much better than Windows in just about every respect. And I much preferred most of the F/OSS software that I was using under Ubuntu. The problem, ultimately, is simply that I use my machine primarily for gaming. If there were native Linux clients for World of Warcraft, Dawn of War, and Far Cry I would likely still be using Ubuntu as my primary OS… But it would just be a matter of time before I found a new game to play that wasn’t Linux native – a new shooter, or another strategy game. Something that really hooked me, dragged me in, and made me boot to Windows more often than not.
Until Linux has truly mainstream game support I just can’t get rid of Windows. And as long as I continue to spend most of my computer time gaming, Windows is going to have to be my primary OS.