It’s the year of Linux on the desktop! Wait, no, scratch that. Postponed until next year.

I used to run Linux on my desktop/laptop years ago until I became fed up with obscure crashes, poor performance, and poor battery life. I decided then that I wanted a solution that allowed me to spend more time on doing the stuff I like such as coding. I switched to Windows. At the time the version was Windows 7 but these days I run Windows 8.1. You might think I’m crazy but… I like it. Alot. So much so that I now have an Atom based Windows 8.1 tablet and also a Windows 8 Phone. Everything works perfectly together, and when I say works… I mean it.

I have zero crashes and the battery life of everything is such that I don’t have a constant nagging voice in my head going “you need to plug that in or you’ll run out of power”. I just use it. That’s the sign (in my opinion) of a good platform.

On my i7 based Thinkpad x220 I get on average 6-8 hours. My Samsung Ativ S phone gets 2-3 days (with usage). My Asus T100 tablet gets 8-10 hours (with usage).

Throughout my adventure though there has been four applications which have risen to the top of my list as software that has made my life easier:

Microsoft Hyper-V

Hyper-V is Microsoft’s virtualization technology baked into Windows (requires certain minimum specifications mind you) and I use it to run an Ubuntu 13.10 Server virtual machine all the time. I’ve got it set up with a NATted network interface to the internet and a host-only interface. I do all of my development on it including testing. It’s fast, it’s free, it works, and once you set it up you never really notice that it is running. Heck, it even works perfectly when I suspend or hibernate my laptop.

MobaXterm

MobaXterm is a piece of software which contains a nice terminal application, a self-contained Cygwin, and an automatically configured/working X server. You can execute commands locally as if it were a Linux system, you can SSH places, you can run X applications on remote servers and have them automatically appear locally. It’s got a lot of nice features and seems to be relatively unknown.

Postbox

This is my email client of choice. It’s available for Windows and Mac, has GMail integration, looks great, works great, and has a few add-ons you can use (for example one for calendars! yay calendars! boo meetings!).

Sublime Text

No text editor wars here! I use Sublime Text. Thanks to the X server support in MobaXterm I can run it in my Linux virtual machine and it appears on the Windows side as any other application.

Using all of these has reduced the time I have to fight with my system and improved my workflow. If you don’t re-evaluate how you do things and what software you are using every so often… you are missing out.

Cheers,