It might be apparent that I think every OS since the abacus has been an increasing pain in the arse, but it has to be said that some modern developments mean even the heavier contemporary OS has enough advantages to make it useable.
At the start of the year I was dipping into Ubuntu as a breath of fresh air from my otherwise stale Windows 7 desktop and I've continued my affair with Ubuntu through a VM so its become more of a launched application than operating environment, and its also meant I can try builds of ChromeOS and other Linux flavours to keep up to date.
Added to the VM belt has been half a dozen OS choices, including WindowsXP which has provided the unique ability to install applications and trial them without polluting an otherwise pristine Win7 setup.
The routine is rather neat - you clone your fresh-os-install VM image and install demos, trials and apps. Given Uninstall wizards tend to be more akin to Tommy Cooper than Mary Poppins in their ability to perform cleaning magic, keeping Windows skippy is all but impossible and the OS eventually gets bogged down. So you reformat and reinstall - Except this is VM, which means you only have to delete the OS and clone the fresh image again. The process takes about five minutes and you have a fresh windows install to use.
Better yet - because I've done the install once it already has its drivers perfectly configured, Chrome is installed, Acrobat Reader, Antivirus and firewalls are already up. Better yet, I'm just copying an OS image, so I can do this without rebooting and without a minute of downtime.
The surfing/browsing experience inside a fullscreen VM is seamless and secure. Day-to-Day operation is confined to a walled-garden super-sandbox that has no access to your hard disk, documents, or personal files. Want the best of both worlds? Switch to your OS of choice and take a stab at anything with your new swiss-army-computer.
As you can imagine, by now my Host OS doesn't have much installed. There are a few apps I want to run without a VM in the way but its fairly minimal.
Playing with VMs has lead to me a rather startling discovery though, one which I really didn't expect. It turns out, your OS choice doesn't matter as much as you think it does. With more and more apps running online, its only the hard-hitters that are restricted to one or two OS options. Everything else 'just runs'
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