Cobra's bits (Posts about windows)

MSTwo

Cobra — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 13:12:43 GMT

We are in the middle of a scientific discussion, and out of nowhere, a reference to an old and well-known operating system popped up. Our benjamin chimes in, grinning: “MSTwo!”

“MSwhat?” It took a second or two, and then it clicked. She's spanish, you know: “uno, DOS, tres, cuatro,...” And young enough to have never seen MSDOS herself.

Which makes me a relic because I've not only seen it but prepared my master thesis with it. 😑

Upgrade to Windows 10

Cobra — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 16:47:57 GMT

My wife's gaming rig is still running on Windows 7, and it's about time to change that. In principle, an upgrade to Windows 10 requires only the download of the Media Creation Tool from Microsoft on the system to be upgraded. However, to save myself the download of several GB of data with my meager DSL connection at home, I've used this tool in my virtual Windows 7 at the office to prepare a USB stick for installation. It took some time to find an active download link for the USB 3.0 drivers compatible with VirtualBox (Intel 7 Series C216 Chipset Family, which Intel has discontinued), but in the end I had my stick.

After uninstalling the antivirus scanner (Avast), I've plugged in the stick, clicked on setup.exe, and off it went. But after 15% installation progress:

Error: 0x8007025D-0x2000C
The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during APPLY_IMAGE operation.

Just below the error message is a link that can neither be clicked nor copied. Now that's usability! In any case, the suggestions on this page aren't helpful at all, but send the users experiencing this error message on the wrong track. Fortunately, third-party pages such as techjourney and the windows club do much better in this respect, in that they have the most likely reason on top of their list: corrupted installation media. And in fact, when I simply let the Media Creation Tool download the files, the upgrade works flawlessly. Didn't even take 3 h including the download, which was much faster then I had expected.

You see how easy the upgrade is – even for someone who hasn't actively used Windows since 15 years. Don't be one of these pathetic figures that are eternally whining and bawling that they have a god-given right to use Windows XYZ until the end of the time, and are very loudly expressing the opinion that Microsoft must be condemned by international (or at least European) law to keep the OS in question alive. Get a grip on yourself, make an update, and deal with it, for Pete's sake. Or switch to OpenBSD or any other one of these geekish systems. You could also buy a Mac, if you insist. But don't act like a newborn.

For us, Windows 10 itself is not entirely new, since earlier this year, we purchased a Lenovo Miix 630 for accompanying my wife on her trip to Japan. We got this 'Windows on ARM' detachable for €444 complete with a back-lit type cover and a pen, 8 GB of RAM, and LTE, allowing her to access the internet from home without the need to search for places offering public wifi. The Miix turned out to be very versatile and fun to use, and it has an almost unbelievable battery life in excess of 20 h thanks to its Snapdragon 835 processor (a mid-range smartphone SOC). What I also like is the rolling-release concept of Windows 10, which guarantees that the device isn't obsolete after at most three years as it's custom for Android gadgets. It's a pity that this interesting concept is so unpopular. Lenovo has already stopped the production of the Miix, and there aren't any others like it (the Surface Pro X from Microsoft comes at more than three times the price).

What you don't want to use, revisited

Cobra — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 16:58:12 GMT

A decade ago, I advised my readers to stay away from OpenOffice for the preparation of professional presentations, primarily because of the poor support of vector graphics formats at that time. In view of the difficulties we have recently encountered when working with collaborators on the same document with different Office versions, I was now setting great hopes in LibreOffice for the preparation of our next project proposal. First of all, I thought that using platform-independent open source software, it should be straightforward to guarantee that all collaborators are using the same version of the software. Second, the support for SVG has been much improved in recent versions (>6) of LibreOffice, and I believed that we finally should be able to import vector graphics directly from Inkscape into an Office document. Third, the TexMaths extension allows one to use LaTeX for typesetting equations and to insert them as SVG, promising a much improved math rendering at a fraction of the time needed to enter it compared to the native equation editor. Fourth, Mendeley offers a citation plugin for LibreOffice, which I hoped would make the management of the bibliography and inserting citations as simple as with BibTeX in a LaTeX document.

Well, all of these hopes were in vain. What we (I) had chosen for preparing the proposal (the latest LibreOffice, TexMaths extension, and Mendeley plugin) proved to be one of the buggiest software combos of all times.

ad (i): Not the fault of the software, but still kind of sobering: our external collaborator declared that he had never heard about LibreOffice, and that he wouldn't know how to install it. Well, we thought, now only two people have to stay compatible to each other. We installed the same version of LibreOffice (first Still, than Fresh), I on Linux, he on Windows. But the different operating systems probably had little to do with what followed.

ad (ii): I was responsible for all display items in the proposal, and I've used a combination of Mathematica, Python, Gimp, and Inkscape to create the seven figures contained in it. The final SVG, however, was always generated by Inkscape. I've experienced two serious problems with these figures. First, certain line art elements such as arrows were simply not shown in LibreOffice or in PDFs created by it. Second, the figures tended to “disappear”: when trying to move one of them, another would suddenly be invisible. The caption numbering showed that they were still part of the document, and simply inserting them again messed up the numbering. We've managed to find one of these hidden figures in the nowhere between two pages (like being trapped between dimensions 😱), but others stayed mysteriously hidden. We had to go back to the previous version to resolve these issues, and in the end I converted all figures to bitmaps. D'Oh!

ad (iii): I wrote a large part of my text in one session and inserted all symbols and equations using TeXMaths. Worked perfectly, and after saving the document, I went home, quite satisfied with my achievements this day. When I tried to continue the next day, LibreOffice told me the document is corrupted, and was subsequently unable to open it. I finally managed to open it with TextMaker, which didn't complain, but also didn't show any of the equations I had inserted the day before. Well, I saved the document anyway to at least restore the text. Opening the file saved by TextMaker with Writer worked, and even all symbols and equations showed up as SVG graphics, but without the possibility to edit them by TeXMaths.

ad (iv): Since my colleague had previously used the Mendeley plugin for Word, it was him who had the task to insert our various references (initially about 40). That seemed to work very well, although he found the plugin irritatingly slow (40 references take something like a minute to process). However, when he tried to enter additional references a few days later, Mendeley claimed that the previous one were edited manually, displayed a dialogue asking whether we would like to keep this manual edit or disregard it. Regardless the choice, the previous citations were now generated twice. And with any further citation, twice more, so that after adding three more citations, [1] became [1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]. The plugin also took proportionally longer for processing the file, so in the last example, it took about 10 min. Well, we went one version back. But what worked so nicely the day before was now inexplicably broken. It turned out that a simple sync of Mendeley (which is carried out automatically when you start this software) can be sufficient for triggering this behavior. We finally inserted the last references manually, overriding and actually irreversibly damaging the links between the citations and the bibliography.

In the final stages, working on the proposal felt like skating on atomically thin ice (Icen 😎). We always expected the worst, and instead of concentrating on the content, we treated the document like a piece of prehistoric art which could be damaged by anything, including just viewing the document on the screen. That feeling was very distracting. I would have loved to correct my position, really, but LibreOffice in its present state is clearly no alternative to LaTeX for preparing the documents and presentations required in my professional environment. I will check again in another ten years. 😉

In principle, I would have no problem with being solely responsible for the document if I could use LaTeX and would get the contribution from the collaborators simply as plain text. It is them having a problem with that, since they don't know what plain text is. In this context, I increasingly understand the trend to collaborative software: it's not that people really work at the same time, simultaneously, on a document, but it's the fact that people work on it with the guaranteed same software which counts.

The office suites disaster

Cobra — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 10:57:34 GMT

I was recently involved in the preparation of a project proposal, i.e, the attempt to obtain external funding for a certain research project. This particular project is a joint initiative of two academic institutions, and after having agreed that we would like to collaborate, a practical question arose. How should we prepare the documents required for the proposal?

The youngest of us proposed to use Google Docs (“it's so convenient”), but this proposal just received hems and haws from all others. My colleague then remarked, with an apologetic smile, that I would work exclusively with LaTeX. Our benjamin cheerfully chimed in and suggested Authorea. Once again, his proposal was met with limited enthusiasm. I gleefully added CoCalc as another LaTeX-based collaborative cloud service and briefly enjoyed the embarrassed silence that followed. After a few seconds I hastened to add that I, being foreseeably only responsible for a minor part of the proposal, would agree to anything with which the majority would feel comfortable with (which, in hindsight, was entirely besides the point).

In the end, we decided to use a Microsoft Sharepoint server run by our partner institution. I didn't connect to it myself, but was told by my colleague that the comments and tracking features didn't work correctly. And so we ended up with good ol' (cough) Microsoft Word as the least common denominator.

Well, I have LibreOffice (LO) on all of my systems, which should do for a simple document like the one we would create. To be on the safe side, I've ordered a license for Softmaker Office (SMO) which is praised for being largely compatible with MS Office (MSO), and which I planned to test anyway in my function as IT strategy officer (muhaha). Besides, in the office I have Microsoft Word 2007 available in a virtual machine running Windows 7. So what could go wrong?

At the very beginning, our document contained only text with minimal formatting, and was displayed with only insignificant differences on MSO and LO. After a few iterations, comments and the track of changes became longer than the actual text. That's when the problems started.

We were in the middle of an intense discussion when I noticed that, from my view, it just didn't seem to make any sense. My coworkers were discussing item (1) of an enumerated list, but their arguments revolved around an entirely different subject. When the discussion moved to item (2), I suddenly understood the origin of this confusion. LO, apparently triggered by a deletion just prior to the list, had removed the first entry, and my list thus only consisted of items (2)–(7), but LO enumerated them as (1)–(6). Gnarf.

Since my SMO order had not yet been approved (it's no problem to order MSO licences for €50,000, but an unknown product for €49.99 stirs up the entire administration), I decided to open and edit the proposal by MSO 2007. Only to discover that my colleagues, using MSO 2013 and 2016, talked about a paragraph that simply didn't exist in my version of the document. The excessive tracking also broke compatibility to MSO 2007. I wasn't too surprised, but at this point I really looked forward to SMO.

When the license finally arrived, we were busy with creating figures. A simple sketch created by our youngster in Powerpoint 2016 looked more like surreal modern art in LO, and not much better in MSO 2007. But in SMO, it was missing altogether. What the hell?

It turned out that the much acclaimed SMO has serious deficiencies with vector graphics, particularly under Linux. This flaw, together with the missing formula editor, makes SMO basically unusable in a scientific environment. That's a pity, since SMO is responsive and has a flexible and intuitive user interface.

Anyway, with the deadline approaching rapidly, my colleagues started to work on the proposal over the weekend at home. It turned out that none of them had MSO at home, so they all used LO. Now everyone's printed version deviated in one way or the other from the master copy on ownCloud, and we had to carefully compare the content, line by line, in the subsequent discussion.

Miserable pathetic fools! Why on earth didn't we agree at the outset of this endeavour to use LO? We could have agreed even on the same exact version to use. Our work on the proposal would have been easier and much more efficient. And instead of creating figures the hard way with Powerpoint, we could have used a full-scale vector graphics suite such as Inkscape, since recent versions of LO support the svg format. Equations could have been handled with TeXMaths, which allows users to insert any kind of math losslessly in an LO document. Here's a slide composed exclusively of vector graphic elements:

No, I did not suddenly become an enthusiastic user and advocate of LO. On the contrary, I still firmly believe that for the task at hand, LaTeX would have been most appropriate and convenient solution. However, LO would have obviously been a much more rational choice than MSO.

When I said that aloud, my colleagues gave me this 'oh-my-god-now-he's-going-mad' look. Normal people accept LO for personal use, but not for a professional one. Why? Well, they have this deeply internalized believe that what you get is what you pay for. Free software is for amateurs and nerds, but as a professional, one uses professional software! Oh wait ...

The number one reason to use Linux

Cobra — Sun, 20 May 2018 20:01:27 GMT

A reader of my previous post remarked that while he found my reminiscences amusing, he believes them to be factually incorrect. Windows and MacOS, he insists, are not prone to crashes as I've described, but are just as stable as any Linux.

That's more or less true, but only for times more recent than those I've dwelled on, namely, the times prior to the release of MacOS X and Windows XP in 2001 (and yes, I knew the older versions of NT and was impressed by their stability, but I didn't like their price tag!).

But if recent versions of MacOS and Windows do not exhibit any deficiency in terms of stability, the reader asks, is there any other reason to prefer Linux?

One? Well, let's at least briefly discuss some of the aspects that led me to chose Linux instead of Windows or MacOS. GNU/Linux is free software, both as in speech as in beer. Contrary to the free software foundation, I'm pragmatic enough to appreciate the latter point as least as much as the former one. Had I decided to employ commercial software for my work, I would not have been able to equip desktop, notebook, and netbook with the complete set of applications required for my work. As it is, I'm fully equipped to work at both office and home, at a pub, or while travelling, without the need to carry a high-end notebook back and forth between all of these locations. I greatly enjoy this freedom.

But free software is not a phenomenon restricted to Linux. In fact, almost everything I really need for my work on an everyday basis is available for Windows as well. So what's the difference?

The difference is the effort is takes to get everything working. On Windows, software installation hasn't changed since the 1990s. Software is installed from any installation medium deemed to be trustworthy by the user or, more recently, by Microsoft. In the 1990s, freeware was installed from CDs acquired at computer shops, nowadays, from any place in the internet. The user usually 'googles' for the software, opens the first hit without checking if it is the developers' site or some obscure download portal, downloads the installer, and installs it by clicking on various 'next' and 'yes' buttons without paying attention to the browser toolbars and other potentially unwanted utilities installed at the same time. The user repeats this awkward procedure for every software to be installed. And that's just the beginning: for the vast majority of both free and commercial software, the user has to check for updates himself, and if there is an update, he has to go again through the same archaic, error-prone, and time-consuming routine.

That's because the Microsoft updater only updates Windows and software from MIcrosoft (such as Office), but nothing else. This update is scheduled to occur only once per month (at the patch tuesday), but is so slow and heavy on resources that every Windows user dreads this day. No wonder Windows users hate updates – but it never ceases to surprise me that they don't draw the obvious conclusion. In particular since this situation is not a mere inconvenience, but inevitably results in unpatched systems that are easily compromised. With potentially unwanted consequences. 😉

The game-changing feature of Linux compared to its commercial rival(s) is the existence of central software repositories, containing tens of thousands of individual program packages, combined with a powerful built-in package management system. Updating the system updates every single program installed on it. Security updates are not held back but are delivered in time, typically even before you read about the underlying vulnerability in the news—at least when using the big six. And installing the updates is usually a matter of seconds to (at most) minutes and does not require a reboot (with the exception of libc and kernel updates).

But that's not the only advantage of the GNU/Linux software distribution model. For example, one can transform a vanilla Linux installation into a dedicated workstation within minutes, and I find that immensely useful. That's because I need a number of applications for my work, including texlive, libreoffice, gnuplot, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, mpmath, gmpy, sympy, pandas, seaborn, hyperspy, gimp, inkscape, scribus, gwyddion, imagej, vesta, and perhaps a few more. On Arch Linux, I'm able to install all of these packages with a single command that takes me a few seconds to enter. And from that moment on, all of these applications are included in the update process, and I get the most current version available automatically. On Windows, I would not only have to search for these programs on the internet, manually download the installation files, and install all programs individually, but I also would have to update all of this software by myself, without any kind of automatism. That means once again visiting the respective websites, downloading the new installation files, ...

Just the first time installation is the work of one day. Do you really think I want to continue doing that for the rest of my life? As a matter of fact, I don't, just as everybody else. And as a consequence, you'll find plenty of outdated software on your average Windows installation. This situation is arguably the major reason why Windows is the preferred target of malware developers: they can simply rely on the fact that their drones will find a huge number of vulnerable targets.

When I set up my wife's gaming rig, where Windows serves as a game starter, I've decided to install and update the few applications she needs with Ninite, and I'm not unhappy with this poor man's package manager. I've also installed Secunia's Personal Software Inspector to detect outstanding updates. Alas, this very useful tool has been discontinued, and I have to find a replacement. There are several contenders, but as usual under Windows, it is not clear which of them are trustworthy, in the sense that which of them are actually doing the job advertised, and not instead being a vehicle to deliver ads to your desktop. It takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff, time I could have otherwise spent on much more valuable and enjoyable activities. That's Windows, the greatest productivity killer ever invented.

Perhaps I should have a look at Chocolatey, which claims to be a “real” package manager for Windows (for a comparison with Ninite, see here). Now wouldn't that be the perfect tool for Windows, which is marketed since version 10 as a service receiving regular updates that contain new features and other changes? Sure it would, but what does Microsoft do with this chance to establish Windows as a rolling release model? They stick to the patchday and roll out new features in the form of semiannual 'Creator Updates', which turn out to require a full upgrade installation. Home users can't even delay this upgrade.

That's ... well, pathetic. In the end, Windows in 2020 will be no different from Windows in 1994: a pile of duct-taped debris desperately trying to look like a modern operating system.

Donkeyware

Cobra — Sun, 21 Aug 2016 12:05:02 GMT

Our entire IT department is on vacation. All of them, the sysadmins, the netadmins, and the helpdeskers providing first level support. How on earth could we let that happen? Well, it's all just one guy. 😉

During any of his vacations, I am suddenly the most popular person in the institute. I'm happy to help where I can, and the most common “problem” are usually forgotten or mistyped passwords. This time, however, it turned out to be more interesting.

Actually, I was among the first users suffering from this year's problem. I have a virtual machine with a Windows 7 that was last updated in June. I've devoted only one core and 2 GB of RAM to this installation as it's only rarely used and not for much anyway. A few weeks ago, I've noticed that the system was entirely unresponsive, and found that 'svchost.exe' utilized 100% CPU. “Windows”, I thought, and closed the virtual machine.

Last week, several of our users suddenly complained that "their" Windows update doesn' t work any more. I've checked and found the same symptom of svchost running wild. The resource monitor showed that it is actually 'wuauserve.exe' (the Windows update service) consuming all CPU cycles.

It turned out that this problem exists since quite some time, and Microsoft has repeatedly tried to address it by providing new versions of the Windows update client. I was able to solve it in all cases by following the directions provided here. If you find this link helpful, ask yourself why you've spent money on a software produced by the greatest bunglers in this business.

Danaergeschenk

Cobra — Sun, 07 Feb 2016 12:49:36 GMT

(a German idiom)

A son, well-meaning, selects a notebook as a Christmas present for his mother. The lady, a librarian close to retirement, is as happy as helpless when looking for the first time at the start screen of Windows 8.1. Everybody at the party has a suggestion, but after hours of touching and prodding, the initial joy turns to disappointment.

Days later, she worked up the courage to ask me for help. Her desperation was so obvious that I agreed immediately. Only minutes later, I had second thoughts. The last version of Windows that I had physically installed was 2000, and that's 15 years ago. I have never even looked at Windows 8 but, I reflected, I was perhaps not totally unprepared as I had digested an article on Windows 8 in the German computer magazine c't in 2012.

The little I remembered from the article was indeed helpful. There was anyway very little to do, except for configuring e-mail access and a browser with an ad blocker. The system came with a full version of Norton Security, and I explained that we would have to find a solution once the license expired in a year. Oh, and the notebook turned out to have a normal display — no touch screen.

....

Two years later. My client asks me if I could have a look at her notebook. She admits to have used it only sporadically, and not all during the past 18 month. She reports that it "behaved strangely" the last time she has logged in. She doesn't know how to state that more accurately.

Well, booting takes an eternity (4 minutes). Norton complains that the license has expired. I uninstall it and activate defender. Full scan, nothing found. Then, I update Windows. And update. And update.

Two days (!) later. After four reboots, all updates have been installed. Firefox crashes on start. I install the current version and add ublock Origin and Ghostery. When opening heise.de, ads start to populate the page to an extent I've never seen before. It's creepy, like a swarm of big, ugly insects invading a cadaver.

Malwarebytes finds 97 "potentially unwanted programs" (so much for Norton Security). Desinfec't (which I could boot after dealing with the secure boot UEFI specialties) detects another 16 varieties of malware of the advertising sort.

After all these scans, and altogether one week later, the system is (reportedly) clean, and everything works as expected.

....

My client was horrified when I reported my findings, and she asked how that could have happened. I wanted to be frank with her, and thus had no choice than telling her that the origin of this "infection" was the download and installation of an apparently innocuous program called Regclean Pro. Needless to say, she never heard about this program in particular, or about download portals in general. With her (naive) view of the internet thoroughly shattered, she sat there with a forlorn, crestfallen expression on her face, not feeling at home in this world anymore.

I'm usually cynical enough to have no mercy at all with people whose view of the world doesn't match reality. But I felt different this time. Microsoft, with the help of the advertising industry as well as profiteers and criminal organizations around the globe, has created a monster. To keep Windows clean requires knowledge, time, and effort. Definitely too much of all, if you ask me.

MacOS and Linux are the best known alternatives to Windows. The former is essentially as vulnerable to adware (or, as that crap is called euphemistically, "potentially unwanted programs aka PUPs") as Windows. The latter is not. However, a full blown Linux installation seems a bit of an overkill for a user who only wants to explore the part of the WWW devoted to bone china accessories, and for the e-mails resulting from the occasional acquisition.

For a user with this profile, a Chromebook would do admirably. It's affordable, boots fast, is updated automatically, is not affected by PUPs, does not require an anti-virus scanner, nor any other pampering, and has a builtin backup in the cloud. And I don't think privacy and data protection are the most important issue here, particularly when compared to the existing notebook with its login based on a Microsoft account. 😉

Update: I'm not alone.

Goodbye Windows

Cobra — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 11:11:15 GMT

Because of my depressing experiences when trying to connect to our Cisco-based VPN under Linux, I've so far used a virtual Windows XP and the IPSec 'vpnclient' from Cisco. Since the end of Windows XP is nigh, I had to find an alternative.

In the meantime, we have enabled SSL support on our Cisco ASA to allow users running a 64 bit Windows 7 to connect to the VPN using the Cisco 'AnyConnect' SSL client. Of course, acquiring a Windows license just to connect to the VPN was not an option for me. I would either be able using open-source software or not be able to connect at all.

I've quickly found that 'openconnect' is held in high regard in the interwebs, and decided to give it a try on a virtual Debian Jessie:

su -
wajig install openconnect
openconnect -c certificate_bundle.p12 https://gateway.de

Bang, connected, and all services work.

Unbelievable! Finally!

I've found that the direct use of the PKCS#12 certificate bundle works with Debian Jessie, but not with Arch, for which the certificate bundle has to be split into the x509 certificate and the pk8 private key in pem format using openssl. But that's perfectly ok, since I anyway value the convenience of connecting to the VPN with a virtual machine without the necessity to disrupt my standard connection to the internet via QSC.

Word compatible

Cobra — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 16:57:58 GMT

Working in a publicly funded research institute instead of a university has many advantages. The most obvious ones are a decent funding and the lack of any teaching obligations. Disadvantages, however, also exist. In particular, we have to prepare an annual report in which we present the main activities to our advisory board, guests and third-party funding agencies.

For the past 20 years, we have prepared and produced our annual report ourselves using LaTeX. The report grew in volume until reading and correcting all contributions became finally unmanageable. We thus decided last year to focus on our most important results. Furthermore, we outsourced the layout of the report to an external media agency to be able to concentrate on the content. We then supplied the content in the form of text files enriched with LaTeX directives and graphics files in postscript format.

The first report produced in this way was indeed quite presentable and left a favorable impression on most people. This year, however, we were told that the media agency "had severe difficulties with converting LaTeX", and were "urged to produce conventional word-compatible files."

"Conventional word-compatible files". There's a whole world of ignorance in this short statement. Evidently, the agency employs people with a good sense for color and arrangement, but no idea about technical issues.

Because "converting LaTeX" is actually straightforward:

pandoc -s source.tex -o result.docx

transforms a standard LaTeX file to OOXML.

Complicated equations may not be converted successfully in this way. In this case, it is better to export to OpenDocument:

pandoc -s source.tex -o result.odt

Now just mark those equations not converted and click on the π-icon of the LibreOffice extension TexMaths. Select svg as format. Then save as docx.

Existing vector graphics is best converted to bitmaps

pdftocairo -png -r 1200 image.pdf image.png

and then imported into the "word-compatible file".

There are no "severe difficulties". That's hipster nonsense.

Independence day

Cobra — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 17:36:32 GMT

The NSA affair continues to make the headlines even three month after the initial report of the report of Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian. Slowly, very slowly, the message of these headlines begins to creep into the consciousness of normal people.

With the result that I'm being asked by an increasing number of people for advice. They always want to know what I'd “recommend”. Recommend with respect to what? As it turns out, most people want to be safe from the spying eyes of the services without changing any of their habits (like skyping and online banking with their trusted Windows XP). They have the most amusing ideas how to accomplish that.

One guy believed he would be safe if he would use his Windows as virtual machine. I tried to discuss this approach, but he insisted, and I thus simply informed him that it is indeed possible to convert a physical Windows installation to a virtual machine. I also told him, as requested, that both VMPlayer and VirtualBox provide convenient point-and-click interfaces with which he can manage his virtual machines. In the course of one afternoon, he converted his existing installation of Windows 7, formatted the disk, installed four different Linux distributions in a row, got VirtualBox running on the fourth, was ignorant about the guest add-ons and was thus shocked to see his Windows running at 1024x768, formatted the hard disk once more and installed Windows again. D'oh! 😄

Others keep asking me about Truecrypt. It's true, everybody seems to recommend Truecrypt right now, even Fefe. I've never used Truecrypt, and I never will. First of all, Truecrypt is not available in the repositories of any of the distributions I'm using (Archlinux, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian) since it is not free. Second, the authors of Truecrypt are unknown. I don't see any reason why I should prefer Truecrypt over the better alternatives existing for Linux.

Oh well, there's the culprit. If you want disk encryption for Windows, and are looking for alternatives for BitLocker, Truecrypt appears to be truly attractive.

But seriously: how can anybody aware of the facts still consider using Windows, except as a game starter?

In July, the Guardian has reported that "Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption [...]." End of July, Heise reported that Microsoft can install root certificates without user intervention by a mechanism called "Automatic Root Certificates Update". In August, the Zeit reported about "Trusted Computing" and the fact that from 2015, a computer with Windows 8 is principally controlled by Microsoft (also read the first paragraph in italics). And in September, Bruce Schneier argues that one should doubt the integrity of commercial, closed-source software in general, and proprietary encryption programs in particular (right, it's a Captain Obvious article).

And at the end of Schneier's article, he says: "And I'm still primarily on Windows, unfortunately." So one can't blame the people, I guess.

Then there are those coming to me since they want to convert to Linux. There's one guy who's using Windows XP, and he asked me if there's a free clone. I could have told him about ReactOS, but I just shook my head. He then asked if there's at least “a Linux without command line”. Literally!

Others just ask me what I'm using. When I tell them that I'm using several different distributions, they are confused. “Why? And which one can you recommend?”

I principally try not to recommend anything. Not because I'm an obnoxious arrogant prick, but because I've learned that my likes and dislikes are incompatible with those of most other people. To be fair, I advice them against Ubuntu, but they install it anyway. Most of them try a few weeks and are then back to Windows, with the sole exception of this little Chinese guy who misunderstood my advice and now calls me the Abanda master. He also calls my Fedora Abanda, the Debian on the workstation Abanda, the OpenSUSE on the servers Abanda, and is always so happy with his little Abanda (aka Ubuntu) world that I never had the courage to disillusion him.

Of all the people talking to me, I had only once the impression that I'm talking to a person who seriously considers a change. “It's not only this NSA business, but even more the dependent position you are in as a Windows user. You always got to accept what MS throws at you, even if you greatly dislike it.”

I gave that person one simple advice, and I repeat it here: If you seriously consider to switch, disregard your previous computer experience, and learn Linux from the grounds up. Install Crunchbang on a virtual machine and work your way through The Linux command line. It will take lots of time (months), but after that, you'll never need Microsoft or Apple again.

It will be your independence day.