Yep, you read that right. I’m once more enslaved to the Beast of Redmond. Why? Because Linux just can’t do some of the things I want to do with my laptop right now. Or rather, it can probably do them but I’m unwilling to invest the hundreds of hours required to figure out how to do them.

What things, you ask? Well since you asked, I’ll tell you.

1) WPA-PSK encryption for one. I’ve read it can be done and my hardware supports it both in Windows and Linux, but nobody can tell me how to do it and I can’t figure it out. It seems unreal to me that at this late date this is not a dead solid simple process supported in both Gnome and KDE. But it is not.

2) Bullet proof synchronization with my Palm. I haven’t given Gnome a try, but the KDE conduits are terrible and are not helped by all the changes that have been going on in Linux land regarding how usb devices are recognized. Its a hit or miss thing.

3) Sleep and hibernate. Dudes, come on. Hibernate sort of works but takes so long to save and restore that I may as well turn the computer off. Saying that sleep is problematic is an understatement. It works, sort of, about 50% of the time. Now there will be people who say that these things can be configured to work. The point is that I shouldn’t have to do anything to configure this, it should just work.

1 and 3 are part of laptop life. I have not used a desktop in 4 years and I’m not going to start now. Most people I know are not using desktops either and its time Linux had better laptop support.

But don’t think that just because I’m back to Windows I’m happy about it. I am actively watching and anxiously waiting for an opportunity to move back to Linux and I’ll post my Windows gripes. Tomorrow.