DataCannibal's Journal: Why I've gone back to Windows on my laptop

I recently removed Linux from my laptop and went back to windows for the umpteenth time. This was for one simple reason - time. JWZ once said that open source is only free if your time costs nothing. Well my time doesn't cost anything in hard cash terms but it has value to me. When I'm not working I want to spend time with my family, making music, drinking wine and eating with friends, sitting around at our book group discussing the life, the universe and everything and occasionally the book we have all been reading. I want to sleep out in the hills and see the sunrise over the mist in the valley below. I want to walk along the empty beaches that we have in Northumbria. I want to sit and read books with my children. I want to sit on a boat and visit the Farne Islands.

I don't want to fuck about any more trying to get suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk working on my laptop. There's just too much of patching a kernel; editing scripts; press the sleep button; poke a pointy thing in the reset hole; start again ;aargh!.

XP just works with this and with the things that I have a laptop for, web browsing and reading email on the sofa the Open Source software that I can install on windows is enough. I still have Linux on my desktop and love it to bits, but on my laptop it just costs too much