Back when I got my first PC at 2004, there were practically no use of it for my school educations and lack of internet meant I couldn’t do something more than playing games, listening to songs, watching movies and creating documents/spreadsheets for dad and occasionally printing them. Being immensely attracted to PCs at that time, I spent a lot of time customizing Windows at first. Subsequently, I had my first hands-on with Linux and at some point of 2005/06, switched to Linux as my primary OS. But the important point here is that switching to Linux wasn’t catalyzed by open source philosophy, rather by my own inquisitiveness of trying new things out. Along came Windows Vista, in 2007, and I switched back to it. Well, people can still raise their eyebrows and criticize Vista and my ass for changing to it but I don’t give a damn. It worked for me for one and half years, and again it was time for swapping OS. January 2009 gave us Windows 7 Beta, officially (not talking about guys who got it a month ago via torrent sites) and it started my tryst with Windows 7 which is still going strong. Also in the meantime I tinkered with OS X on my PC, namely Hackintosh.

People might wonder why I’m giving details of my computer usage? There are a lot of people using numerous kinds of operating systems around the world, so what’s the big deal? Actually, the post is about productivity and customizability and as I understood, it has a lot to do with my usage patterns. At this moment being a student of theoretical physics, I need to do a lot of mathematics and Mathematica is great piece of code to help me in this regard. Apart from that I do read a lot of PDF books, compose some articles, make some presentations for university, and seldom play some games. So the question is what can be a reasonable OS for my usage negating time wastage? A lot of software I use have cross OS compatibility, so operating system isn’t a problem, right? Well, it’s wrong. Even after being enrolled in University, I used all the major OS available in market for my productivity purposes and found out that for some reasons Windows and Mac OS X stand out among the crowd. I can see the Linux evangelists are already pissed off and almost reached their mouse/keyboard to close the tab but at least let me explain myself. The reason I’m going to give isn’t a brilliant invention of my super genius mind, rather a plain old one. It’s that I need a stable, ready to work machine just after the installation of operating system. Too bad, except Ubuntu and its spin-offs, nothing in the Linux category offers that to me. The customizability is quite great, I must say and I enjoyed my time with that before. Windows/OS X comes nowhere near what you can do with Linux in terms of customizing your OS to suit your needs. But there’s a catch as customizability can be unending. And for a person like me who can’t even choose a right theme for his website, the feature can be quite time consuming. What I felt after using OS X Snow Leopard for two weeks is that it’s undeniably the fastest and less troublesome way to be productive. Actually, I finished writing articles a lot faster in OS X than in Windows where even to search for meaning of a word, I need to browse. I know I can install dictionaries in Windows/Linux but still that’s not my point. When I’m doing things seriously, I need other particulars ready to go, just after the start. And in that case, even though Linux is a really good operating system, it’ll remain a hobby for me.