[Coco] For the love of an OS. (Steve Bjork)

[Andrew]

Steve,

I myself would really like to try and run the new IDE from Roger 
(Phoenix), but if it is "Windows only" as the old one was, then I guess 
I won't.

I am currently running Ubuntu 10.04 - and since Phoenix is .NET based, 
it may work OK under Linux with Mono; I'd like to try it out, but I am 
hesitant to spend the money on something that I may not be able to use.

Roger - is there any kind of a system test suite - or is there a demo 
version? Maybe I should look on your website, first...

Anyhow - there is only one condition in which I would run a new copy of 
Windows on a box again:

When Microsoft apologizes to the community - both to the software and 
computer community in general (for their former and any current business 
practices - crushing businesses like Stack and Netscape), and to the 
open-source crowd (including Linux) as well (SCO being propped up by 
them during the crazy lawsuits, and a number of other things thrown at 
the community back in the mid-to-late 1990s - all of which were 
baseless, and served nothing more than to make people doubt Linux on the 
desktop - which is still harming us).

That's all I ask for - I'll gladly go out and buy another copy of 
Windows, and maybe even Visual Studio (though that piece of software is 
still a tough pill to swallow - just from the standpoint of cost).

I'm not holding my breath, though.

So - for the time being, I get to "miss out" on all the supposedly great 
Windows software, including certain items from the CoCo community 
(Rainbow IDE, vcc). But I still have a lot of fun, and I enjoy the 
software that I have under *nix - which is really more than I'll ever 
need or use anyhow.

Until then - the only Microsoft products I'll use will either be 
peripheral (hardware - I've been looking for a "broken" Kinect for 
robotics vision experiments), on the CoCo (can't get around DECB, I 
guess - but I like DECB), or old versions of Windows that I have laying 
around (been thinking about building a couple of old DOS/Win 3.1/95/98 
boxes for old games and/or other software like graphic demos and such - 
and those won't be on the network, likely).

Just my 2 cents;

-- Andrew L. Ayers, Glendale, Arizona