Yesterday morning, after a good couple of weeks with Ubuntu, I installed the Windows 7 RC. The main reasons were a lack of proper darkroom software (you can’t touch Adobe Lightroom 2, and although BlueMarine is supposed to be very close, it wouldn’t run for me or most people I checked with and nobody could say why) and the pain in the ass of installing new video drivers. But no matter.

Windows 7 is doing ok so far. As everyone has said, it’s like running Vista except way less annoying. I’m still getting it up and running, but so far so good. I’m particularly psyched that it installed the correct damn drivers for my bigass joystick. Normally it’d just assign the axes and buttons and that’s it, but it actually picked up and installed the drivers to handle the LED and MFD brightness, the minidisplay works, etc. Snazzy. Tragicially it didn’t do that for my mouse and keyboard’s special functions, but it’s not difficult to get those installed. Gonna have to install Flight Simulator and fire it up… that didn’t work in Linux.

At any rate, that’s the longest I’ve run with linux. Usually it only makes it a few days. The sudden lack of multiple desktops controlled by my mouse’s flipwheel is quite jarring now.