There are no words vile enough to express the hatred I have for Microsoft Windows. I often read posts/blogs/articles where people say, “I tried Linux, but went back to Windows so I could get some work done”, but I can’t for the life of me understand how the fuck they get anything done with that POS.

There is an Ice Bowl on the 20th of this month, and when Dan gave P some flyers yesterday, I noticed that although the St. Louis club had a nice logo and Gateway had one on there, too, our little club’s name was just in a plain font. Since it’s a new club, and I happen to know that it’s just a bunch of guys (AFAIK, no women unless I count as club photographer) who happen to love the game, I decided that I’d make a logo and offer it to Jeff/Dan for the club. I had in mind a simple design that would use the elliptical path of a disc in flight as the crosspiece for the letter “F”, and the disc itself as a stylised dot for the “i”. Something that would scale up or down nicely, and would look good whether in the three colours I’d planned to use (red, blue, black), or in one single colour.

I booted into ExPee (shuddered at the boring, 90s-look, lonely little single desktop), fired up Photoshop and created my document. A quick browse of the listed fonts revealed nothing that had quite the right look, so off I went to DaFont to find a free one. I found a few that I thought might work, saved the files and thought I’d be done in no time flat–just copy them to the Fonts directory, restart Photoshop and good to go, right? WRONG!

I fired up Windows Explorer and tried to browse to Windows\Fonts. Explorer crashed. Fuck. Okay, fine. I’ll try again. Crash. Jesus H. Christ. That’s okay; I’m a Linux user and when a GUI fails to behave itself, I know just what to do. Fire up a command line and start typing. Start > Run > cmd and I should be good to go. My DOS never was all that good, and I’m pretty rusty, but after the first time it told me that “ls” is not a command, I started to remember. Win cmd doesn’t support copy and paste (archaic), but even that was okay because goddammit, I was getting the best two of those fonts into Windows, whatever it took.

I typed my happy little DOS-y commands in and it told me that the files had been copied successfully. Again, I fired up Photoshop, created a new document, and looked in the dropdown for my newly installed fonts. Nope, not there. Fuck. I was a Windows user long enough to recall that it wants a reboot any time you do something more complicated than move the fucking mouse, so FINE–if that’s what it wants, that’s what it’ll get.

I rebooted, waited two hundred years for the desktop to load so I could use it, and yes, I do have 2 GB of RAM (people who complain about Linux boot times seem to forget that you can’t use a Win desktop until your antivirus and software firewall load). Again, I fired up Photoshop, created my new document and looked for my fonts. Not there. Well, fuck-a-duck. Okay, let’s look in Explorer. No, wait–let’s try command line first, just in case. “cd C:\Windows\Fonts”, “dir”…yup, there are my freshly installed fonts, right where they belong. Shouldn’t be any problem. Let’s check Explorer, too…crash.

I finally gave up. I don’t have too many more than the default fonts that install with Windows (just a few installed by Adobe), so it’s not like it’s trying to read a directory with a thousand fucking entries or something. I don’t know why it’s crashing, but I could browse other directories in C:\Windows, just not Fonts. I don’t even care why it’s crashing anymore, but I’m hoping that by some magical process, that infinitely stupid, sluggish monolith of an OS is going to find the fonts even though they weren’t (ZOMG!!!11one) dragged and dropped in the GUI, and let me create my logo. I’d do it in GIMP, but I’ve got almost eight years’ experience in Photoshop, and I know my way around it pretty well. I can do simple things with GIMP, but it’s going to take me forever because I’ll have to figure out what I’m doing as I go along. Christ.

Why did I switch from Windows to Linux? Well, one reason is that I like simple tasks to be simple, and I like having some control over MY OWN FUCKING COMPUTER. I also like to GET SOME WORK DONE! Arrrrggghhh!

P.S. I hate you, too, Adobe. Even people who use free operating systems would be willing to pay for Photoshop if you’d port the fucking thing.