Submitted by Everyone’s been talking for what feels like an eternity about Vista being a major blunder, and everyone has their theories as to why it happened. So why would John C. Dvorak be any different? He’s got 11 reasons why the OS was destined to flop.I guess I fall into the category of “the first group,” as labeled by Dvorak. I am a happy Windows Vista user. I’d be curious to know how OSNews readers would categorize themselves. But before anyone excoriates me for not taking up the anti-Vista banner, let me describe my Vista experience, which isn’t exactly typical:
First, I have a brother who works for Intel. When he came to visit me for Thanksgiving he brought me a new Quad-core processor and high-end Intel motherboard. I used it to build up a system from scratch. Thanks to Newegg and Clubit.com and my high tolerance for filing out rebate forms, the rest of the components I needed to build my system only cost me about $300, half of that being a 750 GB hard drive. My old computer? I gave it to my kids, and it’s still running XP. Needless to say, any slowdown in performance from Vista is unnoticeable since my new computer is about 11 times faster than my old one. This phenomenon also applies to most people whose first exposure to Vista is on a new computer. Their new machine is faster, and they don’t have a reference point to know how XP would run on the same machine.
Thanks to the free OEM version of Vista I got, I didn’t have to navigate Microsoft’s mind-blowingly confusing Vista merchandizing, nor did I have to pay an outrageous licensing fee. The retail cost of Vista Ultimate would have been more than my computer cost me. Despite being quite the OS insider, I had to go look up what the differences between Vista versions are. And when I went to this page all I saw was confusing and useless marketing fluff.
The comparison table is more helpful, showing me that Basic doesn’t have Aero or anything else, that Business doesn’t have Media Center, and that Home doesn’t have backup or remote access. Only Ultimate has drive encryption. Looking at the chart makes me certain that Microsoft decided beforehand on the prices and the market segments that could bear those prices, and rearranged the features, or commissioned new features, trying to make each version as crippled as they thought they could get away with to maximize revenue. They way it looks to me, every optional Windows feature looks like it would be very valuable to some people, but very few will be interested in them all. By sprinkling them around in the various versions, they hope to make just about everyone pay more money for the few special features they need, while making them pay for bundled features they don’t care about. Kind of like your cable TV bill.
The worst part of the Vista segmentation is that consumers have to decide ahead of time what new things they’re going to do with their computer. They have to know whether remote access or drive encryption will be useful for them, or pay up just in case. When people have to decide to pay for a fancy new feature before they have a chance to see whether it’s actually useful for them, you have a bad situation: people who don’t pay have regret that they never got to try those features out, and some people who do pay will regret it when that feature turns out to not work well or they just don’t use it.
As for Vista being too big, 750 GB is a pretty big drive, and since mine’s a traditional desktop, I didn’t have to deal with battery life issues. I also didn’t have any problems with drivers, since I made my Vista move months after the launch and was using all-new components. Needless to say, my computer didn’t have a dishonest Vista capable sticker on it. All in all, most of Dvorak’s complaints didn’t apply to my situation.
But perhaps my greatest reason for not having a problem with Vista is that I really only use this computer for browsing the web and working on the occasional document. My primary computer is a Mac laptop, and that’s where I do my “real work.” This Vista machine is also a media server, and I use TVersity (not Media Center) to stream and transcode video to my TV through a DirecTV HR20 HD DVR and music to various devices through iTunes. Vista has a pleasing interface and works perfectly well on my outrageously-fast-for-what-I-use-it-for hardware. Probably the only thing I don’t like about Vista as compared to XP is all the nagging about security. One of these days I’ll have to take some time to find out how to turn it off.
I can see that many people who eagerly anticipated Vista’s release have been let down, because their machines don’t run Vista well, and they had to navigate the merchandising minefield and pay for an upgrade that gave them little benefit. How about you, OSNews reader? Which category are you in, and why?
I have tried Vista just after it was released with pirated copy of Ultimate. It was very slow to install and work, even with all the drivers. I gave up fast – my Athlon64 3500+ with 1GB of RAM seemed to be to slow and I was quite content with all the modern features provided by Ubuntu.
I have tried installing Vista yesterday again (this time on Athlon64 X2 5000+ @3GHz with 2GB of RAM, reasonably powerful computer IMHO) as I support my relatives and friends computers often and some of them are moving to Vista since SP1 was released.
“Tried” is a key word here. I have prepared empty NTFS/HPFS active primary partition on my hard drive for Vista but it kept saying that it couldn’t find a partition that could be used for install, I have recreated it and formatted from Vista partitioning utility but it didn’t help. I figured that it might not like other operating systems sitting there given the previous Microsoft OS record.
So I’ve got my old empty ATA HDD from my “ancient hardware” and useless wires drawer
This time it went little further but crapped out just few seconds later with error saying that it couldn’t find vaild system volume. On a drive that it just formatted and had all for itself.
I gave up on this as Google didn’t bring much useful help. I’ve installed XP SP2 and “upgraded” it to Vista – it worked although took quite some time.
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Now for the Vista. What a mess it is. Core desktop OS utilities are IMO terrible. Windows Explorer tries hard to bring some useful features from Finder/Nautilus and I for one find them useful (favourite places sidebar, breadcrumb address bar). Other than that it’s interface is too busy and many “features” are purely for cosmetics and not usability, often having the opposite effect on both sides.
Control Panel is even worse, there are recursive links everywhere and it lacks any impression of being sanely structured. Thank $deity for classic view but they have managed to bork it a little too.
Aero – very good looking, maybe they went over the top with the glass effect but overall it’s elegant. They should have shortened the animation time though because little delays everywhere are very distracting.
UAC – I have disabled it as soon as I’ve found those settings in Control Panel (by accident).
Sidebar – useless waste of space and resources, why is it enabled by default?
I’m still trying to use Vista and I’ll probably leave it on a small partition because I have to know how to use it, but it’s not a very pleasant experience. There are many new useful features (and insanely good looking Minesweeper
) but problems I have brought in this comment are mostly showstoppers for me.
2007/2008 is certainly not a year of Windows desktop.
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So, I’ll add some points to the Mr. Dvorak list
12. Bad design decisions.
13. Too hard to use / broken.
The few times I’ve used Vista — mostly when setting up a friend’s new computer with AV/anti-malware programs — it’s been a UI nightmare for me. It seems almost as if they changed the most user-friendly aspects of XP and left in the crap. All the added “bling” from Aero and the new window decorations succeed in making it look even less professional than the Luna theme in XP.
Aesthetics aside, I’ve noticed a trend among name-brand PCs with Vista preinstalled. The cheaper HP and Dell systems which are barely a bump up from last year’s XP machines are horribly slow under even Vista Basic, and the midrange systems that have all new technology still lag a bit under Vista Premium. An example: A friend bought an HP system with a dual core processor, 2GB of RAM, a fast SATA drive, a midrange nVidia 8xxx series video card and a 1GHz system bus. It absolutely crawled under Vista Premium even after removing all the bloatware installed by the manufacturer. It boggles the mind that my three year old eMac is snappier and more responsive than that new PC. Even when I had Ubuntu and XP on a 2005-era Compaq laptop I had better responsiveness than this new system.
I don’t think I could ever invest in such a backwards OS and not feel incredibly stupid for doing so.
I remember trying out the new Windows Server 2008. I couldn’t get it accept my NTFS partition until I formatted the other one where I had FreeBSD installed on.
What I’ve read it seems the blame is on both sides. Manufacturers trusted too much on Microsoft failing to deliver once again, but afterwards they found out Microsoft just failed at providing sane APIs which meant they were all screwed up. Creative had to invent this bubble gum fix called Alchemy (the name tells it all, I believe) and nVidia is still in trouble, I hear.
“They should have shortened the animation time though because little delays everywhere are very distracting. ”
No kidding. Those delays happen even with aero shut off though. It’s just stupid the delays Vista has. It’s as if the OS is deciding it should comply. “Hmm should I open that folder? hmmmm… open…. take sweet time loading”
Whereas in XP and Ubuntu click – bam – “what do you want me to do next sir?”
I have a dual-boot machine setup with Vista Business and Ubuntu Hardy Heron. My main issues with Vista:
1. The horrible file copy/unzipping bug. Like many, I was bit with this bug. It took 15 minutes to unzip a 2MB zip file. Say what?? Same with copying a file – EVEN ON THE SAME PARTITION! I thought this was a very strange bug in a released OS.
2. IP6 – also like many, I had the IP6 bug. Basically, if IP6 is enabled on the network interface (which it was by default), then networking would eventually die. Even rebooting did not help. Fortunately, I knew what to do and disabled IP6.
3. The sidebar is pretty, but it tends to crash frequently.
4. Many applications would no longer run. An important one for me was PHP. I use the Komodo IDE for PHP development. Every few seconds a dialog would popup telling me PHP had died. I never solved this one. Fortunately, I just do PHP development with Komodo under Ubuntu.
5. Many of my programs warned me about installing them in “c:\Program Files\”. I guess Vista “protects” this directory more than others. Therefore, I have many programs installed in “c:\MyProgramName” instead. It reminds me of the old Dos/Win3.1 days.
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Well, the good news is mostly I was booting into Vista just to play games. All of my development could either be done natively with PHP or Java under Linux. For my .NET development, I just use Parallels with an XP image. Finally, I have Steam working (sound, 3D, and microphone) under Crossover Games. I haven’t booted into Vista for over a month. If I can go a few more months without booting into Vista, I’ll give it the boot and reclaim the space.
For me, the biggest mistake Microsoft ever made was combining Dos and Windows in Win95. When Windows was just a shell, but the “real” work could be done from Dos, things were better for me. It was more like a real operating system. Think of all the servers over all the years that have been running a desktop. What a waste! I like the UNIX model of the core of the OS being display neutral. I use GUI’s in Linux, but I also terminal into my boxes. It’s nice to be missing nothing of the power of the OS when I access it that way. Modularity, baby! Maybe Windows 7 will rediscover this principle.
[edit] – spelling
Edited 2008-04-23 18:19 UTC
I believe MS have already discovered this. I had the pleasure of installing windows 2008 the other day. There you can actually select not to install a GUI at all. Combine this with PowerShell, and you’re suddenly well on your way to having a real operating system.
I’m a linux guy, and the “pleasure of installing” part was ironic, but still I think MS is moving in the right direction wit this.
I previously installed Vista on an AMD Ahtlon64, 3000+ with a gig of RAM and a POS 5200 Geforce card. I nuked it and put XP back on within a week. It just performed like crap.
I bought an IBM Thinkpad T60 and installed Vista Ultimate on it, updated the firmware and drivers from Lenovo and have had no issues at all. It runs very fast (machine is a dual core 2Ghz, 2 gigs of RAM with an X1400 ATI vid card). I use it daily and have no complaints. I’m very happy with Vista on this machine.
My older hardware? not sure I’d touch it. On newer hardware with proper driver support it seems very stable and performs quite well in my experience.
I’m willing to believe that my experience is possibly not the norm. lol.
“But perhaps my greatest reason for not having a problem with Vista is that I really only use this computer for browsing the web and working on the occasional document.”
So, all of this hardware, and software and expense, and you could have done the same thing with an EeePC (if you like little things) or an Everex gOS cheap machine, or even a Fit-PC if you want low power consumption.
I guess I could rive myself to work in a tank, but the ride would be terrible, it would be slow, and it would use a large amount of fuel. Maybe I wouldn’t care if I only lived 3 blocks from work, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.
Maybe when hardware catches up, Vista won’t be bad, but maybe it is WinME all over again, and we just need to wait for the next release.
I have been using vista on my home computer for a year now and have no huge complaints. The primary use for that computer is playing games, multimedia in general and a little hobby 3d graphics work. Hw: C2D@3ghz, 4gb, 8800gt, hdds in raid0.
From my experience, as long as you have the hardware to run it, Vista works very well… and looks nice too
I would not recommend trying it on anything with less than 2GB of ram and integrated/old video card though.
On my turion64/1gb ram/gf7300 laptop I use for work it’s frustrating and unusable (mostly because of the ram) – so yeah, I agree that “Vista Capable” thing is bulls*it (my laptop had that sticker too)
You do seem to be playing the long odds ponies here.
HDD’s in Raid0?
Why? You are just asking for trouble. One disk goes bad and you are totally dead in the water. Why not Raid 1?
Oh, you are using Vista! Never mind…
Why not? It gives a VERY nice performance increase and it’s not a server – it’s an entertainment machine.
Besides, all my important documents from those HDDs are backed up daily at 3:00 on a separate drive.
Raid1 on that computer would make no sense. But yeah, what the hell do I know – I’m using Vista, right?
Edited 2008-04-24 07:22 UTC
I don’t get all the problems with Vista, I agree to begin with there were driver issues, but that happens with every release of a new OS, it takes about a year for things to settle down.
I’ve been using Vista on all 4 of my home machines since release, and have gone thru the driver headaches, and have kept updating, and am now using SP1 across the board. It’s all working great – it looks sleak, it’s reliable, it’s smooth and seems fast enough to me given it’s a modern OS so should really demand modern hardware. There’s nothing wrong with that.
After trying some laptops in the IT department I run at work, we’ve decided it’s stable enough and good enough to now try to migrate to this on all our work computers – we waited till SP1 like most companies, and have found it works a lot better on a domain environment (folder redirection in group policy, wifi access to the domain being 2 main examples).
There are tonnes of little tweaks in it as well not just the modern look and feel, but the search is great, the tagging of photo’s is amazing, the re-arrangement of the users folders is a godsend! Along with that it’s got proper built in support for far more modern hardware.
There are some annoyances being a network admin I do get annoyed with the bloated network interface, but i can see how home users would prefer it.
I think the problem with Vista, is not so much Vista, but more the publics view of it:
1. XP is good, so for most people why bother? Not everyone is like me and wants the best of everything, but then I am an OS enthusiast, I love playing with operating systems.
2. Most people can’t be bothered to upgrade or can’t afford modern hardware, so expect moving on to vista to work on their old load of crap properly – it wont! It’s like trying to put a Ferrari body on a Ford Escort and expect it to go at 180mph!
3. The changes in Vista have annoyed people who have gotten used to a certain way of doing things – like my network example earlier, it took me months, and as another example I still look for Add/remove programs in control panel… but you get used to it if you stick to it – it’s about breaking old habbits.
4. UAC has probably annoyed people a lot too – but that was the point – UAC is great!! It’s finally breaking that perception that everything should just run with admin rights… linux users should be happy with that, it’s a good thing, software should be written properly, and users shouldn’t be an administrator all the time (never in a corporate environment).
5. Old hardware isn’t working properly – well big deal, it’s OLD… why should they support old hardware? it’s not cost effective to support some joe bloggs old scanner just for him – and the company who made it either no longer exist or no longer support it either – basically it’s not Vista’s fault, bug the manufactuer, and don’t blame them for not wanting to – there’s no money in it! Try linux – it’s so far behind the times that it seems great at old shit.
I’m sure there’s other reasons, and I’m sure there are genuine problems – but I would bet that 95% of it is down to the reasons above.
Edited 2008-04-23 18:50 UTC
What a load of bollocks that statement was. Admittedly Linux can be 6 months behind in some hardware support (usually new Intel chipsets and some new wireless cards) in general it is generally able to support very modern hardware these days (especially with Nvidia and Ati providing Linux drivers for their newer devices). Linux ‘seems great at old and new shit’ because it is designed well and is (slowly) starting to get the vendor support it needs.
For me, I think the hardware support on Linux is pretty damn impressive, an as for the quality of the distribution – you won’t hear a complaint from me; today they’re leaps and bounds ahead of anything Microsoft can put out.
With that being said, people don’t run operating systems, they run applications. That is what is sorely missing from Linux (and *NIX in general) – mainstream applications from big name vendors. Photoshop Elements for example, an Office suite which doesn’t take aeons to load (ok, and exaggeration, but OpenOffice.org is hardly setting the world alight in terms of ‘teh snappy’).
With that being said, my expectations are probably higher than most peoples; having seen, however, my mother and father use Linux quite comfortably without any need of intervention by me (as technical support) on a regular basis, I’d say that Linux is more than ready for the desktop.
The key is marketing, and I think the best form of that is kiosks setup around the world (yes, I know, I think big) in malls and allow end users to come up and use the computers for themselves – “this is Linux”; just like Apple did in New Zealand and Australia, where they have no go from relative obscurity to something as a ‘must have item’. If people just get to see Linux, ask the questions, I think they would be more inclined to choosing Linux (or what have you) over Windows. The problem is that the current crop of OEM’s are so dependently suckling on Microsoft’s tit – that it is Microsoft who is actually undermining their model (pushing prices down to unsustainable levels (low margins)) and that given the mercy they are at when it comes to shoddy third party drivers, it makes the whole experience with their hardware more uncomfortable and painful than it needs to be.
Edited 2008-04-23 22:25 UTC
Bingo — I’ve preached this for years, and am pleased to see that you are bringing this up repeatedly.
For my work, I need to manipulate 14-bit images in a color-calibrated work flow. This is really hard on OSS (work flow color calibration in particular is terrible), but PS with various other tools does it well. Having CMYK available would help a lot, too. I also need to manipulate PDF files — adding and deleting pages, removing document elements like graphs, recovering data points from internal graphs, and adding miscellaneous text elements. Acrobat does this fine. OSS?? I submit grant applications through a program that runs only on Windows and OS X. Some have gotten it to work under Wine, but seemingly never for very long.
I could go on (retrieving chemical and biological structures from the standard databases??), and in spite of these shortcoming, I still use FreeBSD for most of my routine work. For the heavy lifting, though, there is no way to replace Windows (or the Mac) for what I do.
Many other people are in the same boat, though of course the particulars differ from case to case.
I tend to bring this up on a regular basis, the problem is that every time I do bring it up, I find my post dies the death of 100 moderators with a chip on their shoulder. The problem is that there are a large number of people here who think “because I can use it, everyone else can” or “because it suites my needs, everyone else’s needs are addressed”. These are the same people who spread the belief that if you use the excuse of “my application isn’t available” – you just hate Linux out of spite, because deep down you could move to Linux, but it would too inconvenient.
In fact, it actually mirrors a lot of what Muslim fundamentalist claim about the kafir – the kafir know the truth, but it would be too inconvenient to become a Muslims, so they choose to hate Islam. Its the same sort of logic I see some Linux (and open source people too) use to justify their stance.
Anyway, back on topic, like I said, they have this view of, “because it does the job for me, its suitable for all” – I’m sure you’ve seen people who have attempted to compare GIMP with Photoshop, or use *really* specialised examples to make a generalised announcement that because a specialised case could use GIMP, its therefore applicable to all.
True. Of course you’ll hear Linux users come out and claim you’re a niche. Well, every end user has at least one piece of niche software that is either unavailable on Linux or just plain terrible to use. Case in point, I want an office suite, OpenOffice.org is just plain awful, the alternative is KOffice, which I like, but lacks features. What am I going to do? I’ll wait.
For me, I don’t think Linux (or even *NIX desktop) will be the tidal wave which many advocates on here try to make out it will be. People will gradually move – and for me, I might end up moving back to the PC land in a couple of years time once OpenSolaris becomes mature. I’m using Mac OS X not because I think it is great, but because the alternatives are just so bad. When I mean Mac OS X isn’t great, take a look at the laundry list of issues which plague Mac OS X 10.5 which never existed in 10.4 – or the fact that Office 2008 has been stripped, castrated and incredibly slow (believe me, with the latest update, Office 2008 is as slow as golden syrup going down a hill).
Sure I have. GIMP is fine for what it does, and I use it a lot. It has severe limitations, or cannot even handle, many files or cases that are important.
Of course I am in a niche: I do research in physical sciences (biological physical chemistry, to be exact). I would think that there are lots of us around in the larger area, though not precisely in my area.
Office 2000, which I purchased in 1999, is a far better program than OO.o. I use OO only when I am too lazy to boot a VM — it truly is awful. Abiword is OK if you do not require Word compatibility. I still use groff and TeX for text creation, though no one with whom I collaborate uses them.
I too have great hopes for Solaris in some incarnation. Sun understands Unix, and having a single commercial vendor behind the OS makes it far more likely that other commercial vendors will support it. But it is not there yet. (I also admit to a fondness for the company, having used SunOS with great satisfaction before the SVR4 rupture from BSD.)
A reasonable choice, but I find Apple’s hardware other than the Mac Pro to be unattractive. I need to be able to maintain a computer when this or that fails without replacing the entire guts. The Pro is just too expensive for what it is.
Edited 2008-04-24 01:39 UTC
I remember using StarOffice 5, way back when Sun had the ‘Free Solaris’ programme. It was slow then, and sadly, even with the latest and greatest machines, its still slow today. They would have been better off purchasing Mainsoft and Corel, and making Wordperfect available on Solaris using Mainsoft (which is basically a win32 api on UNIX (not a translation layer like Wine) which one simply compiles against, and voila, UNIX application).
True; definitely true; there are some standards behind it, big names, the drivers are developed and maintained as matter of course rather than them falling into disrepair as peoples interest fades away. JDS is working very nicely, but I am disappointed about the fact that KDE 4.x isn’t out yet – it would be nice to at least have a status on what the situation is – whether they’re waiting for the 4.1.x before focus on creating a distribution for OpenSolaris.
Well, for me, I have a laptop, so it is pretty much a non-issue. I have a MacBook, and IMHO it is pretty good for what I need to do. I don’t play games, I don’t do anything particularly CPU intensive; all I do is surf the internet, write university assignments, synchronise with my iPod Touch and watch movies. Nothing particularly strenuous.
I hear the GIMP is supposed to be improving the colour depth it can deal with (might be worth checking out, although it still might fall short of your needs). In a former life I was an astrophysicist (and still get the occaisonal observing run in with my old university supervisor). We use 16-bit images and our solution was always to “write your own” software since even powerful tools like Java2D don’t properly deal with more than RGBA32 for all filtering operations. It takes time to get things going (especially considering the time constraints of thesis work) but the end result it always worth it. I don’t mean to be elitist with this comment, but if your are a research scientist (sounds like you are a biochemist or similar dealing with instrument data) there is nothing like having complete control over you data reduction. Anyway, learning programming might be the best thing you could do for your career (plus gives you job options if ever decide that science is not cutting it).
ps. The observing astrophysicists I meet use a lot of Linux, it is plenty good enough for their research needs.
Edited 2008-04-24 02:34 UTC
Ahem. I am well over 20 years beyond my Ph.D., a grandfather, and have founded and run a start-up biological tools company (my third one, btw).
Yes, there is a Google SoC project on extending the bit depth of GIMP, though it is not phrased that way. I am content with using Photoshop when I need it. It works, the entire work flow can be calibrated, and it is fine for my photomicrographs (which are not that different from the sorts of images with which you dealt).
Edited 2008-04-24 02:58 UTC
Not only plenty good, if they’re observational, they pretty much need the IRAF programming environment… and IRAF doesn’t have a Windows version (or didn’t last time anyone I know checked)
Hopefully the IT department here will recognize the inherent problem with that, and not force us to move to XP (which would necessitate completely changing our workflow in any case)
http://iraf.noao.edu/
IRAF works on Windows using Cygwin.
GIMP 2.5 : http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.5.html
… it has UI improvements and support for GEGL
http://gegl.org/
… so not quite ready yet but getting there.
PDF Edit support:
http://www.linux.com/articles/60715
http://pdfedit.petricek.net/screenshots_en.html
Wine is approaching version 1.0 … you would have to be more specific about what program you have that does not work under Wine these days before one can comment.
Government departments should not require you to have a specific commercial product in order for you to submit applications to them. That is more or less state aid to that supplier company … agitate for a more vendor-neutral cross-platform solution.
GIMP has been “getting there” for years. I have no confidence that it ever will.
Now let’s deal with the second part: how do you calibrate the work flow? This includes calibration software (with support for various spyders and colorimeters) to generate an icc profile for monitors, scanners, printers and cameras, and color-aware software that uses those icc profiles to maintain color integrity through the entire work flow — every last tool. I’m happy to purchase the targets.
pdfedit does many of the tasks, but not enough of them. The output quality for clipped graphics is not as good, and it sure is cumbersome. Acrobat is just the better tool.
Sigh. Sure, that’s right, and I have expressed my strong interest in having more platform-neutral tools. There is a Citrix back door that enables you not to use the provided MS- or Mac-specific software. It does work, but not as well as using the program.
In the mean time I have to eat. I have submitted grants totalling $3 million using the software. Should I not have applied for them? And if I do, should I not use the best tool for the task?
Kia Ora kaiwai,
I take your point about applications. As far as kiosks go, I think Linux is progressing with a slightly different model, and the desktop seems the laggard in terms of adoption (although our company of consultants use it). Recently at Wellington (New Zealand) airport I saw an departures screen ‘black-screen’ with what appeared to be Red Hat or Fedora (saw a Windows blue screen at Auckland on return from the same Pacific trip). While it sucked that the terminal was having problems (looked like the terminal server was down) it was nice to see Linux working somewhere unexpected. That is the thing about Linux. While Windows may currently rule the desktop for corporates, Linux is unobtrusively sliding in to plenty of market niches where you wouldn’t know it was Linux (the kiosks in the airport screens, on phones, in routers, in digital TV recorders, and appliances of all sorts). Note that the desktop market is relatively small for most companies other than Microsoft and its VAR resellers, and that it is embedded systems and corporate applications that are the goldmine for nearly everyone else.
Kia Ora, kapai on the great post, its good to see another fellow kiwi on the board
Its interesting you talk about the enterprise; its funny because of the number of times I see Windows being used as a session merely to host a terminal session to a mainframe – case in point would be, for example, Minister of Social Development.
As for Linux, personally, my bets are on OpenSolaris being the more viable future enterprise and possible – end user replacement for Windows.
Yes, OpenSolaris looks good. Solaris is of course admantine in robustness, but lags Linux a bit in driver support. I was so impressed by the Solaris-kernel with Ubuntu userland Nexenta project (http://www.nexenta.org/) that I donated. I hope this project goes somewhere.
I’d put money on Apple getting the desktop. They only sell higher-end stuff (which may put off the corporates) but their hardware and OS is just so pleasant (plus they don’t make proprietary software houses too nervous). Let’s hope they can restrain their corporate instinct to prefer propprietary stuff over standards – as I think that may count against them in the end.
Back on topic to Vista. One thing that used to be attractive about developing for Windows was it was a relatively heterogeneous environment – everyone used to upgrade at the same time and have the same version, more or less. Now with Vista on the scene there are a fair number of corporates spread between Win2k, XP, and some Vista mixed in. With the Win32 API having slightly different versions on these different ‘platforms’ that advantage is starting to diminish (even using .NET you sometimes have to reach down with pinvoke into the underlying platform, and the results can differ depending on the target). Hopefully it won’t get like the bad old days of proprietary Unix – but it will be interesting to see what the future holds here.
ps. I don’t want to risk being rude, so for non-New Zealanders some explanation may be in order. “kiwi” is a New Zealander (and a native bird); “Kia Ora” is New Zealand Maori for “Hello” (like the US informal, “Howdy”) or “thank you”; and, “Ka Pai” means “it’s all good” (kiwis also say, “Sweet As”). There, you learned something new today.
Sometimes I wonder if I really want to see Linux get that mainstream. You really do have to be careful what you wish for… because you might get it.
I imagine a world in which all those “computer illiterate and proud of it” people that I have to deal with every day are using Linux rather than being segregated off in their own Windows world. I imagine the dollars in their wallets driving the direction of Linux and Linux applications. I imagine being a member of a tiny minority of the Linux community that remembers how things used to be, and that nobody cares about anymore. There are some good things to be said about living in a small town.
Edited 2008-04-24 01:28 UTC
I see a different future: Most used operating systems in 50 years will be commercially backed open source systems, even Windows might one day get os’ed.
Then we would have markets with 20%-20%-20%-20%-20% marketshares of different operating systems, and virtually every software will be multi-platform.
This will also reduce the Virus risk of one particular platform.
What it needs for this to happen? Just a working market, the behavior patterns of today’s Microsoft must be broken.
Vista for me means two things:
-.NET 3.5 capable (which is XP too)
– DirectX 10 capable
In rest there is no need to use it. Security is so and so, it has flaws, it gives no real value compared with a free Ubuntu. The main flaw I look at is: in the time they do a Service Pack, that corrects most of the issues, Ubuntu in the mean time offers at least one release, and Suse or other Linuxes again more than one.
So instead taking a 3 years / OS (Windows 95-98-XP-Vista), we may take 1 year/OS Linux. And you will get more polishes that you may cry for them in Vista.
Desktop wide translation? There is. Free Office… there is! Powerful development plaform (using Netbeans, Eclipse, JBoss in Java, or PHP) or SQL platform (only SQLServer does not work on Linux), still there.
Vista is a desktop OS which may be capable, but offers too less. I remind you that Vista takes 18 months in beta stage! And one year more for first SP1. In that time, Ubuntu gives to you 5 new releases. Do you know Ubuntu Breezy? Namely 5.10? It offers a GNOME 2.12, no powerful photo management, 2D desktop, crappy drivers, that didn’t detect more than 1 G of RAM, no tools so common today for Linux users, a so and so polished desktop, but the installer goes in text mode.
Tomorow is an Ubuntu release. Is the 5th release over that time. It offers a better boot time (over upstart), have improved virtualization support, state of the art desktop experience, desktop internationalization, consistent desktop interface, automatically codec download, Firefox 3, a more standard compliant browser.
My question is: why we are forced to get Vista preinstalled in our machines? For instance my Vista machine initially hangs. I have no problem with that, because I use Vista only for a test platform (to be sure that works on Windows), and the license does not permit to me to put in a virtual environment (I opt for the cheapest Windows version, Home Basic). The experience is ok for many, but for sure Ubuntu offers much more.
I had two reasons not to use Linux, one was the Warcraft game, which does not connect to Battle.net, it’s paid service of Blizzard, but the default Wine, from Ubuntu repository works nice right now (great job Wine team!), and some issues with Pidgin. Kopete is the single KDE based application I use it in GNOME desktop, and the webcam and send-file works smoothly, so no need to switch back.
So, who needs Vista? For basic stuffs, like basic .NET, you may use Mono (http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page ), for old Windows applications as Total Commander (http://www.ghisler.com/ ), you may use Wine (http://www.winehq.org/ ) from Ubuntu repositories, codecs are plently in a country without enforcements of patents (as is the “freedom” country as US). For most needs, OpenOffice does it great, really!
That two pillars of good things that Vista has: DirectX and .NET may be easily replaced if computer gamming companies will support in a strong way Linux. And if the games will exist on Linux too (at least running in Wine), I recommend for Microsoft to take care themself, at least on Windows division, or to learn to port on Linux the entire Office stack, probably some will love it.
I don’t read Dvorak articles anymore, and I susgest you to do the same. They are not worth it.
Just think about earlier John Dvorak stories here on OSNEWS.
“Try linux – it’s so far behind the times that it seems great at old shit.”
Try linux – it’s great at times that old shit seems so far behind.
I installed Vista SP1 on my new machine: Q6600 at 3GHz, 4GB RAM, 750GB HD, 8800GT. Vista has been working fine since I switched over to this machine at home about a month ago and frankly, I prefer it to using XP now (my work machine has XP on a notebook with a 2GHz Core 2, 2GB RAM).
I’ve turned UAC and the security nags off, installed most of my day-to-day apps, added a few gadgets to the sidebar. Two things haven’t worked right – Civ 4 renders its fonts slightly wrong (a few others have this problem too) and my external HD causes the machine to freeze when connected over e-SATA (never tried under XP, so don’t know). I connect the drive using either USB or Firewire.
I don’t feel that there is any usable performance drop from XP – ie. XP may open a window faster, but I don’t have the ability to make use of that extra speed because Vista is still faster than my reaction time.
I like the new UI. Where things are in the control panel doesn’t matter. If I want something, I just type a word into the search box and am presented with a short list containing what I want. Same with the start menu – its much better than XP’s, which either gets out of hand or requires irritating maintenance.
I’ve installed Vista on other hardware. I installed it my old P4 3.2, 1GB RAM, X800 Pro when it RTMed. I didn’t use that except to play around with Firefox, but I didn’t notice performance problems. One day I’ll try again and install Office 2007 just to see. I’ve also tried it on a ~2 GHz Core 2 Xeon, 2GB RAM. No Aero because of the graphics hardware (it’s a low-end server). Again performance was fine, although I didn’t install anything, just poked around in the OS.
It seems like Microsoft have decided to start playing the underdog with Vista. Its not a role that suits them well.
All the hype seems to be building around the next imaginary version of Windows. So Vista may not be not a patch on XP for performance and nowhere near OSX for user experience; but millions of use it and somehow we manage to get through each day.
But lets not bother waiting for Windows 7.
Thats asking a bit much.
Ubuntu and XP here. ’nuff said.
A few more “pillars”:
12. Activation – Even worse than any previous versions, activation police is here to get you. Jeez, I don’t really want to pirate it, I just need to reinstall. Trying to install an app messed it up completely.
13. Crippled UAC – This could work, but now most people just disable it, and the rest simply clik continue.
14. Interface – Needing 4 clicks and 4 piled up dialogs where 1 click would do in XP is simply too much.
15. Show stoppers in RTM – Horrible network / file copy bugs. These are basic operations for every OS and should have been done right before shipping RTM.
16. No really added value for Ultimate users – They just paid up, but don’t seem to have received anything much.
Good things:
With compatible apps and latest drivers, reliability is very high. This is good, since rebooting take its time.
Nice environment – Aero has a nice overall look and feel. Not very obtrusive either.
I never played with Vista, but I gave the Win2008 evaluation version a spin over the week-end, after reading the rave reviews it got recently. After switching on the right services and features (including Aero), it offers a surprisingly pleasant experience on my laptop (albeit with a few missing drivers…). I like what I saw. And that’s from a full-time linux user for years.
I certainly can’t relate to the Vista horror stories that abound on the net these days: I’m still wondering what UAC is, I have no side bar, and the system feels really snappy and boots fast. Of course, the fact that this laptop sports a 2GHz core2duo, a GF8600GS and 2GB of RAM might help…
At the end of the day, though, it still offers nothing over Ubuntu that I’m willing to pay that much for (and certainly not the server license). I installed it on Saturday, along with putty, firefox 3, pidgin, glade and sonata, telling myself I’d have a bit of fun before the end of the 60-day evaluation period. And I haven’t booted it once since then…
Vista is working great for me. Also for the 3 people I know who have it. None of us want to go back to XP.
When will this ridiculous I-want-to-bash-vista-too c*ap stop?
Edited 2008-04-23 21:58 UTC
When Windows 7 comes out and we all fondly remember the glory days of Vista and how good it was (ie same story as what’s happening with XP vs Vista these days)
shrug.
/me pets BFS.
(actually NTFS has all needed features (xattrs and even indices), I suppose everyone at Microsoft forgot about that.)
Vista 64 here. It works fine though not without hiccups. I mostly use it for games and for just a few apps like Open Office, Gimp, Inkscape, Pidgin, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. Even with a core 2 duo at 3ghz and 4 gigs of RAM, Vista is no speed demon. I have shut off a few things like the UAC stuff, and removed my Audigy sound card (crap drivers) in favour of the onboard Realtek chip. Vista does seem to get “stuck” quite a bit though. Very large multimedia files cause it to barf here, as do a few multimedia apps like MediaCodec and PVR software, though to be fair they are probably beta-ish and really wired for XP. I wouldn’t give Vista top marks at all – the Start menu is a real mess, imho – but it is fine for the job.
Where I take issue is with the assumptions that may lie behind Vista. It’s trying to be all things to all men. It’s trying to be oh so user-friendly and sort it all out for you with routines behind the scenes. But neither idea has really worked. What should be pointed and focused is sprawling and those background routines are real hogs.
I still don’t understand what Microsoft thought they were doing, though. If I didn’t play games and hadn’t bought a new computer recently, I wouldn’t touch Vista with a pole. A modestly spec’d laptop with 512 megs or 1 gig of RAM is more than enough to run XP or Linux perfectly well. With Vista you would won’t even leave the starting gate, yet machines like this are probably what most folks around the world actually have.
Besides, we’re into a new era now. Energy costs where I live are rising at 15-20 per cent a year. If you are a company, multiply the cost or potential cost of running a high-spec PC to run Vista and Office 2007 by 1000 or 10,000 times, chuck in extra for all that air-con, look at the energy bills and weep. It’s madness.
Never been a fan of windows, It always has felt like they were a decade or so behind everyone else in terms of features and polish. XP is what got me off of windows, and using Linux full time. Vista is what brought me back.
I got a HP Pavilion dv9000 a few weeks after Vista RTMd. I am a .net guy, but I had been dual booting basically for VS (I absolutely adore .net, and always have). I brought my new machine home, and literally had my XP and Ubuntu cds in hand, but figured I would give Vista a fair shake, and decided to play around with it a bit first (being an OS geek and all).
Right off the bat, I loved aero. I find it tasteful, without being full of bling. The animations are subtle, and well executed. Overall, there is just a level of polish and attention to detail I have never seen in windows before. Esthetic is far from the most important part of an OS, but it was a good first impression.
Using it full time for a well just left me more pleased. I found it very stable (which impressed me, being a 1.0 release and all), and everything just felt more snappy then on xp. A prime example of this is WMP11, which I absolutely despised on XP, but found myself liking on vista. The live previews were a big help, and I really liked the new Network administration panel, as previous versions of windows had been pretty much a joke with this. Another pet peeve of mine had always been the start menu, but that was pretty much eliminated with the advent of the search bar. Same thing with explorer, I have never liked windows file manager, the vista one however while not being that innovative, was still rather modern. There are a few gripes I still have with it; you should be able to drag links off the links bar into the trash, there needs to be a hot key/button to show/hide hidden files, and the contextual bar needs a higher degree of customizability. But it is WAY better then before.
The other thing is the much maligned UAC. I find it a hell of alot easier to run as a non-admin in Vista then any previous version of windows. It took me a while to wrap my head around the security scheme, which while definitely overkill for your average home user, is very powerful and customizable.
Last but not least is IIS7, which IMO is the version where the web server really came into its own. It is a joy to administer, its very performant and secure, and with FastCGI it makes a killer PHP platform (I have a few php projects I support). As an ASP guy, IIS7 alone was almost worth it all by itself.
Since about 80% of my pet peeves with the OS were either eliminated or mitigated, I didn’t feel the desire or need to go back to linux, especially since all my work is done on and for the windows platform. I still don’t think windows is the best OS out there or anything, but as someone who has some usability experience and has used alot of different operating systems, I just don’t loathe it the same way I hated XP.
I know my experience was not the normal one, but for whatever reason (my guess is HP just doing a good job with its hardware choices and drivers), I never really had any problems with Vista. Back in the early days the nvidia drivers sucked in a bad way, and the boot time was really too long, and that was about it (which is really exusable for an OS with as much changed and rewritten as vista had). Both those issues are fixed now.
I also have XP installed on this machine for compatibility testing, and honestly, if anything I find Vista more snappy. Sure, it takes longer to boot, but for whatever reason there is a 30-45 second delay between when I see the desktop, and when I am on the net in XP. On Vista, by the time I see the desktop I am on the net.
Anyways, ever since the Heroes Happen Here event, I have been using Windows Server 2008 as my workstation (ms gave out free not-for-production-or-resale copies), and unlike Vista, I would say it is one of the best operating systems out there (if only it didn’t cost so damn much). What it has that vista lacks is the modularity, and much wider array of servers and admin tools. The firewall tools are alot finer grained, the IIS tools are alot better, and Hyper-V is just sweet (goodbye VMWare, never really liked you in the first place). We also got a copy of Vista Ultimate, but I think I’ll be sticking with 2k8, at least until windows 7 comes out.
I bought a Vista (home premium) notebook: it was a budget, lightweight notebook (four pounds). The AMD low-end processor and integrated graphics = sluggish performance with Aero turned on. Even with 2GB of RAM.
I had to surgically go through and turn off all unnecessary Vista processes, including Aero to make it run reasonably close to XP in terms of start up time. I actually liked Aero until I had to use the computer — the notebook was just too slow.
I travel for work. A lot. I gave Vista five months of constant usage until I couldn’t stand it anymore. There were too many things that Vista could not do or did not do well: has problem with faxed .tif files, has issues with network file transfers, I needed to purchase a new set of Vista-compatible software (what happened to the “budget” in this notebook?!)
I receive lots of fax .tif files. Windows Picture and Fax Viewer no longer exist in Vista. I had to install a third-party program to deal with it but it still does not replace the ease of use and ability to view/manipulate the fax as Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in XP.
Slow network file transfers. Time is $ and I can’t sit and wait for Vista to take its sweet time to sync my files with the network computer.
It cost more than I wanted to spend to upgrade my work software. So much for saving money on a budget laptop.
There were other things that annoyed me, but what I’ve mentioned were the big three.
Being very unhappy with Vista, I installed Windows XP on my laptop. It was difficult to find a few drivers since the notebook was “made for Vista”, but I managed to do a full install. I am now reasonably happy with the notebook since it actually WORKS. My issues now is with the hardware itself, but hey, I can actually process my work now.
and I don’t know why anybody even bothers to read his stuff. He’s been doing this kind of “cry baby” journalism for years now.
I personally like most things about Vista. However, coming from XP Pro, I do find Vista navigation a little confusing – nothing that Search can’t overcome though. However, I suspect once I get used to it I’ll be fine.
I got Vista Business 32 bit pre-installed on a new PC I bought recently, and it runs with no major problems. By the way, it’s a Dell – I saw someone complaining about a friend’s – and it runs Vista just fine. I even installed SP1 without a hitch.
Before anyone suggest that I’m not tech savvy, simply because I bought a Dell, I’ve got news for them: I was a Senior Consulting Programmer-Analyst for 18+ years before I retired from it, and I’ve built many PCs in the past. I went with Dell this time around simply because building PCs no longer excites me and I’d rather just turn them on and go, leaving the hassle of tech support to someone else.
The Won’t give it a try category… and happily so. 🙂
Vista x64 and was having a multitude of issues on my home system. Tracked the problem down to the BIOS on my XFX 8800GT card. Replaced it with an EVGA BIOS and Vista has been stable since. The recent Nvidia Beta drivers have come a long way too, took them long enough.
All hardware supported. Love the Restore Point tech. UI is better than XP from a usability function just took a little getting used to. SP1 was a boon for Vista especially with networking.
I have built Vista x64 systems for a few clients and they are happy with them. Most OEM’s don’t know how to set the OS up. UAC is good but I prefer to get clients onto Vista Business x64 or Ultimate x64 and then install them Admin and a day to day User account. I let them know the advantages of it and they are fine with the concept.
Now if MS could just make the OS a little more modular so we could easily remove programs of MS that we don’t want I think Vista would be great.
I want to like Linux and I support Ubuntu on some clients PC’s but for my needs I just don’t have access to the same apps that I require as I do on Vista. I have not run into a compatability issue yet either and that’s on x64 Vista.
Oh and MS, fix NTFS. We should not need to have to defrag our drives just like our OS-X and Unix/Linux bretheren don’t.
I also like what DirectX 10 brings to the table in image quality. Sure you can tweek DX9 to look roughly the same in screen shots but when the action is running the IQ in DX10 is much better and fluid. Iäm sure you can get the same capabilities in OpenGL but alas, not many bother.
1. Driver support *should* have been much better. This is NOT Microsoft’s fault, but lazy driver vendors who should be shot and court martialled at dawn…
2. Price…far overpriced…
3. Takes too much grunt to run properly…
4. Far too many versions…
Dave
You’re right.
Vista coulb best be served by 2 versions
1. Vista Business x64
2. Vista Ultimate x64
F the rest and charge appropriately. MS went out to obscure the market with the differing versions of Vista hoping to make a pretty penny. It’s blown up in their face.
Why do they even need a business and ultimate version? I mean, Windows 95 had one version, so did 98, 98se, ME, 2000. They introduced home/pro versions in XP, which I didn’t like back then, and don’t like now. There simply is NO need.
Vista is way overpriced, at nearly triple the cost of Apple’s OS X, which is a much more competent OS imho. How can Microsoft really justify that overreaching cost?
My take is that Microsoft knows that it’s screwed up, knows that it is going to lose customers hand over fist, and this is a last minute gasp to grab as much money from the “believers” before things go bad. Gates resigning? Was that just co-incidence or an important timing event? I really wonder…
Look, as much as I dislike Microsoft’s business methods, the world needs them, because Apple just has too little hardware support, and Linux is simply not ready (and in all honesty, unless serious changes are made, probably never will be).
Dave
Whether Vista ‘works’ or not, is not the point for me, whether XP works or not doesn’t bother me either since I finally (after several years) also had to go through the, in my view, terrible forced reactivation procedure just for adding some hardware to an older P4 box. In fact, on the machines that currently have Vista and XP, you would have a fairly decent general computing experience, and you probably wouldn’t grumble as such on that count (although for some inexplicable reason, I cannot get a firewire drive to be recognized by Vista – there seems to a known bug there, too).
Now, unless I speak in great ignorance (and do please correct me), given that in Mandriva 2008.1 I personally have discovered a free OS that works out of the box, doesn’t get in the way (haven’t had to fiddle at all to get things functioning and the only time something didn’t work, Metisse, getting Compiz back was an absolute cinch), and is never going to hack me off regarding whether I can or cannot install it again, doesn’t require ‘proof’ that I may use it legitimately, isn’t going to belch at me because it ‘thinks’ I may have transgressed a software licence, Windows has proven itself in a sense to have become obsolete. I can now ‘stick it to the man’ with personal impunity. This is a juvenile expression, perhaps, but it encapsulates the relief that free as in speech finally for me articulates a liberation from all that anti-consumer cr*p that Microsoft has been pushing out for years. Now I will hear in that word ‘release’ for any new iteration of my OS not just the notion ‘upgrade’ but effective liberty.
If anyone has the inclination at all to go through my past posts they will realise that I am a hobbyist OS whore who likes to play Devil’s advocate. I think I must have defended (and criticized) every OS I have been able to lay my hands on and install over the past 10 years, perhaps often for mean rhetorical reasons.
So, you’d be forgiven if you take this current conversion of mine to Mandriva with a pinch of salt. However, ‘freedom’ just seems to work, and getting out of the box feels just fine to this escapee.
Actually, I don’t agree with most of authors remark. Many of its “pillars” are infact speculations, widespread beliefs which aren’t correct or blatant lies.
But there are a few points he wrote I agree with:
1) Too many (really, too many!) versions – That’s something even hardcore Windows users like myself criticized once Microsoft make it public its Vista strategy. That time I said marketing depts just work to destroy good things developers do.
Release an OS during 2007 which had so many and confusing versions was a bad mistake a mature company as Microsoft shouldn’t have done. Anti-piracy tools were working and tried to squeeze market to get the very last drop from users and start to cash their market share. Which is good for them (they’re a company, after all) but you could cash it without flooding the market with so many versions. Bad mistake.
Also, a product like Vista Home Basic is just a nonsense. I wonder who the hell really thought someone could be happy to get “Vista Home Basic”…
2) Drivers – Microsoft just trusted its partners. They thought partners would have been able to ship drivers on time as they usually always did. Too bad most of them release incomplete, low-quality drivers and they took months to have acceptable ones out for users. That was an huge mistake and it partially reflect wars among industry players but was also an huge mistake by Microsoft not to ensure partners would stick to their promises. For example, Microsoft was benevolent to Intel while Intel itself essentially betrayed MS.
This also reflect changes in industry where everybody is now at war with anyone else. When Microsoft entered h/w field, they should have expected that h/w producers would stop being so sweet to MS.
3) Performance – Here again Microsoft tried to be sweet to h/w makers and got backfired for that. Industry pushed Microsoft to produce low-level Vista versions in order to ship it with their outdated hardware (for example, those millions notebooks they already had in stock) when it was clear that most of such systems would have provided a bad Vista experience while they provide a very good XP experience. Yet again, instead of resisting, Microsoft allowed industry to flood market with outdated h/w carrying “Vista capable” sticker which fooled many users into having “Vista Home Basic” while h/w makers tried to sell their stock of acient h/w. This was a bad and self-inflicted error, also because Microsoft had to downgrade Vista to basic versions in order to support such systems. Maybe some coconut-head in Marketing Dept. thought it was smart to limit your software in order to sell basic versions to fool and cooler versions to people willing to pay. But in the end, general perception during first months was Vista was a “fraud”, regardless who was to blame for that. Another bad mistake.
4) Games – We all know gamers are most hardcore users and that gaming market is the hugest market today, bigger than Hollywood is. Taking months to deliver first Vista-ready games and not having enough title out when Vista was launched was a big mistake as well. Plus, Vista performed at least 10% slower than XP on same hardware (I think that changed with Vista-ready games but as I said, almost 0 of them were ready when Vista launched). So in the end, basically all gamers just got back to XP and encouraged all their friends to do so. Not a good deal.
5) Performance again – Considering what I wrote just above and considering that everybody say Windows2008 is at least 15% faster than Vista on same configuration, this means Vista SP1 was rushed to the market without proper caring. SP1 was just released and W2008 is still noticeably faster so it’s obvious there’s something they couldn’t optimize because codebase is similar BUT not identical. I believe they will optimize that in SP2 but then Windows 7 (a Vista-lookalike) will be in sight and thus it will be easier to switch to W7 rather than patch your Vista.
Now, let me say Vista IS on all my PCs. Anyone who really tried that, for example, cannot say that Vista is about 15-30% faster in network operations (expecially on the Internet).
It is INFACTS much more secure than any XP using less software. It is very pleasant to operate and looking at. But Microsoft was just fool to let their Marketing Dept. doom a good release with bad moves.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone to downgrade to XP unless you have a valid reason (like no drivers for Vista) or you’re a gamer.
But Microsoft obviously get frantic about Vista and put a good release under a bad light by undervaluing mistakes which could have been easily corrected.
I agree with the author although there are many, many more reasons resulting in Vista’s failure. I am still convinced the first and major problem of Vista (and will remain so for other MS OSs) that XP is a wonderful OS. It does everything, it’s stable, it’s, well, “fun”.
Many of the Vista complaints were addressed to XP while it has been launched. There were memory and resource problems, compatibility, etc. What seems to be different today is that consumers are not willing take that any more. They won’t let Microsoft, or anyone else, to tell them what should they want.
The same remark goes to some Linux people who suggest that consumers should want “freedom” above all.
It is over, now consumers drive the market, not vendors.
DG
As a system builder I’ve found Vista to be a craps shoot – You will find hardware that it works fine on, and hardware that it chokes on… and sometimes even the same brand and part # won’t work, switching for another one does… Case in point I have some nVidia 680i chipset ASUS mainboards and half of them Vista has applications hang if you look at them the wrong way, while the others purr along happily. BIOS on them all updated to the same point, same board – and to verify it wasn’t something in the install or drivers and just swapping the IDENTICAL mainboard stabilized those systems (??? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot). These ‘issues’ do not appear on those boards under XP, Linux or OpenSolaris.
When Vista first hit I tried using my own machine as a guinea pig – A64 4000+, nForce 4 mainboard, Ge8800GTS for primary display, Ge7600GT for the outer two and a Audigy 2 ZS… With the SP1 I’ve retried it on my current hardware – one of the ‘good’ 680i boards, Q6600 CPU, Still the Audigy 2 ZS and Ge8800GTS but now the outer displays are on a Ge8400GS
The results were much the same, and I tried both the 64 and 32 bit versions of Vista:
I downloaded the correct drivers for the board(s) ahead of time, run the installer, reboot – and the networking won’t connect… ok, back out the… hey, how do you back out the drivers? No deinstall under program options – it didn’t trip a system restore point… reinstalling the drivers and choosing list only lists the new driver as the compatable option?!?!? AHA, when you deinstall a device you have a option to delete it’s drivers – doing so made it fall back on whatever drivers it was using – networking restored.
Video – unlike my previous attempt I can run aero if I want now that it’s all Ge8 hardware… BUT:
Themes/appearance – Ok, this is ugly as hell – the transparancies make it so I can’t even read the window title bars, (I ***** HATE TRANSPARANCIES!!!) the new buttons in the ‘glass’ theme are next to invisible – hell, it makes that stupid jelly bean ‘luna’ crap from XP look good. Flip3d? Flip that **** off. Thankfully it’s Microsoft – I can turn ALL OF THAT CRAP OFF unlike some other operating systems I could mention. Aero theme? I’m not fond of pleasure spiked with pain. Flip3d? Flip that off. New start menu (Yet AGAIN), goodbye. Amazing they feel the need to take huge steps BACKWARDS on the start menu every time they release a new version. (simple structure akin to KDE or Gnome… or Win95 – and we wouldn’t need this **** if Windows software makers didn’t feel the need to make their own directory and ten links for each of their programs – which advanced users like myself just delete) Wow, we almost have something usable here. Goof assed animated bullshit just slows me down. I click on something I want to see it NOW, not two to five seconds from now after some brain-rotting eye-candy. (You should hear my opinion of Compiz and Expose some time)
So we run windows update and… it slipstreams in that same broken networking driver, and now it won’t deinstall the drivers or give me an option to remove them with the device… Safe mode, nothing, reboot to normal and… what the? The option to remove the drivers with the device is there again… ok, removed, detect hardware, networking restored AGAIN. REboot – it REINSTALLS without so much as a by your leave!!! Finally have to dig in and delete it’s registry entries and files by hand – shades of Win9x.
So I install Opera… install Trillian, install AVG… Of course IE 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 standalones (I need those for doing web page testing) will not run as there isn’t enough legacy windows present to run the hacked standalones…. Ok, I can live with that – install windows 98 inside Microsoft Virtual PC… and it crashes… Ok, try XP… and it crashes… Screw this, I’ve got a copy of the latest VMWare 6, let’s do that… 98 works except when I try to access folders on the LAN, it crashes… Try XP – ok, it kind of works, but DAMN it’s slow.
20 minutes later… crashes. Hmm. Check the event logs – every half second VMWare is throwing errors into the log file, at this rate I’ll have a 1 gig log file inside 24 hours. Ok, remove VMWare.
I get Safari, Firefox, all my other software installed, but every 20 minutes like clockwork SOME random application hangs – and you can’t kill it’s process from the task manager. The task manager acts all happy and pretends to do something when you hit kill process, but 20 minutes later some other random application just hangs.
Get it seeming almost stable for an hour by applying some wierd hacks like removing the connection limits, putting UAC into the undocumented ‘quiet’ mode, etc, etc… Leave it overnight.
Morning – EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION I LEFT OPEN HAS HUNG… without even reporting ‘not responding’, OS chugging along nice and happy as if nothing is wrong. Winamp, Opera, Firefox, IE7, Trillian, Filezilla, win32pad – with none of them reporting ‘not responding’ and ending their processes in task manager having no effect.
Finally I tried nuetering the OS with vLite, and the only thing that made any difference was ripping out superfetch, which turned that every 20 minutes of random app hangs into every two hours. Oh yeah, /WIN/ there.
Screw this, out comes my XP Pro VLE disk.
I am for the most part an advanced user who can handle most anything any OS throws at me, comfortably switching between OSX, Gnome, KDE, XFCE and Windows with barely breaking a step… and I have to say this is the WORST DISASTER of an Operating system I have EVER seen. This makes Windows ME look good – hell, I’d get more functionality out of going back to Windows 3.1 than Vista is able to provide. On the other hand, I have multiple installs of Vista that work just fine – I’ve seen it work fine. It’s this inconsistancy on hardware that runs XP, Linux and OpenSolaris without a hitch that made me unable to bear it for 48 hours – On my own workstation the longest I’ve been able to stick with Vista has been 43 hours and 10 minutes before I’ve said “Screw this”.
It would be enough for me to consider switching something other than Windows if the various *nix flavors and OSX weren’t like taking a trip in the wayback machine to Win 3.1 so far as desktop OS functionality is concerned. At least XP’s file manager isn’t still in the dark ages (even if I do end up diving into the registry to make it default to showing the filesystem tree. TREE! **** spatial navigation, **** stupid search bull, give me a damned file TREE!!!) and has a competant task manager (Good lord, a flat text list of what’s running? All this graphical task switching bullshit is next to useless anyhow when you have five text editor windows open!!!)
“But perhaps my greatest reason for not having a problem with Vista is that I really only use this computer for browsing the web and working on the occasional document. My primary computer is a Mac laptop, and that’s where I do my “real work.””
That’s all you use a quad core computer with 650 GB of space for?! Seems like it ought to be the other way around!
I actually like Vista…got some driver problems with my soundcard, but nothing that couldnt be fixed. I like the look and I even like UAC (which everyone else seems to just hate)…
However…
I am a performance junkie, and Vista just is not good enough for me unfortunately. It uses waaaay too much resources. I want my OS to be an OS, and not take over my entire computer, leaving little for the applications.
He has some of the parts right, but he defiantly has them in the wrong order. To read his article, you would think that it’s some product, misunderstood in the marketplace, whereas Microsoft failed to understand its marketplace.
While Microsoft made money on it, as an operating system, Microsoft Vista is failure because:
Microsoft’s Vista is needlessly slow and bloated, offering very little for that bloat. It’s almost if Microsoft did not care about the consumer.
The operating system tests slower than XP.
Microsoft’s Vista was released riddled with bugs and incompatibilities.
The GUI is messy, ugly, with irregularly sized buttons, a skin that features glare. Microsoft’s last GUI look is the spinny wheels, cheap plated bling of the GUI world.
When you got to the part where you said “one of these days I’ll have to learn to turn it off” (the security features) you and your article lost any and all credibility.