“Windows Vista Build 5384 has been released to Tech Beta testers at Microsoft Connect. Build 5384 is the real deal: Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 Milestone Build! Contrary to public opinion and ‘leaked’ information, Windows Vista Beta 2 is not a mere recompile of Vista 5381.1 and it isn’t 5381.4; Vista 5384 is Beta 2 and it’s official! Microsoft has already launched the public download site for Vista Beta 2, but no more than that, only the site is live, but the build is not ready for download to non-techbeta testers yet.” eWeek reviews the Beta (“Windows Vista Beta 2 shows steady progress, but the new 3D Aero Glass user interface in particular still flakes out”), and also has a slideshow.
I guess I’ll have to wait for it. Only have a Technet Plus subscription so have to wait until July. Hopefully one of you MSDN folks can get it and let us know how it is compared to the other builds!
We have MSDN, but I don’t feel the urge to test this Vista crap, these screenshots are really ugly.
I don’t expect anything from it.
Does MS provide a 180 trial version?
I am not familiar with MS’s release methods yet would like to try this legally.
BTW I mean for free and legal.
For example,
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/trial/default…
But for Vista.
Edited 2006-05-23 22:39
look more and more like a OS X rip off.
And this is going to matter to customers because…?
I think you mean a Windows 1.0 ripoff! I can’t believe they’re ripping it off using WHITE. geez.
Oh, I see what you mean.
Except it doesn’t look like OSX AT ALL.
I think he means the features.
c’mon now, that’s a blatant rip-off of “expose” for the mac.
Yep! And OS X can do it all with slimer hardware specs.
…where Xorg 7.1 is RELEASED and KOffice 1.5.1 is RELEASED today… and both already have had a release in the last six months… and Vista is still “preparing for beta 2.”
It just makes me smile a l’il.
…where Xorg 7.1 is RELEASED and KOffice 1.5.1 is RELEASED today… and both already have had a release in the last six months… and Vista is still “preparing for beta 2.”
Ah, yes.
Because Xorg 7.1 and KOffice 1.5.1 are fully fledged consumer oriented desktop operating systems and can be compared to Vista.
What do you get when you buy a Windows license ? A wonderful word processor which is Wordpad. An image processing tool (MSPaint) and also some great games (Solitaire, Minesweeper). A windows license alone is nothing (I don’t know about Vista but I doubt it’ll be different) so please don’t say vista will be a “fully fledged consumer oriented desktop operating system” …
Sorry but that’s a silly complaint. If they put more features in people scream bloatware at them and other companies (and entire countries) sue them. What do you really expect them to do? Integrate Microsoft Office? I don’t want to pay more for a bunch of extra stuff I may not even use. I just want an operating system, it doesn’t have to come with a full office suite, a Photoshop-like program and a bunch of first person shooters. You can buy all that stuff seperately if you want it.
Edited 2006-05-24 14:32
Vista will require more CPU cycles and RAM to deliver what XP delivers today.
Vista will require yet more CPU cycles, RAM and video horespower to deliver what it promises.
Vista may or may not have some compelling new features.
Vista may or may not be somewhat harder to crack and infest with virus/spyware/trojan/rootkit/spam/hack tools.
I find it quite easy to contain my excitement……
Let me know when Red Hat starts shipping a Linux distro with desktop compositing…
I find it quite easy to contain my excitement.
Let me know when Red Hat starts shipping a Linux distro with desktop compositing…
Why Red Hat? They’ve left the desktop market years ago.
Novell, on the other hand, came forth with Xgl and compiz and made them open too. If Vista takes much longer to make the release, it’s very likely there’s going to be at least one SuSE version shipping with Xgl in the meantime. And probably other Linux distributions will get to do that too before Vista ships.
Fine. Pick SuSE. When SuSE ships with desktop compositing, let me know. Otherwise, all of these ridiculous comments about “there aren’t any new features” are a bunch of tripe.
…am I not even the least bit thrilled?
I’ll give you some heads up since we Mac users have these features already.
1: Widgets/gadgets will not really get a whole lot of use.
2: Exposé/Areo Glass thingy won’t get a whole lot of use.
Why? Because we still tend to do things one at a time and the horsepower needed to use multiple applications doesn’t really exist except in the more powerful desktop machines with a large monitor.
Now get a 30″ monitor and you’ll have multiple things open and running. TV or two over there, web browser over there etc. all a quick glance away and not piled on top of one another.
On laptops and light CPU powered machines one is going to try to conserve CPU usage, the 1 and 2 features above won’t get a whole lot of use.
This isn’t about Macs, get over yourself.
re 1:
Well, some might disagree. I use my calculator, dictionary, web/db server widget, and my ruby doc widget frequently.
use opensuse 10.1 for now… no need to wait for redhat
of course you could also download the packages and install them yourself on any other linux distribution. And the good news are that you won’t need a state of the art pc, a low end pIII with a gforce2mx will do just great!
Man, this Vista thing is so crazy complicated judging by these screenshots.
And I thought XP was cluttered and a pain.
Anyone understand the performance rating screen in the slideshow? The overall rating was 2 but the lowest rating in the details was 2.7
Microsoft has yet to divulge any information on how these calculations are made. It apparently is not a pure average.
It attempts to look at your CPU, RAM, HD, and Video Card to make an assessment on how “well” your system will run Vista.
Based on personal experience i’ve found the most important factors to be RAM and Video in raising your score. It was able to go from a 2 to a 3 by change form a pci-e 128 to pci-e 256.
Right now it’s purely an assessment tool, but i wouldn’t be surprised if at some point this thing started making ‘suggestions’ on how to improve your system. I can easily envision it being tied into hardware partnerships and advertising campaigns. LOL
Edited 2006-05-24 04:09
…I don’t think it looks all that bad at all. I thought the problem details id’ing the drivers that cause Windows to “stand by or hibernate slowly” was pretty funny. Just get rid of your NIC driver, Audio driver and video driver and you’ll be all set!
I couldn’t stant waiting for the release of the shiny new Windows XP.
Now I don’t care anymore. My need for shiny new software hasn’t disappeared but I’m not using Windows anymore. Thanks Debian Sid for providing me with the new shiny and pretty “appz” I need, for free and legally (not that I cared of being legal or not but now I do).
Anyone else think Microsoft are really scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find features for this thing? I can’t see anything particularly exciting about the ‘features’ in it.
The support for running as non-admin users is simply a long overdue necessity, but it looks like it’ll be crippled by MS’s usual poor attention to detail. If non-admin users can’t view the performance monitor (and no doubt other similar things) I can see lots of people just making themselves an admin to get over all the headaches.
I could suggest that RSS support and gadgets on the desktop is a reaction to Apple’s latest, but they’re hardly the first people to offer that. Strikes me as just another way to put stock prices on the desktop, like there weren’t enough already – even going back to the ill-fated Active Desktop. The CPU use one would be nice, but it hardly replaces the options I’ve got available at the moment.
The Performance Rating is a bit cruel too – that eweek system had an average of about 3.4 or so, but it got 2 (presumably the highest integer less than the lowest result) – which seems a bit tough given the lowest result was for ‘only’ having 1GB RAM. Neither the CPU nor graphics card set the world on fire any more, but it seemed happier with them – I’m guessing this means Vista will be _really_ RAM hungry?
Anyways, enough bitching. Overall Vista is a good move for Microsoft – towards the features needed for a real operating system – it’s just a pity it’s only going to be a baby step, when people were hoping for a giant leap.
What kind of features would you really look forward to?
This isn’t a loaded question, I’m honestly curious.
sappyvcv: For example, I would have been impressed if they’d shipped a _proper_ search infrastructure – ie. what WinFS was going to be before it was pulled. The search in Longhorn isn’t really any more compelling than Google Desktop, although possibly without some of the privacy issues!
The search in Vista is basically exactly the same as OSX search.
Also, WinFS is still in the works and in testing right now. It just won’t ship with Vista, but as a separate product.
Yes, WinFS would have been nice. But it’s still supposed to come out, so all is not lost.
I don’t completely understand what purpose WinFS serves (ssearch is possible without it), so I wasn’t really looking forward to it that much.
Anything else?
Disregard, wrong reply.
Edited 2006-05-24 14:30
I get sick of people saying that it looks like Mac OS X. It looks nothing like it, and I have used a Mac for years. It may have introduced some of Tiger’s features, but it DOES NOT look like it. Just because it has shadows behind Windows doesn’t mean it is a rip of from Mac OS X.
All the UI goodness will look good on screenshots, and the first few days you use it, but then it will become irritating and probably end up being switched off by most people. Its only there just to sell it and make it look exciting. Similarly I tried out XGL, whilst it looked really cool, I switched it off after ten minutes because it served no purpose and became annoying. Does anyone remember the translucent stripey menus in Mac OS X 10.0, they soon got rid of it.
Another thing people seem to forget is that Microsoft need to ensure Vista is fully backward compatible with older programs. This is bound to add a huge weight to the overall coding of the operating system, whilst the likes of KOffice releases (as mentioned above) aren’t (Correct me if I’m wrong). Having companies like Symantec sueing them because they realise half of their products won’t sell anymore also doesn’t help.
And I love the comments about I’m not testing this because it looks like crap. Well, I guess Microsoft don’t want you testing it either since you sound like another “I hate Microsoft” person, which means Microsoft will never win in your eyes.
Oh, c’mon. Get real. Vista is trying VERY hard to be OS X. Stop fooling yourself. You certainly don’t have to a hardcore Mac user to see where MS is appropriating all of “its” ideas.
I agree, there are some similar concepts between the two – but they are really not that much alike.
To me, it looks as though Microsoft finally built a ‘Stardock Windowblinds’-looking theme, that probably wouldn’t have been voted very highly by Windowblinds users in the first place. I know this ‘glass’ theme can be turned off and you can use the XP theme (maybe classic 9x theme too?) – but why bother with all the effort to make such an awfully-designed theme in the first place? Why would anyone actually care about a blurry semi-transparent frame that can almost visually disappear? Do people like to squint?
The two systems do have a few things in common, though. For one, you can barely tell which window is the ‘focus’ unless they are stacked over eachother – a MAJOR oversight as far as I’m concerned which OSX also suffers from. The only indication on Aero Glass of the ‘focused’ window is the coloring of the max/min/close buttons – and these are TINY little things that your eyes have to train to find, especially in cluttered windows. A saving grace that Macs have is the ‘one titlebar for the screen’ which shows you what app is focused, but when more than one document/window of that app is open, you’re back to the same problem of not knowing which one is selected. What idiots decided to make this critical point so badly designed in both systems and why they would do such a mean thing to end-users (who are probably going blind as it is) is totally beyond me. The advantage of Mac’s Expose (which I had though was so stupid until I had a screen full of windows) is the ‘show all windows’ feature – which I hope Vista will make similar use of (but kinda doubt it).
For those that don’t always remember, the OSX interface doesn’t allow you to resize a window from anywhere except the bottom-right corner – which is a minor nuisance that gets more and more annoying the longer you sit at the desk. Windows has had it right from the beginning in allowing resizing from all four corners and four sides. This is partly due to the fact that OSX windows don’t really have a frame border aside from their titlebars, more bad than good to me.
Finder is horrible, Explorer has become overambitious. Neither shell feels ergonomically-oriented, with Finder’s mere three view options and Vista’s apparent seizure-inducing info-laden Explorer appearance. Explorer needs to step back from being an internet browser interface, and Finder needs to have a few more customizational options (are ‘lined-trees’ illegal in Apple’s philosophy or something?).
Neither GUI has the very basic concept of ‘pushing’ a window to the back of the stack, or overlaying several windows without the awful ‘cascade’ appearance. As my favorite OS’s interface had these features from the beginning (kudos to the person who guesses it), I think both OS X/Finder and Aero Glass are sub-par. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are completely ‘original’, and considering the paradigm of ‘windows’ on a ‘desktop’ has been around since the 80’s it’s no surprise to find OS’s going in parallel directions – it’s not ‘ripping off’ the competition, it’s a common line of evolution.
Peronsally, I’d rather use Windowblinds on Vista than it’s native choices, but who knows if that will even be a usable option… tisk tisk, Apple and Microsoft – you both get only ‘average’ grades for class ‘GUI 101’.
I’m really sick and tired of the bs the majority of you are writing. To be honest I do not care how Vista compares to OSX, KDE and the like (If I did, I’d read some comparison review on that issue). 90% of the thread is offtopic, awfull.
What I’d like to read is the feedback from the people who have Vista Beta2 installed and how it compares to XP SP2/2003 or something. It’d be definetely very very nice.
There is a bit too much childish bitching and moaning and not enough technical information.