Slashdot Mirror
Longhorn M4 Build Review
Gsurface writes "I finally got my hands on the new Longhorn build, 4008, that was announced two days ago. After installing it and looking around through it, I decided to write a review expressing some thoughts on the new build. This new longhorn build, upon the prompt to "press any key to boot from cd..." jumps directly into a GUI that is unique. This build Microsoft decides to abandon the setup interface of XP and dress Longhorn on its own. "
All that's here is one guy with FP, and I already get a database error. Talk about bad decisions, advertising your story to /. without preparing first.
Anyone manage to sneak in and get a mirror up?
SO microsoft is changing its interface yet again. Of all the CompE majors that I know here at school, every single one had their version of XP revert back to the old windows 95/98 look and feel. One of these days, people at microsoft and apple (and KDE and Gnome) will realize that people don't want a change in the interface every other release, and stick to their own standards.
I do not want pictures of people I don't know built into my OS (for those that can't get to it it's a picture of a woman wearing headphones and smiling as an image appearing underneath the title part of the 'My Music' folder). Thanks.
I don't know how he got his hands on a copy of longhorn, but it's exciting to see that it's not crap yet.
From an inside Microsoft source - "Longhorn will be released with a retina and fingerprint scanner since the previous product activation code was not effective enough. We are currently on beta 2 of our scanner. By RC1 we should be able to scan your retina without detaching your cornea."
I guess he decided to install Longhorn on his server...
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
From the article,
:P
The welcome screen is presented, where I am logged in automatically. During the installation I was asked to enter a username, by default this username was given full administration access. Maybe not such a good idea according to some security experts.
That's standard behavior of Win95 and 98 (you're just the admin by nature), Windows NT (you start as the admin account), Windows 2000 (creates an admin account, then prompts you to create a user w/ full administrative rights) and Windows XP (see Win2k).
Does any *nix installation *not* start you off as Root, with the ability to create more accounts?
By the way, Windows installations from Win2k onward will not prompt you to create a local admin account (i.e., Please enter your Username so I can make you an admin, too) provided that you're joining a domain right off the bat -- which, as the installer of this OS, is the only case where your local account's security rights becomes a real concern. If you're doing it at home, for yourself, you're already the installer/admin. You know the admin password. Meaning, the user will know the admin password.
So, non-issue.
I didn't encounter any crashes while playing with Longhorn, even though I would have loved to see what kind of errors I would have gotten. I'm sure a couple of more minutes while browsing would have done provoked Longhorn to squeal.
"I said it died screamin' like a stuck Irish pig!"
(with props to Untouchables)
Likewise, I'm sure that me evalating any Linux kernel of your choosing could smash it into a million pieces through careless use of rm * -o , whack Solaris by repeatedly throwing the power while it's doing disk writes, or break any other *nix operating system you choose to name.
*Any* operating system can be broken through maliciously beating on it. "I bet I can make it squeal" doesn't imply "I am going to conduct a fair and extensive beta test of this newest distribution to see where it's faults still lie". It implies "Let's see what we can destroy".
Work on your bias. Good work submitting the article; news is news, regardless of the bearer.
There is some interesting commentary on Longhorn, Build 4008, including cracks that are already being released :). You can read about them at http://www.xbetas.com/.
& catid=1.
Plus, there is a Longhorn 4008 wallpaper for those really interested.
NeoWin also reports that they got their hands on a new leaked version of Windows Longhorn. "The reporter insists that these are original shots. Lots of grandients are going on in the UI and while this is an alpha and the final version might look different (that's what happened with XP's Luna, MS only revealed XP's final design only a few months before the release, while most betas used another theme), these shots showing there are just pretty ugly IMHO. Bad taste on colors, no easy distinction between elements, it all looks like a big bad web page."
Finally, there are some nice screenshots available at http://www.windowsxpstuff.net/comments.php?id=460
Suhit
If you cant get to the site, here is a Mirror.
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Did the XP users at least try the new interface for a while or instantly turn it off? If you give it a test you'll find the XP interface is nice. The changes are fairly minor but do allow you to access things more quickly. Some things do cause a performance hit but you can easily turn them off.
In fact, I've found the XP interface to be pretty granular in control so if you don't like something, just turn it off.
A lot of people don't like new things just because they are different. Sit a new user in front of Win2K and XP and I bet they prefer XP, especially after tweaking it to their work habits.
Windows Longhorn XP 4008 Alpha M4 screen shots can be found here.
http://www.206.dk/4008.html
here
The site is probably running Longhorn build 4008 :-)
But underneath, Longhorn is the same old bull.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
I only have one question... Did they finally get rid of the random error generator?
Are you paid for that?
You're not missing much. The article is poorly written and offers little insight to those who are (like me) unfamiliar with Windows XP. All of his examples come from how it's changed compared to XP.
An email has been sent to the administrator notifying them of the problem. Please try again later.
/.ed someone's email server, as if slashdotting the web server wasn't enough. Shame on us.
OMG, now we've
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
He either one brave fellow or all his other data are belong to the recycle bin.
I wouldn't let an early beta o/s on a system that even had another partition or drive in the same room. I'm still pissed from when that dumb-assed release version of Win2k "upgraded" my NTFS 4 on another drive to NTFS 5 (making it incompatible with NT4) WITHOUT WARNING when I simply looked at the other drive. Yes, they warn that it could happen during the install if you have any NTFS 4 partitions, but this was after the install, when I connected another drive to copy some files over! Luckily, I had imaged the drives beforehand just in case.
Sigs are bad for your health.
I think with "reverting back to the old look and feel", the parent poster didn't think of switching off usable features like hiding all those seldomly used items from the start menu until you request to see them all. I think he rather referred to switching off the new kindergarten-style window borders, config panel lazout etc., which take up more pixels on the screen (so less useful information is displayed) and look different for no good reason.
Sure, maybe you can tweak the new l&f so you can be just as productive with it. However, the point wasn't that it's inherently bad, it was that _changing_ it around all the time is a very bad idea, and as the old one is just as good for most people, most people are better off continuing to use the old.
"Pointless 'innovation' considered harmful." I read that somewhere today, probably Wired News. Definitely applies here.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Few nice screenshots, longhorn screensaver and wallpaper. http://www.msfn.org/comments.php?catid=1&id=13 75
..the more they stay the same.
.net, which I think will be the equivalent of embedding the channel bar into the OS and trying to make it look more "seamless" in the OS. Remember the subscription channel bar in Win 98, that no one ever uses and hates?
Having survived the Windows 98 to ME, Windows ME to 2000, and Windows 2000 to XP migration curves, I have to say, that until this thing reaches release candidate status, all bets are off.
I remember installing every single Win 98 beta that came out -- what a buggy headache (especially the early Active Desktops) -- when I could have spent my time being productive, and waiting and watching.
This time, I will wait and watch.
So far all I see in Longhorn is Windows XP with a few new panes, some screen reogranization and some pretty icons. Until I see a dynamic, functional difference that is not just screen reogranization or eye candy, I'll be convinced that this is just more of the same, in a new package, with some bugfixes, speed optimization and additional hardware support (like DVD burning, for example).
Oh, and I forgot
I could have guessed those "improvements", without even seeing one screenshot. Come on, MS, where's the real innovation?
Time will tell.
Chris
What else is it going to be compared with? MacOS 7? Might as well compare it with the thing that (a) most people interested in the new OS are currently occupied with, and (b) it's intended to eventually replace. Anyway, the guy presumably got it off usenet last night like everyone else, so he's hardly likely to be aware of the extent of any underlying changes.
For anyone who still can't get through to the site, it really is nothing but a bunch of screenshots of the first hour's desktop experience.
- Chris
When I look at the screenshots, all I can think of is "And YOU, you're too FUCKING...BLUE!"
Vote for global prefs bug
from this picture it seems they changed the "Yes to All" button when doing a multi-file copy/replace with a checkbox like in Jaguar (OS X) however the wording is terrible "Repeat my answer each time this occurs".
And what's the point of having a slideshow in the taskbar?
too bad it's a cluster of 486's
:-P
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There seem to be two camps here (with a third lurking in the background), and they're diametrically opposed: those who think the GUI is too big a change from WinXP and therefore people won't like it, and those who think the GUI is too much like WinXP's and therefore people won't like it.
You can't have it both ways.
There's always a third camp around here (of which I'm a part), which seems to be strangely under-represented in this thread today. This camp believes WinXP is actually a perfectly fine OS, its UI is perfectly functional and easy to use. These people look at Longhorn and think "well, it's no worse than XP, and probably a little better."
Lots of people use Windows XP and lots of people like it. Heck, lots of people even use its new swanky GUI - I do, my wife does, and everyone else I know does too (including most of my co-workers... all of the ones running WinXP, that is). I'm not sure why anybody would expect MS to make any drastic changes to a formula that works, and that a lot of people are used to using. Honestly, the core functions of the GUI haven't changed since Windows 95/NT 4 (which were very similar with the exception of the added administrator functions in the NT 4 GUI). Some of you seem blinded by bright lights - the XP GUI is almost no different than the Win2000 GUI underneath, and what *is* different (the control panel layout, start menu, etc.) can be easily changed back without removing any of the functionality or the prettiness. For my part, I find the new start menu much more useful than the old.
And from what I'm seeing of Longhorn, it's hardly any different from the XP GUI. It's a bit flatter, with fewer 3D effects - an attempt at being a little more tasteful and understated without going back to the ugliness of Win95 (though I'm not a fan of rounded window corners - especially when maximized, they just don't like right). Still has the start button, the systray, the quicklaunch, very few desktop icons, etc. A few new transparency effects on the new sidebar. Honestly, if anything I'm disappointed they haven't made more visual improvements to the UI, though this is still an early build, and most of the visual flash comes last in any software development. I'm sure the final release will look even better than this.
I think you all need to stop expecting Windows to be Linux (or BeOS, or whatever), and accept the fact that not all of us want to worry about customizing every last bit of our GUI or working in terminal consoles to get anything meaningful done. This doesn't mean we don't have "half a brain", it just means we want to spend less time with our OS and more time with our work. But it's nice if the OS looks good out of the box, so we don't *need* to spend time with it to make ourselves comfortable with it.
On the other hand, it seems KDE and Gnome are both trying to move closer to the Windows GUI. They both have "start" buttons of their own, they both have quicklaunch equivalents, etc. They're both even going for eye candy lately. So what are some of you complaining about? This is what most people want, and it's the way most people are used to working. Just deal.
try this one
crowds of zealots with their anti-Microsoft sentiment in hand, ready to propogare their GNU agenda.
I agree - It's terrible!
I met this GNU/Linux guy, and he wanted to give mt a disk with over 5000 peer-reviewed, stable and interesting peices of software. And get this, the fucker even tried to give me the source code!
God, I hate those GNU bastards.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I wrote my own review with a bit more detail and thoughts. It is availible on www.betaone.net as well as below. My review assumes you had seen the previous M3 leaked build so doesnt go into details about the sidebar etc:
.NET (which I was running previously). Even with the WinFS service disabled, the system runs painfuly slow.
----
Well, I finally got around to installing Longhorn build 4008 on my laptop, and have decided to write a mini review. Rather than writing a full review of each possible screen, I will concentrate on changes from previous versions of windows.
Installation
Behind the scenes a lot of changes have happened to the setup program.
* Rather than having all files in one folder (i386) there is now a directory dtructure in 'boot' which resembles the structure of the system once installed.
* Rather than having a text-mode preinstall upon booting the cd which then spawns a graphical setup, the entire Longhorn M4 setup is graphical. This seems to be based on Windows XP PE (preinstall edition).
The changes look very promising, although the GUI is clearly unfinished and seemingly rushed;
* In many places the wording is quite unproffesional
* You are informed you will be informed when you can "just walk away" and "setup will complete on its own". While setup requires little user interaction, you are not informed when your input is no longer required.
* There is a nice treeview for selecting the installation partition, but your options are quite limited. In XP you can select Fat32/NTFS, FULL/QUICK format. In LH M4 the only option you have is a checkbox - "Format this partition (NTFS)".
* The layout will need more work. Currently everything is centered, giving a kind of pyramid look. The previous setup style with several 'panels' proving information looked more visually pleasing.
I am sure the little flaws will be ironed out sooner or later, but one thing is for sure, a lot of work has gone into improving the setup wizard which until now had remained largely unchanged ever since windows 2000.
Visual and Features
When longhorn M4 first starts, you are greeted with a much nicer screen than in Longhorn M3. In M3 there were a lot of visual imperfections and the plex theme looked worse than the luna theme on many windows. Now these imperfections have been ironed out and longhorn looks truly beuitiful as far as visuals are concerned.
The sidebar, in additional to being much nicer visually, now has a few essential features that were missing in M3. Namely, there is a tray icon tile, so you do not lose access to trayed programs when using the sidebar in place of the taskbar.
Glitches, Speed, Stability
I tested M4 on modest hardware - a laptop with a 600Mhz P3 and 128MB of RAM. Longhorn ran SIGNIFICANTLY slower than
After altering the screen resolution the sidebar seemed currupted. Hiding and then reenabling it made the sidebar completly invisible.
Stability is difficult to comment on because I have only been running LH for a short time so far. Till now I have not had a single crash or even error message.
Rant on WinFS's implementation
A lot of effort seems to be going into WinFS. The idea behind it seems brilliant - store files in an SQL like database so you can search for files, run queries, and receive results in a fraction of a second rather than having to wait for the computer to scan through each folder and take several minutes to search through the entire drive. Unfortunatly if the implementation in M4 is anything to go by, MS are going in completly the wrong direction. The new search panel prompts the user to enter a search string "Example: 'Pictures from John' or 'What is a firewall?'". It can search both the local files. This seems very newbie-oriented. Computers are usless at interpreting natural language queries. They should do what they are good at - fast indexing by filenames and keywords in the files contents. Also, searching a local filesystem for a jpeg and searching the internet are two entirely different activities. Combining them into a single search seems to make no sense and will just confuse advanced users.
The current search system in XP is good enough as far as the interface is concerned (at least after you kill the faqing dog - again classic newbie-oriented bloat). You can search by filename, modified/created date, and a files contents. It is layed out in a perfectly logical way, and you know exactly what you are asking the computer to do. If only this was based on SQL and queries lasted under a second it would be perfect. Why replace this clean, logical interface with a textbox claims to supposedly understand plain english questions and automatically decide for you if you are looking for an email message, file, internet document, or application. Pointless artificial intelligence which will be far from perfect. I think ill stick with 'grep' and 'ls -R' - they do everthing I need them to.
It would be nice if it required 4GB of ram thus forcing Intel to release a desktop 64bit chip like AMD is already doing. ;)
hers a link where u can download the .doc file of this review :
"http://www.iebeta.net/modules.php?modid=5&action= show&id=32"
I was thinking of a different bone of contention I have when I said that: FAT32 support, which MS never provided under NT4 right up to SP6A (I mean, the provided it under '95a/b for goodness sake!). They probably thought that it would eat into Win2k sales. I have read-only support of FAT32 with a free driver from System Internals. You can also purchase the driver with full read/write support from Wininternals.
It was a couple of years ago, but I now remember that the problem was that the (SP4-6A) NTFS5 support was half-assed - you could no longer use low level disk tools (including MS's own *cough* tools) if you had NTFS5 under NT4. And that certainly qualifies as NFG IMO.
But that's not what really pissed me off. I knew that and didn't want NTFS upgraded. What pissed me off was that Win2k did it anyway and without warning. And that is unacceptable.
Sigs are bad for your health.
it's not a fake, it's a real beta/alpha piece of software - right down to the 180 day license agreement.
I couldn't get it to go on VM-ware (wouldn't see my VM disk file as a valid disk to install on) so I will just have to leave it at that.
The poster of this story apparently Slashdotted himself?
Nice move.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
A more authorative answer from netcraft:
Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) AuthMySQL/2.20 mod_log_bytes/1.0 mod_bwlimited/1.0 PHP/4.3.0 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 on Linux
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
You have gno idea what you are talking about. I gknow for a fact that gnobody is trying to brainwash you into gnusing GNU/Linux.
Hrm. My comment got modded as 'troll'. While I am trollish, in the physical appearance sense, my comment was not intended as such. .dlls in \windows\system32, which in turn makes me boggle in wonder. For example, there's 7 or so AOL .dlls for displaying 'Art' graphics. Very close in version and size. Why do I have these? That's one of many examples; I'm guessing 75% of the .dlls there, about 200 meg worth of space, is useless and wasted, and never used. 200 meg might not seem like a lot, but, it's a decent Sliders or Buffy episode in divx. So, again, why do I want yet another version of Windows with more useless stuff? As I said in my original post, I'm quite anal. Having empty directories like 'xerox' and 'msn gaming zone' under my programs directory just makes me lose sleep.
I was not soaping linux, or bsd, or even BeOS, for that matter. I was simply responding to the article, and seeing if anyone else felt the same: That the lack of options during an install is a *bad* thing. The only reason I can see for it, is OEM installs, or unattended installs over a network. However, that's what (currently) winnt.sif is for. It works rather well: With a winxp, you can set the initial state to 'classic' mode and never see the, in my opinion, rather gaudy default desktop.
My OSen of choice tend to be the standard wannabe hacker faire, but, I'm 'forced' to use Windows a good bit. Okay, I whore myself so as to be able to eat. It's life. Am I the only one that wonders why yet another 'version' of windows is needed, and why it now installs itself with next to no user input, much like a good virus, just without the whole tiny memory footprint?
WinXP is a nice melding of the 'normal' windows with some stability. As far as M$ produced... 'software', it does rather well. It crashes only about once a week on me, compared to the earlier versions of Windows that crashed with every compile of any program I might be working on. My linux 'router's' currently got an uptime of about 164 days, but we had a power out. Anyway, I only run a web server, smtp daemon, dns, ip masqing, seti, squid, and other trivial programs on there, so there's no reason for it to crash; I use the XP box for major code production (yes, ugly... but, whores need not be pretty, nor what they produce...) so once a week is acceptable.
Why would I be interested in Longhorn? The article doesn't say what's new and super duper about it. Just that it's got a different interface, and, I infer, will install even more bloat, without so much as a click from you.
I had an interesting time the other day with Norton System Works 2003. My personal opinion is that it's a piece of shit. On the other hand, I'm too lazy to go get all the separate pieces that it's got (jv16 Powertools only goes so far). Installing is a bear; I had to remove it, and reinstall, but it doesn't properly remove itself, hence one must do so by hand. That leads to exploring the
What scares me is that there are actually some people here who use Windows by pure choice. Not because they have to in order to make a living, but because they WANT to. Call that trolling, if you will, but until Slashdot's run off... erm, "Longhorn", I think there should still be a place for those of us without "I'm a Bill Gates Acolyte (Wanna play monopoly?)" t-shirts to gently poke fun at it and whatever other 'innovations' to come out of Redmond.
And, seriously, does no one else find installs with no options, and ever changing user interfaces annoying?
ENDP RANT
We can face anything... except for bunnies.
for the blind.
I do a lot of work in the Contact Management industry, and I find it very interesting that this build of Longhorn includes the My Contacts item. My interest in based on the fact that Microsoft has recently released their own competing contact management system (there are 3 or 4 established players in the field) (see Business Week article here).
I really have to wonder whether this is another MS "bundling to gain market share" tactic. We'll see how this turns out, but I really have a bad feeling that the DOJ's failure to split the OS from the application side of the company is going to reduce choice and innovation even further.
> On a side note, are explorer, progman, litestep, etc.,
> really shells?
explorer is a shell. Post Win95, progman and litestep are very limited shells.
The last version of Windows to have a shell in the classic sense of the word was Win3.1: progman (default), winfile, norton desktop, etc.
But explorer.exe is a very *deep* shell, in the sense it provides a (rather rich) set of services (not in the NT services sense) to Win32 apps as well. For example, the FileOpen/FileSaveAs common controls use Explorer to enumerate the system namespace. IIRC, it manages the desktop as well, and show MRU history in dialog boxes.
There's no good way to *really* replace it short of re-implementing each of the shell interfaces, which no one will likely do because (a) it's too much work, (b) too little documentation unless you have access to MS' shell team (c) it probably won't sell very well because most people are so overwhelmingly familiar with explorer now (which is why you'll never see a Norton shell for XP).
Which is why running litestep doesn't take you away from explorer: it runs every time you hit File|Open in notepad.
Bottom line: post-Win95, Windows' shell was just not *designed* to be snap-in replacable (although it is very modular indeed) the way the Win3.1 shell was (or X is).
Which unfortunately makes them look just washed-out and lacking in attitude. It's like the safe corporate version of Aqua, only instead of being Playskool like the previous attempt, this time it's "OK, we'll make it all blurry and stuff!".
God help them, this is pretty sad.
It reminds me of a Roger Ebert review of 'Heaven's Gate': "When you don't enjoy even the physical act of looking at a movie, the director is in deep, deep trouble." Well- Longhorn appears both annoyingly blue, and annoyingly washed-out and contrastless. This is the best they could do? Windows 95 was more appealing, in a crude-but-cheerful way. Do you suppose they know they are downward spiraling?