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Windows Longhorn Beta for June Release
An Anonymous Reader writes "According to CNET, the Windows Longhorn Beta 1 is supposedly set for release this June. The Register has commentary on the delays the new OS has faced." From the article: "Longhorn was originally supposed to ship in 2004. In May, this year release was pushed back to 2005. This week Longhorn's availability has been delayed even further, with Microsoft execs declining to say when exactly the operating system might ship, eWeek reports."
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The next two years, will be the last chance to get Linux on the consumer desktop.
.NET code on your machine. Kind of like applets, but the entire webapp will be built out of them. Just think about the possibilities there.
Once Longhorn comes out, Microsoft will again be so far ahead, it won't be easy, or even possible, for enthusiasts to catch up. Right now they're essentially standing still. They've put all their efforts into LH, there's nothing going on with XP except for service packs/bugfixes. Now is the perfect time to release a really polished Linux desktop that would be simple to setup and use.
When Longhorn comes out, Microsoft, and folks who develop for Windows, will surge ahead REALLY fast.
Here's why:
1. The entire OS will be accessible through a set of managed APIs. This makes coding 10 times easier and faster, and raises productivity to unprecedented levels. This also makes buffer overflows and some other security issues a thing of the past.
2. New, resolution independent, vector based, GPU-enabled UI engine. Two years from Longhorn release people will be buying 200+ DPI displays because things look a lot better on them. What's KDE/Gnome users gonna do? That's right, try to discern tiny non-scalable icons on these displays.
3. Completely new UI, including some significant paradigm changes.
4. Seamless integration of client and server side (that's what XAML is all about, IMHO). Your webapps will actually run sandboxed
5. Reliable Web Services - Indigo, web services that don't suck. More importantly, web service protocol that's supported by the majority of computers in the world (when most people upgrade). And you can bet your ass they will upgrade, just like a couple of years after W95 was released almost everyone ran W95.
The most important thing is, all of this will be available to Windows users out of the box, without any tweaking/recompiling/downloading dependencies. That's where the real strength of this all is. Developers will be able to rely on this stuff when building next-gen apps and be reasonably sure that if a user runs Longhorn, the app will run there.
It's time to stop copying Windows XP, folks. It's time to start copying Longhorn. Gnome devs have already realised that.
You sir are a nut
It's time to stop copying Windows XP, folks. It's time to start copying OS X. Unfortunately, nobody from KDE or Gnome seems to realize this.
::gasp::. These are all opinions, of course. Besides, if everyone copied OSX (or XP, or whatever) then what would be the point? All the OSes would look the same.
Well.. I just have to respond to that. Look, not everyone thinks that OSX looks nice. No, really. It's true. Some of us think it looks worse than XP