Slashdot Mirror
Longhorn Beta is Disappointing
bonch writes "Well, Longhorn beta 5048 was released a day before the start of WinHEC 2005, suggestive of the fact that it is not terribly impressive. Paul Thurrott (a Windows writer whose previously reported review of Mac OS X Tiger was updated after user feedback) confirmed this today in day two of his blog from WinHEC. Microsoft needed something big to kill the hype of competitors, but screenshots show minor visual updates from the last beta, and to quote Thurrot: 'This has the makings of a train wreck.'"
Longhorn will run fine on a 1GHz computer with 256 MB of RAM
Following on from what you said, considering that the system requirements for XP Pro state a 300MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, the real requirements for this thing could be huge. I'm sure many of you would strongly disagree with the idea that XP can run acceptably with 128MB of RAM.
I'm starting to think that they're at the same point Apple was at in the 90s: every attempt to build a modern successor to OS 9 from scratch crashed and burned horribly.
...
...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
It seems that Apple was working on "an object-oriented OS on top of a new microkernel" in C++ since *1988*, following System *5.0*. They finally gave up on it in 1996, when they bought NeXT, which had many of the same concepts and was released as part of OS X in 2001
It's a lot like reading the history of the space program, isn't it? First you've got airplanes that can go into space being ready any day now, and Mars by 1980, and now we're just happy if we can get satellites into orbit
Check you aren't running the 'nv' NVidia driver or standard SVGA driver if you have an NVidia card. That will make the graphics 'slow', as you describe. A 533MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM should be more than enough. Services that are just sitting there will 'sleep' if they aren't being used, so they shouldn't have too much effect.
The reason the Windows GUI appears 'snappier' is because it runs with the highest priority in the system. Microsoft did this to make its OS appear fast and, probably, because that's what many users want - a system that 'feels' quick. The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero), where 20 is lowest and -19 is highest, and thus competes equally for system resources with web browsers, word processors and the like. Resource- and time- sensitive stuff like CD/DVD burning, music and video playback, and system processes typically run with higher priorities, but most of these are user- (or root-) tunable.
This is a preview build for hardware makers to test their hardware and drivers. It is NOT a beta, it's more of an alpha. NOT feature complete, and NOT meant to show off the capabilities of Longhorn.
Sheesh, people.
At least have the intelligence to tell the diffrence between a beta and a preview build.
Still IMing in the stone age?