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Longhorn Beta is Disappointing

Posted by Zonk on from the time-for-extreme-programming! dept.

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.'"

33 of 1,086 comments (clear)

  1. Train wreck indeed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's even uglier than XP, which is no small feat.

    1. Re:Train wreck indeed by NatteringNabob · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I haven't been able to look at the screenshots as the site appears to be slashdoted, but I find it impossible to believe that any UI could be uglier than XP. My major complaint with XP isn't really the look though, it is the incredible amount of screen space it wastes in favor of eye candy. The first thing I do with an XP machine is set it back to Win95 mode and pick the classic skin for media player (which is truly an abomination with the default skin). Of course, these days I hardly run Windows at all since Fedora Core 3 does everything that I need a computer to do, and does it better and for less money than any version of Windows. I doubt Longhorn will be a train wreck as there are millions of people that will upgrade no matter how good or bad it is, and Microsoft will spend billions persuading them it is the best thing to do. It is amazing that people never catch on to the old wine in a new bottle trick. Of course, in the case of Windows, we aren't just talking about any old wine, we talking about vintage 30 year old Gallo Hearty Burgundy.

    2. Re:Train wreck indeed by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Insightful
      God..Why can't - after 2000, XP and 3 years in development - the HORRID ancient bitmap artwork for "Control Panel" icon, etc. go away!

      This is exactly the lack of focus on essential detail that will make LH a sad, second-level retread of W2K for users. Yeah, it's got an improved driver and development model. Yeah, web services are integrated throughout. It drives like a tank.

      UI is artless and amature. Better work is seen on DeviantArt.com

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    3. Re:Train wreck indeed by Phillup · · Score: 5, Funny

      God..Why can't - after 2000, XP and 3 years in development - the HORRID ancient bitmap artwork for "Control Panel" icon, etc. go away!

      Because Apple doesn't have a control panel icon for them to use?

      (yeah, yeah... I know. System Preferences. It was a JOKE!)

      --

      --Phillip

      Can you say BIRTH TAX
    4. Re:Train wreck indeed by avalys · · Score: 5, Funny

      "For example, XP had the desert dunes wallpaper as default in the beta but switched to the grassy hills wallpaper for the release."

      Uh huh. Quite the paradigm shift, there.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank.
    5. Re:Train wreck indeed by PabloJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "they just need to add new features"

      Not just new features... they have to add features that people actually want. Apple does this.

      For example, Expose was the big hit of Panther, and now Spotlight and Dashboard are going to be the big hits of Tiger. Sure, the performance and GUI enhancements are nice (except for perhaps the Finder), but they are a sideshow.

      Microsoft needs to add something that will make people actually want to upgrade. They can say they will improve security, but that isn't something the average user will notice right away. In fact, it should be something the user doesn't notice at all since the OS should protect them in the first place. Microsoft needs to have something that has a tangible effect on the end user.

      If people can't tell between XP (or 2000, or ME for that matter), they are in for trouble. Then they won't bother purchasing it. But if they see that there is a good reason to upgrade, they will.

      Jaguar and Panther could both play DVDs, surf the web and play games... but Apple came out with features in Panther that made people able to do those things easier and/or better than before.

      My point is that most new features are mostly marketing fluff, and if M$ wants really pull this off, they have to offer something truly innovative and useful.

    6. Re:Train wreck indeed by loconet · · Score: 5, Funny

      Because the Control Panel is tightly integrated into the OS and thus the icon cannot and MUST NOT be changed. You cannot change the icon colours without changing the way the calc.exe does addition, if you change calc.exe, Windows Explorer will change to a maroon colour which then will result in kernel32.dll not being found which is needed by notepad.exe and thus it will not start-up and if notepad doesn't start, Internet Explorer will need to work "Offline" and we know what happens when Internet Explorer is "Offline", you cannot login to MSN Messenger!

      --
      [alk]
  2. Pre beta review by Joe+U · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow, a pre-beta release that isn't feature complete has 'the makings a train wreck'.

    Give me a break, it's not even considered beta 1.

    It's like complaining about interior design of an unbuilt house.

    'OMG, I didn't want open walls and exposed wires! I wanted green wallpaper.'

    1. Re:Pre beta review by Joe+U · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would be very suprised if the shell was a high priority in beta 1, especially when they are changing the graphics subsystem and parts of the file system.

      You can't go and toss up a new shell using new technology that hasn't been designed yet. Wait till RC1 to review.

    2. Re:Pre beta review by daviddennis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It does seem interesting that they've been shedding features, seemingly backing off from most of the things that were supposed to make Longhorn special. In the mean time, Apple's powering along and giving Mac users exactly what was promised in versions of MacOS X. I think that's a bad sign by any standard.

      Another bad sign is that they claimed that it would be finished in mid-2006 and now it's "holiday" 2006. So in theory they might release December 24th now.

      As I remember them, betas of MacOS X were feature-complete but very slow, and then speeds improved as the release got closer. I wouldn't expect enough changes in the interface to make it less than disappointing to these reviewers.

      Those indications make me feel the Longhorn project is in deep trouble.

      *

      I worked in a job when I had to support mainstream (non-computer people) with Windows systems.

      Most of them seemed to like the Windows XP interface better because it was more cheerful. In fact, a few of them even liked Hotbar and didn't appreciate my suggestion to improve their slug-like performance by removing it. It was, after all, pretty.

      So don't expect that everyone acts like a geek and removes it. I'm a pretty hardcore geek myself and even I prefer XP's interface to Windows 2000's gray Depression City.

      Of course I prefer MacOS X to either, but you get the idea.

      D

    3. Re:Pre beta review by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Wow, a pre-beta release that isn't feature complete has 'the makings a train wreck'.

      If Microsoft want to compare OS 10.4 with Longhorn as if Longhorn is a finished product, can you really blame everyone else for treating it the same way?

  3. sarcasm by DarkHelmet · · Score: 5, Funny
    What is he talking about?

    No more Super Mario Land default theme! I'd say that's a step forward.

    --
    /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
  4. Screenshots? by JUSTONEMORELATTE · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He's complaining that the screenshots aren't very different? I thought the point of Longhorn was primarily the changes within the OS internals.
    I could pop a Ferrari engine into a Pinto, and this guy would complain about the air freshener hanging from the mirror.

    --
    get a free laptop

    1. Re:Screenshots? by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, it wouldn't flip itself -- as soon as the rear bumper touched the ground it would blow up!

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  5. ME? by shamowfski · · Score: 5, Funny

    Train Wreck nothing. If we are going to refer to unreleased software as a trainwreck, then what the hell are we going to call Windows ME?

  6. The build for WinHec is a build for driver makers by km790816 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It was made very clear that the build for WinHec was soley provided as a platform to test driver compatability. MS still has a couple of months until it releases Beta 1.

    Please hold your flame till then.

    --
    A speech...
  7. Screenshots by FriedTurkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I actually like the new look. It is 20 times better than the default XP theme. I have to switch every XP work machine to "Classic" because I hate the "Fisher-Price" coloring scheme of XP. Computers should look professional and not like "My First Computer".

  8. Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None by rpozz · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Black boxes... by MisterLawyer · · Score: 5, Funny

    "This has the makings of a train wreck."

    Shouldn't that say plane wreck now that Microsoft is using black boxes?

  10. Fester... by Stanistani · · Score: 5, Funny

    >to quote Thurrot: 'This has the makings of a train wreck.'

    *Dons engineer cap and lights cigar*

    Just call me Gomez Addams!

    --
    You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
  11. Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None by Loki_1929 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "I'm sure many of you would strongly disagree with the idea that XP can run acceptably with 128MB of RAM."

    Windows XP runs fine on 128MB of RAM. The problem comes when you try to install or run applications which require any memory whatsoever.

    But Windows XP runs fine on 128MB of RAM.

    --
    -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
  12. Wow by Pike · · Score: 5, Funny

    The commenters on Paul's site are even more juvenile than we are.

  13. Shadows in the shadow world by magarity · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Recycle Bin icon casts a shadow to the left. All the other shadows, including RB's own text, casts shadows to the right. Is it because the RB is itself in a shadow world halfway between here and oblivion??? Such subtle metaphysical goings-on in Longhorn!

    1. Re:Shadows in the shadow world by As+Seen+On+TV · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I just checked each of these on my machine.

      Activate Dashboard, the iChat/Volume/Battery/Clock menus in the menu bar still work and pop up over the Dashboard layer.

      Not correct. A click outside a widget dismisses Dashboard.

      Open a .pdf in Preview, activate Dashboard, and the cursor will change to a hand as it floats over the (dimmed and unclickable) document.

      Not correct. Outside widgets, the cursor is an arrow regardless of context.

      Dashboard Translation widget, click the 'swap' button several times and the focus ring will flicker madly

      I wasn't able to reproduce this. I don't know what you meant by "several." I clicked it 20 times. No error.

      Finder, start renaming a file and the insertion caret will flicker twice on each keystroke until the name wraps to the second line

      That was an occasional bug in 8A425. Are you using a pirated copy?

      System Preferences/Mail, now showing the third major window style on the system (Aqua, Metal, and now Plastic)

      No, that's Aqua.

      Spotlight, randomly fails to index non-boot-drive partitions

      Obviously not reproducible. Spotlight will not index a volume if there's insufficient free space available. We look for about 1/10th of one percent, if I remember correctly.

      Your response may be "oh well, they're all minor"

      No, my response is "Please stop using pirated copies of Tiger that you download off the Internet and then complaining about them."

    2. Re:Shadows in the shadow world by As+Seen+On+TV · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes, that explains why companies like Apple, and even Microsoft in their own, glacial way, are innovating on a fundamental level while Linux is ...you know. Not.

      I'm being totally serious now: Linux is easily twenty years behind Apple. Seriously. Think about where all the attention is going: Human-user interface design. That was Apple in 1985. Today, Apple is doing no-shit innovation.

      Even little things make a huge difference. Linux, being almost a file-by-file clone of Unix, is crippled by a vast and interdependent web of system watchdog services. There's init, there's inetd, there's watchdogd, there's cron, all separate and overlapping services whose job it is to start services. All complex, all in need of configuration. What did we do? We scrapped it all, replacing the whole mess with launchd. A single service with XML (meaning self-checking) configuration files.

      Do you know what happens on a Unix machine if your inittab file contains garbage data? The system refuses to boot! With XML configuration files, a config file that fails to validate will simply be ignored. The system will run in a degraded state until the file is corrected.

      It's stuff like that. Yes, we're doing big-time flashy innovation with things like Core Data and Spotlight. Those are no-shit world-changing things. But we're not just glomming new services onto old infrastructure. We're evolving the operating system, replacing things that are dumb with things that make more sense.

      So tell me again, oh please, how Mac OS X is a 20th-century concept.

  14. To be fair by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    MS has been working on Longhorn even longer than they worked on Windows 95. So its appropriate to comment on the state of the beta after billions of dollars of work over a long period of time.

    After 4 years, if this is all they can show, then I'm buying stock in Apple, because if MS attempts to "lock down" digital "rights", then people will be sprinting towards the Mac platform just as fast as they can to get away from this abortion of an OS.

    1. Re:To be fair by killjoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You never know. IF they can't play the music they already paid for or watch the movies they already paid for or play some cute foreign commercial their friend sent them, then it could happen.

      --
      evil is as evil does
  15. Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None by As+Seen+On+TV · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Calling something disastrous "a train wreck" is a long-established idiom that isn't going to just go away because a train wrecks. And frankly, I think calling it "an unfortunate choice of words" is just a big, steaming load of language-police bull crap.

  16. It Just Works!(tm) by SamMichaels · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Looks exactly like XP using an OS X theme...but remember kids, It Just Works!(tm)

    Although I'm glad they've decided to use technology created in the late 60s (which SCO owns and Al Gore invented) as well as a lovely new password scheme guaranteed to create jobs in the IT support workforce from all the clueless office lemmings. Not to mention how IE7 won't be exclusive to Longhorn nor will WinFS be included.

    So like I said...we're paying $299 for XP with an OS X theme.

  17. Re:They can't ever do the "right" thing. by FLAGGR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Have you seen that start menu? More usable? It's got a motherfucking scrollbar inside of a fucking menu.

    Whats next, a row of ugly windows tabs, with some hidden, or even better multiple rows of tabs?

  18. Re:The buttons make perfect sense by Fred+Foobar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Go" doesn't in any way mean "restart" to me. How on earth did you get that association (besides looking at the text below the button)?

    --
    It was a really good paper.
  19. Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Why MS ever come up with the concept that an OS was suuposed to be anything but a platform on which to run apps. I do not give a rat's ass about the OS. The OS doe not do any real "work." When it get in the way of apps, it is no longer of any value.

    It probably helps to think of Windows in two different terms. 1) the Operating System 2) The environment. The OS probably changes very little from major release to major release. The environment, however, with all those background tasks, DLLs, pretty widgets and sounds are what seems to gobble up the majority of resources.

    MS keeps bloating the OS, making apps ever less convenient and usable. MS seems hell-bent on "developing" itself out of business.

    On the contrary, I think they've got some people who don't give a rat's patoot about hardware or kernel particulars, but just want a warm fuzzy computing experience and that is what they target. That and making sure there's always some incremental improvement which keeps you coming back every couple years and upgrading Windows or Office.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  20. Re:Jack of All Trades, Master of None by Handpaper · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.