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Tom's Hardware Looks at Microsoft Vista Beta
RockClimbingFool writes "Tom's Hardware has a pretty good overview of what the current beta version of Microsoft Windows Vista has to offer. The article is written from an average user's perspective, specifically highlighting exactly which differences the average computer user can expect to see from Windows XP to Windows Vista. It covers everything from IE7, to the new Windows Aero interface, to brand new games." But if you'd like your eye candy open source and downloadable now, check out Lunapark6's review of the current version of Ubuntu Dapper, with "emphasis placed on helping someone set up the system for everyday desktop usage."
Nice article posting, but was it necessary to shill for Ubuntu as part of the post? Advocacy is one thing, but it's really starting to get out of hand around here.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
And this is relevant to the article how ... ?
It does nothing good for the Open Source movement to desperately insert some plug at any opportunity. It just reinforces the notion that it *needs* the desperation (which may not be false, but that's another subject). See also: religious cults, Amway (or any MLM), smokers who quit, Libertarians, and the Apple Macintosh. If people just want you to Shut Up Already, you're not helping your pet movement.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
But if you'd like your eye candy open source and downloadable now... Now I understand the Slashdot bias, but some of us are just genuinely interested in the progression of computing; and yes, a new version of Windows qualifies. Not EVERY article needs to be an ad for Linux. Yes, I tried it, and yes it was neat. That's...well, that's pretty much it. I'm still going to use a Mac, I'm still going to dual-boot Windows when needed, and I'm still going to be interested in occasionally reading articles that don't mention Linux whenever the words "operating system" appear...
Well I was able to get through about 30 pages of this "review" and pretty much gave up. Hundreds of screen captures of Vista "stuff" with a caption describing said capture does not a review make.
So, I went to the last page to work my way back for summary and recommendation info. Turns out, last page is the summary. Save yourself some time, the gist of this article is:
This is a review?
No big deal to fix though. All I had to do was edit the xorg.conf found in /etc/X11 and change the driver from nvidia to vesa.
I stopped reading when I got to this point.
If this is supposed to be "Linux For The Masses" and it (1) can't recognize common commodity video cards correctly, and (2) requires you to hand-edit a config file to correct the situation...
Well, let's just say I won't be recommending it to Mom anytime soon.
40 pages?
Fourty. Fucking. Pages?
Look, Tom's hardware used to be a useful site. It's not anymore. Stop posting their paginated ad-cancer garbage until they realize that so long as they make their stuff intentionally difficult to read, people won't read it.
Out there is not in here. The typical /. denizen is more than aware of the alternatives.
You know, Windows has some legacy junk, which hopefully
ReactOS(or a fork of it, once it is stable) will address/remove.
* DOS back slashes. Internet/C/UNIX slashes should be used. While windows internally understands '/' in filenames, many command utilities rely on '/' for flags.
* Two char dos new line. There is no real reason to keep using \r\n in text files to represent a new line. It wastes one byte for every line of every text file.
* Drive Letters are an obsolete and limiting concept. a 'fstab', simple drive labling, or windows junction points can all replace these 24 single letter drive names.
* A real console/terminal window. Yes, an xterm or similar that has real scroll bars, real cut/pass, understands terminal protocols and has a 'curses' interface that lets you run console apps locally or remotely.
So, I'm a tech security consultant.
I only bring it up because it means I see about a zillion different companies and talk to their IT Directors/CIOs/Whatevers, Fortune 500 down to Dave's Community Bank-member FDIC, every week.
They are all Microsoft shops. Yeah, they have some small-u unix boxes (various flavors of linux, bsd, solaris, or etc.) running important stuff. But the core of their network, the centralized authentication servers and groupware servers (read Active Directory and Exchange) -- which means their app servers are typically Microsoft-based even if their DB and web servers aren't -- serve the core of what they do.
None of them have any interest in Vista. Many have recently in the past year or two finally rid themselves of the last vestiges of 9x boxes. Basically, Windows 2000 satisfied any and all needs they had. Everyone running Windows 2003/R2 had a Microsoft partner consultancy come in to "help" them with their network.
That's not to say they're anxious to jump to other platforms. Most show at least mild interest in my choice of a 12" PowerBook G4 to travel with and would start switching if "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft". But no one is ready to start seriously investigating a wholesale switch to a non-Microsoft OS on desktops or servers.
There are many reasons for this.
But the core point is that enterprises have been pretty happy with their core OS since circa 2000. Everything since then is just features added to satisfy some niche constituency.
Vista would be dead on arrival if the PC manufacturers weren't so in bed with Microsoft that everyone who buys a PC after Xmas of 2007 had it coming to them by default. The reason OS X and Ubuntu, et al, are seeing their market share creep up is because they have finally caught up to the feature set and a bit of the mind share Microsoft had 6-7 years ago.
The computers in my house -- including my wife and kid's -- run OS X. My computers at work run Win XP, OS X, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Open BSD. I am familiar with Win Server 2k and 2k3, many Linux distros, and various flavors of Unix.
Operating systems are a solved problem. The devils are in various niche details. Rational people with complete information (I heart Adam Smith) should be running OS X on the desktop and whatever they want/have to use on the server.
Flame at will.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
If you really believe all those points, then I don't think you've used Linux for very much or on sophisticated hardware. XGL support, while looking good, is buggy and immature, not all software is under the package manager and updating manually installed software can be a pain, easier to use than Windows? On what world? For many basic tasks I could agree that the ease-of-use is probably about even, but I wouldn't call Ubuntu easier. Easy to install? On this one I think Windows still remains quite easier, even if Dapper does bring with it a lot of improvements. No drivers? The kernel has come a long way, but there is still quite a bit it doesn't know. I've never installed Linux for desktop use that I didn't have to spend quite a bit of time making all the hardware work right. Ubuntu is doing a lot to make it easier for the average user to use Linux, but it's still got a long way to go before ease of use can compare to Windows.
I love my sig.
Congratulations, you've just discovered how all of us who run Windows 2000 have been feeling for the last few years.
Microsoft has been holding back features from Win2000 for ages to encourage uptake of XP. Perhaps the most annoying example is their ClearType screen-font technology for LCDs; ClearType is XP-only, for reasons that I've never found particularly compelling. And the last two versions of Windows Media Player have been XP-only too. There's no reason that stuff couldn't be made to run on XP, given that XP is just 2000 with a facelift; so it's no surprise that they would pull the same act with Vista.
Read my blog.
Your post seems to emphasize the negative sides of your experience with Linux. But as Columcille put it in his reply to my post, it is all a question of perspective. I would like you to look at your experience from another viewpoint, so look at my comments below...
What happened to you here is NOT the norm in Ubuntu. For most users, Ubuntu correctly detects and configures the sound & graphic cards. It's not 100% reliable (else you wouldn't be here to complain), but you shouldn't assume it to be totally unreliable either :-) The current situation is already rather good (it works in most cases), and the Ubuntu developers are continuing their efforts to fix the remaining cases. So you should expect it to work when you install Ubuntu on another box.
Enabling the secondary video output is indeed a feature that often relies on chipset-specific features and there is no common API in Linux to configure this. Which explain your problems. Not a lot of work has been put into making this feature more user-friendly because only a minority of desktop users need it. I am not trying to justify the poor support for it, I am just explaining the current state of affairs. So once again please realize you belong to those 10% of users that, unfortunately, need to use something that has not yet been made user-friendly in Linux in general. The remaining 90% of Linux users don't care at all about this feature so it is not a pb for them (IOW you shouldn't expect your bad experience as something that HAS to happen to anybody trying out Linux).
Why did it take you a long time ? You may not realize it, but your current knowledge of Windows apps is something that has taken you months/years to acquire. You seem to think that somehow, it's not normal that Linux doesn't provide you with a similar knowledge almost "instantly and magically" :-) But the truth is that, as with Windows, you have to gain this knowledge by yourself. So you shouldn't see that as an inconvenient of Linux only. This is an inconvenient present in ALL OSes.
Also something that upsets me (and this thread proves it once again) is that EACH time people criticize Linux (and they have the right to do it since Linux is not perfect), somehow NOBODY ever points out the current huge flaws inherent to Windows environments in general. Namely: no package management system, no way to fully upgrade the system, quality of third party drivers not guaranteed, lack of innovation (Windows == one of the last OS to have been ported to AMD64), vendor lock-in, poor security track record, costly proprietary applications, forced h/w upgrades (Vista will require 512 MB of RAM), poor interoperability with other systems in enterprise environments, etc.
Whoooah! I agree in principle, but my non-geek friends don't: my experience with Ubuntu has been great overall on 2 laptops and 1 desktop. I'm a ~100% Linux user, except when my new laptop doesn't work and I have 3 days to get my presentation ready ;-) ...but Ubuntu is still a long way from polishing off those two issues, so that an average Desktop user doesn't have to use CUI (they don't like it) to mend something. There have been examples I have with each box that fit into the driver categories:
nvidia cards - they're quite common, aren't they?
wireless cards
bluetooth mice (needs CUI & editing configuration files, in my experience)
mounting disks isn't desktop-user-friendly (NTFS writing? + my USB pen & CD-RW disks frequently mount as read-only; the update script for my mp3 player only works if I plug into a specific USB slot, but not the others)
I've not known trouble with windows for these. It's not Linux at fault, but it is an inhibitory step towards switching for an average desktop user. And there is a long way to go.
Please don't use the "you're only 10% of the userbase" argument. It really upsets a lot of Firefox & Linux users (myself included). ;-)
There's enough Windows-bashing on slashdot as it is. But I prefer to focus on improving things in Linux than FUD-ing Windows.