Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/31/windows_vis ta/print.html
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.
Yeah it's a great review! I was on the edge of my seat when they were going through how they changed the look and feel of the newest and greatest parts of windows, solitare and minesweeper! I just can't wait to get my hands on a copy of vista now that I know that they've updated the card games to look flashier! I can't see how OS X can hope to compete against a (for the first time ever mind you) completly reworked version of Spider Solitare.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
The first things I notice:
1.) This review is forty pages. Thanks, toms hardware [next] for really cashing [next] in on those ad [next] impressions. They've been doing this for years, and if they didn't actually have substance to their reviews, it would be remarkably annoying. Err. Something.
2.) The very first screenshots of the Aero vs. Vista Basic interfaces look identical. Just to make sure, I loaded them up in photoshop. The "preview" window is exactly the same between the two. What?
Still reading...
sig?
Yeah, my submission was only the italizied part. That other garbage is just submission crapping.
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.
If I'm not up to "read" 40 pages of screenshots, what, besides gfx of the UI (which has been already backported to XP as "skins") has changed in Windows?
o ws_Vista. Some notable features include:
A rather extensive list can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Wind
-New network stack
-New audio stack
-New driver framework
-New printing architecture
-New windowing system (DWM)
There are a substantial number of 'behind the scenes' changes in Vista. But for some reason the Slashdot crowd seems to think that the UI is the only thing that's changed. Oh well.
I've been suffering XP for almost six years now. Is this beta going to define Windows for the NEXT six years? If so, I'm unimpressed.
Don't get me wrong. I welcome a much needed update to Windows. The features of Vista, however, aren't quite wowing me. The performance should be worse than XP given the heaftier requirements. There's still no WinFS, promised back in '96. The Win64 API is pretty bad (I'm a developer). Other than eye candy and clones of the most popular Mac OS features, what will I be getting for my money?
Stability, performance, and enterprise features are what I want... not an updated Minesweeper. Will the Bluetooth protocol stack be less problematic than XP's? I hope so. Will they support WPA2 natively, without 170MB of updates? Will IPV6 be native? How about IPSEC support? Will it actually work this time? How bad is the new Windows shell? Is it close enough to Bash or even csh to be useful? What's Task Manager like? Do I still have to wait seconds for it to appear when a process runs amok? Does the UI remain responsive during heavy calculations (I do a lot of 3D)? Can I install games without worrying about which version of DirectX is installed? Will the new version of Office install things I'll have to disable, like toolbars, fast find, and Word integration into Outlook express? Do I still need to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to do things?
These reviews rarely touch on any issue that's actually important to me. Yes, it looks pretty and it should dammit. But does it work as well as it looks? That's what really matters. Microsoft keeps pulling features and slipping the release date. I doubt the reviewers remember Cairo.
I beta tested Windows 95 / Chicago and recall how slow that thing was. The production release was hardly much faster, despite the assurances. In fact, the beta versions of Windows 95 ran more stable, IMO. The graphics were even slicker. I ran Win95 beta until Microsoft shipped OSR2. It was a matter of necessity.
When will Ars Technica do a thorough review? That I might be interested in.
Personally, I am looking forward to the Windows gadgets. I mean what a great idea!! Who could have thought of something so ingenius...
Nobody ever lost their job at Slashdot for dissing Windows.
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.
I wish they'd made an argument or two to support that conclusion. After reading TFA (or rather looking at it, it's very low-wordage), I have come to the conclusion that it has a very nice user interface, it will be easier for average people to use, and if the security features work as advertised, they might have that particular problem licked. I think it will also spur the Windows fanboys to make hundreds of pronouncements about Vista's unquestioned superiority over Mac OS X, on the basis of two interlocking arguments:
These things given, Vista is a better operating system. But...
I think BillG and SteveB are convinced that MS will become the American Megatrends of the Internet-connected future if they don't take the lead and kill Google, which is causing them to gamble big on web services -- I just don't see such things as the end-all that the Win32 OS is.
If MS really wanted to make money off web services, they'd fully adopt open web standards, and then buy a telco or 3.
2 cents
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
Funny, I re-installed XP only 6 months ago and had to spend hours just getting the OS up and running with updates and drivers and such. Then another several hours putting on applications such as Visual Studio, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc, and I'm not including games. Just over the weekend I installed Fedora Core 5 and after an install that took less time than Windows I spent about 1 hour running the updates and had myself a usable workstation, with Anjuta, OpenOffice, Firefox (with plugins), etc. And no, this isn't new hardware. All my hardware was purchased before Windows XP was released, so the age of the OSs shouldn't be a problem when it comes to drivers.
But maybe you were counting customizing the look and feel. Because most distros don't come with Nerzhul as the destop wallpaper I had to do that, whereas for windows it's just the blank blue for me. So yeah, you have to spend a little time customizing Linux, but at least you can do it, whereas for Windows you get what they decide looks nice to the eyes.
In case anyone is wondering, Nerzhul goes on Linux because I can make everything blend in better with a dark wallpaper, whereas the simple blue on Windows blends in better with the blue-ish theme in XP.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
I have been using, contributing, and developping source code for alternative OSes and various open source projects since 1998; all of my 5 personal boxes have been running Linux/BSD only since 2000; and 95% of the server and desktop machines I have installed or administered at my previous and current jobs have been running Linux/BSD. So I think I have a pretty good view on the advantages (and inconvenients) of alternative OSes.
Let me reply to your questions. It is true that Xgl is very new and will continuously need to improve. It is true that not ALL apps are packaged by Ubuntu, however with a current count of 17,000+ it is way enough for an average desktop user (I have personally only had to package myself obscure command-line tools that nobody else should ever need). However you are fundamentally wrong when stating that "it has still got a long way to go" for the desktop user. The remaining issues can basically all be regrouped under 2 banners: "lack of open source drivers" or "lack of proprietary software XYZ under Linux". Those 2 things are VERY important, but the whole framework for a successful operating system is already here. If your hardware has open source drivers and if you don't depend on a particular proprietary application, then there are virtually nothing preventing you from fully enjoying Ubuntu as a desktop user. Unfortunately I also recognize that it is apparently going to take quite some time to convince the remaining "closed" hardware vendors to release open specs of their devices, and that commercial software vendors are also only very slowly starting to consider Linux as a target OS.
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.