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Early Testers Say Vista RC1 Not Ready
digihome writes "A number of partners and analysts who have downloaded Vista RC1 say the code is solid but they are not convinced it will be ready for release this fall. A Directions on Microsoft analyst said, 'I would call this at best a Beta Three and not a Release Candidate One.'"
If MS hadn't been promising it for so long, it wouldn't be such a disappointment. IE7 is finally out, put it on a client's laptop, and it doesn't look that bad. I haven't seen it do anything terrible yet, but now that I've been using FF, I'm not really excited about the look and feel of it at all. I'll probably have the same 'oh, it looks a bit crayola-ish' reaction to Vista too. Oh well, as long as MS is trying to keep up with the rest of the world, all can't be bad.
Seriously though, all the people that are trying to predict this or that, call it good, or denounce it already.. well, all I have to say to that is wait for Vista SP2 before you make up your mind. That's when all the bugs will be worked out, and by then, two or more Linux distros will be better than Vista. By then, many more people will have figured out that the OpenOffice apps are good enough for what they want, and the little lightbulb in their heads will turn on and they will realize that a computer doesn't need MS products to be useful or relevant.
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It's safe to say that this is the most disputed release of any operating system made by Microsoft. The software giant has not had huge delays prior to this release and therefore it had not yet stressed out a pre-Vista product like it is doing it now.
Microsoft loses whatever they do from now on. If they delay the product even further, share holders will complain and people will lose faith in them. If they release it too soon (i.e. as currently planned), it is likely going to require significant upgrades and probably also a super fast SP1 upgrade. That too will make people upset and techies will have to upgrade computers over and over again.
I am a Windows XP user and I must say that I am satisfied with this product as it is right now. I am not going to upgrade to Vista before we see the first, second and third wave of reactions.
Full Tilt
Has a Red Hat, Suse, Debian build ever come out bug free. Hard to say since so many of the packages that you can install via apt or whatever are not really associated. If apache has a bug it's apache's fault, not Windows.
This is a major disadvantage, but also a major advantage that both Windows and Mac to some extent share.
With any software you have to get it out the door. It'll never be perfect, and no matter how long they wait there will be an SP1 fairly soon.
To me what RC1 means is that nothing big and fancy is going to get ADDED. What you see if pretty much what you get. If a major flaw is found they might rearrange a piece of functionality, but most things are going to be bug fixes.
While in Beta they might completely take something out. In RC you probably are not going to get away with it, although you migth "delay" something to SP1 like Microsoft did with database mirroring in SQL 2005 in order to get it out the door.
As much as I hate patching, I'd rather get it out in the field and get some use out of it. Early adopters will get hit the hardest, but that is what they expect. Dell and the other manufactors will be the ones finding most of the bugs from now on anyways.
Every software product is rushed. Nothing large is ever released perfect, there are always known problems and things you could have done better.
As for Windows, the NT line has always been pretty solid. You could always install RC1 and expect it to work normally with maybe a driver going crazy every few days. Final releases were always an improvement in overall user experience from the previous version. (Though not an improvement in overall stability as it's pretty hard to beat the previous version that has been through every imaginable scenario on millions of computers.)
Vista seems to be another story. If you analyze the Beta and RC timeline of every NT-line OS up to now, you see that Vista is abberation. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is lowering its standards in order to push the product out, and that's just going to turn around and bite it in the ass.
Service packs: They are a mix of patches and new functionality. We also do that in the Linux world, just in smaller steps as there is less to worry about compatibility and localization.
And stop badgering Windows 95. It looks lame now but it kicked ass on 4 MB computers with broken hardware back in 95. It ushered process isolation many years before Macs got it. It ushered a reasonably good UI many years before Linux got it. Plug & Play, ugly as it was, brought the end to fiddling with jumpers which is something that 99 percent of the population doesn't know how to do. It ran all your DOS and Win 3.1 stuff. So go easy on it. It may suck by today's standards, but in that day and age it was miles better than any of the alternatives.
Am I the only one who sees "Completely new TCP/IP Stack" and thinks "Massive security holes bound to be lurking just below the surface?"
Why would you rewrite the stack that you (finally) got the damn bugs out of?
I guess it technically isn't re-writing, since they lifted the majority of the stack from BSD in the first place, but hey, did this wheel really need to be reinvented?
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
I'm not sure Windows takes this category either. It's true that Linux has some big WiFi problems (WPA and chipset support, namely), but my experience with wifi in Windows has been even worse (!) than my Linux experience. Setting up WPA worked, although my successes and failures seemed to occur randomly. When actually using WiFi, I get failed connections, random disconnections, and the like regularly. Currently, my computer connects to the access point just fine, but all the while it tells me I'm disconnected. After five minutes or so it loses the connection and I get to wait for Windows to go through its exceedingly slow connection process again. On top of that, it's nearly impossible to figure out what's going on from the Windows wireless network configuration screens.
By way of contrast the same computer, running Linux, connects perfectly and stays that way, even if I turn off the antenna for a while. It works so well that I never even use the wired interface. On the other hand, I wasn't able to get WPA working when I tried it. I haven't taken a look at it for a while, so the software may have matured.
I'm not trying to say that Linux is particularly good with WiFi, just that Windows's wireless networking is as screwy as the rest of the OS.