A Mac Fan's Take On Vista

jcatcw writes "Ken Mingis has been running Vista on a MacBook Pro for a couple of weeks. Highlights from his review: 'Apple's UI is called Aqua. Microsoft calls its interface Aero. Hmmmm... Gadgets and widgets. What's that line about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?... The UAC implementation in Vista is heavy-handed and intrusive — it halts what you're doing, even if you want to do something as simple as change your clock. My sense here is that Microsoft has been criticized so often for security vulnerabilities that it decided to club users over the head with its new operating system-in-lockdown-mode... I'm more enamored of Vista's Flip 3D feature, which basically takes all of the open windows on your desktop, stands them up on end and stacks them in a way that you can cycle through to the one you want to use. It's similar to what Apple's Expose does... Vista's method wins on aesthetics.'"

Comments

Missing out on the real features...

[cybrthng]

I'm not going to copy and paste them here, but check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windo ws_Vista for all of the features & enhancements that really make vista what it is.

The new gui is just a fraction of what Vista offers and i'm amazed at home many people praise it or deteste it based on that single aspect alone.

UAC annoying? Not really, it finally juts alerts you to a change that affects your system as a whole. UAC used to be MUCH more annoying on previous betas but really is a non issue for most people on 5728 or higher because once your running there really isn't much you need to change and being alerted to changes that can impact your system is a good thing.

It takes 2 seconds to disable it if you don't like it. Windows R, msconfig, disable UAC, reboot.

Re:Missing out on the real features...

[oc255]

Yes, home directories have been around for a long time. They moved C:\Documents and Settings\username to C:\Users\username which is the exact path of OSX if you switched it to a UNIX path.

Re:Missing out on the real features...

[artemis67]

You do realize that Konfabulator (which started out on the Mac OS) was nothing more than a return to Apple's Desktop Accessories, which premiered in Mac System 1.0, but Apple started to drift away from with the introduction of System 7? By Mac OS 9, DA's were pretty much dead, and with the introduction of OS X, gone altogether. Konfabulator may have had a lot of influence on the way Apple implemented Widgets, but technically Apple is only returning to a concept that they pioneered in 1984.

Vista

[cybrthng]

Runs on my XP 1700 as a "headless" media center server powering two xbox 360 and handling file share and windows media share for over 10,000 photos and about 7,000 songs. This machine has 1 gig of ram, several 250 gig hard drives and handles recordings with a single tuner at this point in time. Working on a second tuner that will run FireSTB to handle pulling hi-def from my comcast box.

I only have a geforce 4 mx 440 on thre so my score is 1.0 but everything that ran in XP is useable and same performance in vista.. i can swap out video cards and make the desktop fully useable with aero but i like it powering my extenders. Biggest thing i did was optimize the system for services, enable a large cache and dump my recordings on a different drive then what most of my pre-recorded stuff is and have a seperate boot drive as IO is where most of my latency is.

I will be throwing in an XP 2600 becuase i got one off ebay dirt cheap, but there you go. Vista works and it doesn't need a super system like you fellas seem to believe. Beta testers have it working on much lower end systems as well - just add memory.

Re:Aqua, Aero, Terra, Pyro?

[talornin]

That would be "Ignis" UI. Pyro is Greek, Aqua, Terra and Aearo is Latin, thus Ignis is more apropriate ^_^

Re:Painfully Subjective Review

[TheRaven64]

Here's something you could have figured out for me: how efficient are these effects? What's the net cost of having Aqua or Aero? Do these graphical interfaces leave sasquatch sized memory footprints? Are Gadgets & Widgets memory efficient?

Here are some subjective comments from someone who operates two laptops - a ThinkPad running FreeBSD and a PowerBook running OS X - which I hope will answer your questions on the Os X side.

• Aqua is fast. All windows are buffered, and so dragging them around only causes a small CPU spike. This was bigger before Quartz Extreme, because it was all handled on the CPU. Now it's done on the GPU, and even my old S3 ViRGE could handle compositing opaque textures easily (the shadows around the edges, and any transparent windows require a little more power, but not too much).
• Aqua is quite memory intensive. A moderate size window is likely to require about a 3MB buffer. Assuming it's double buffered, guess 4MB (we'll allow for some smaller windows in the average). Now multiply that by the number of windows you have. You're looking at a lot of memory just for this. I don't know how much of it is VRAM, but on my system it amounts to more than my total VRAM so it can't be all unless they use some form of lossless texture compression.
• Widgets have a big memory footprint. Each one seems to have its own instance of the Javascript runtime (probably for security reasons). 20MB of real memory each seems a good approximation. Invoking the dashboard after doing other memory intensive things will cause a lot of swapping.

Widgets, I could easily live without. There doesn't seem much point in having them written in Javascript other than buzzword compliance. Let me write them in a language that doesn't require a hefty runtime (or, at least, one where the runtime overhead can be shared more efficiently), and I might change my mind.

Aqua, however, is worth the cost. Memory is cheap; this machine has 1.5GB in it, which is slightly more than I actually need (it struggles a bit with 1GB, I have some spare in 1.5GB), and it's a couple of years old. If the cost of a more responsive UI is more RAM, I'll pay it. When compositing support stabilises in x.org, I'll probably enable it there as well.

More bugs? Hard to quantify. I've encountered bugs in Quartz (a lot in Quartz 2D Extreme, which is why it's not enabled by default in spite of being faster), and I've encountered bugs in x.org. In a purely hand waving manner, I would say I've encountered more bugs in Quartz, but more serious bugs in x.org, so it probably evens out in the end.

Re:Painfully Subjective Review

[cooley]

from the OP:
Hmmmm... Gadgets and widgets. What's that line about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?...

I'm so tired of hearing this. I'm not disputing that Microsoft took some good ideas from OSX for Vista, but one thing needs clarified. "Widgets" didn't originate in Mac OSX. I was using Konfabulator (now owned by Yahoo) Widgets in both Windows and OSX before 'Widgets" were part of the OS in either.

Seems like I was using gdesklets (more widgets) in Gnome before OSX introduced their Widgets, too.

Since the OSX Widgets are so similar to the pre-existing Konfabulator Widgets (and even share the same name) I guess I just assumed that Apple licensed the Konfabulator software (though I don't know that, it was just an assumption).

I'm not a fanboy of either OSX or Windows, so please don't take this as that sort of slam. I don't have a problem with people noting which ideas have been obviously copied, I just hate to see incorrect statements repeated over and over.