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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.'"

25 of 499 comments (clear)

  1. Painfully Subjective Review by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'll just out and say it -- Ken Mingis is just looking for bells & whistles. He's not in search of the 'best' operating system, just looking for the one that can waste CPU cycles while making the user ooh and ahh.

    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? Does all this extra shit cause any more bugs than a regular operating system without them?

    Big deal. Call me when you write an object review. I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it. Not all of us have the new intel core 2 duos.

    Congratulations, four pages of inundating me with ads, bitching about UAC & falling head over heels for Aero. Sounds like every other Vista review I've read.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Painfully Subjective Review by finkployd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Big deal. Call me when you write an object review. I want to know which of these operating systems will run on my old ass laptop with a low end P4 in it. Not all of us have the new intel core 2 duos.

      Neither, you will run XP or Linux/Solaris/*BSD, those are your options. Or buy a new computer, which is really what they want.

      To put it another way, Apple and Microsoft could very easily produce a modern *-lite version of their respective OSes and sell them to people with older or not maxed out hardware and probably keep a high percentage of the population happy with just that. However that will not help Apple (or MS's hardware partners) sell new machines that most people don't really need, so it will not happen.

      Excluding gamers, developers, and people who work a lot with media (photoshop, video editing, etc), a 500Mhz box running windows 98 with office, outlook, and IE serves the vast majority just fine, but where is the profit in that?(*)

      And even though Gnome and KDE are not doing much better, fortunetely there exists fluxbox and xfce for those who think an 1GHz P3 should still be usable as a desktop machine.

      (*) note: windows 98 is criminally insecure, and not being patched anymore, I don't recommend you do this.

      Finkployd

    2. Re:Painfully Subjective Review by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:Painfully Subjective Review by cooley · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
    4. Re:Painfully Subjective Review by finkployd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What you miss, is those new UI features. Are they really that important?

      A better question is: "without those new UI features, is Vista really that important?"

      Most of the really cool features have long been stripped out of Vista, so you are effectivly paying a lot of money for XP+DRM, which is clearly the real reason for Vista to exist.

      Finkployd

    5. Re:Painfully Subjective Review by dan828 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yep. And I've already been told by one of the Mac faithful about this great new feature that will be in Leopard called "spaces", where you'll be able to have multiple virtual desktops, not knowing that Linux has had such functionality for years.

  2. Well... by e2ka · · Score: 4, Funny

    What's that line about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?

    I think it goes something like "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"

    1. Re:Well... by Chacham · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think it goes something like "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"

      I think it goes something like "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"

    2. Re:Well... by RorschachUK · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Here's a Google Video featuring audio from a Microsoft presentation of Vista's new features over video from OS X Tiger, showing that pretty much everything that was touted as new in Vista is already in Tiger. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-413444611 2378047444

    3. Re:Well... by StarfishOne · · Score: 4, Funny

      and I believe it ends with ", but originality wins the day" ;)

  3. Missing out on the real features... by cybrthng · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Missing out on the real features... by oc255 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Missing out on the real features... by fomhoire69 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Solitaire has been updated and rewritten to take advantage of Windows Vista's new graphics capabilities well thts sold me.

    3. Re:Missing out on the real features... by artemis67 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Missing out on the real features... by whathappenedtomonday · · Score: 4, Funny
      reboot.

      Good thing that this particular feature remains unchanged.

      --
      I hope I didn't brain my damage.
  4. Old Arguments. by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well that is the typical Windows vs. Mac Debate. Apple OS method is do what you need to do, and let the OS Do What it needs to do, and try not to step on each others foot. Windows is a working Microsoft Commercial for every feature that help you save time or protect you from trouble it is like Windows says "See Microsoft cares about you because we just protected you", While Mac OS X is more like go do what you need to do we will keep out of it and protect you when you need it, and we will only talk to you when we really have to. Even the Eye Candy. OS X eye candy is subtile while Windows is flashy. It is like a a man in a nice suit vs. a Pimp.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  5. Vista by cybrthng · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Flip3D is aesthetic? by Overly+Critical+Guy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.


    Ken, are you freaking kidding? Expose simply looks and behaves so much more efficiently and aesthetically. Try Flip3D when you have 20 windows open, and you'll get an obscured stack of windows that you have to travel through one by one, including the desktop (weirdly, Flip3D puts the desktop in there as a window too). In addition, there's no need to "cycle" through the windows in Expose, because it displays all windows at once. Flip3D is essentially a completely useless tech demo that's not that impressive. Flip3D doesn't win on anything.
    --
    "Sufferin' succotash."
  7. The problem is... by Spaceman40 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...that the major differences between XP and Vista are graphical. On my computer, I can't tell the difference in speed between XP (SP2) and Vista, but Vista sure looks prettier.

    (Note: I only had it on my computer for about a day before switching to Ubuntu, which can actually use my sound card. Vista doesn't let you use any unsigned drivers, and Creative's 64-bit Vista drivers are beta and -- guess what? -- not yet signed.)

    --
    I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
  8. Re:Flip is a matter of opinion by Tom · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes I know that the glass color can be changed, but no matter what it is still dark and depressing.

    It's just there to get you in the mood. You know, if you're already depressed, then the first crash or 0day won't hurt so much. :-)

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  9. End the madness! by dave420 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Everyone seems to be seeing how OSs fare compared to each other, giving bragging rights to whichever one was the first to use various features, when that doesn't even matter in the slightest. An OS is to be used - it's not your child, you don't have to stand up for it. If it does what you need it to do, then it's great. I don't give a rat's ass who invented "windows flying around revealing themselves" first, I just care if it's of any use to me. It's an operating system, not a political statement. Fucking fanboys.

  10. Security nags by dtfinch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The more you tighten your grip, the more star^H^H^H^Husers will log in as administrator.

  11. So Vista can look and act like OsX... by Thansal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... But can it look and act like Win2K?

    I am a windows user (yes, I know I will be shuned for addmitting this), and my preffered OS is Win2K (it works for what I want it to, and that is primarily games).

    Up untill recently I just ignore anytihng about windows that is not Win2K (I admit I have to use XP at work, but I have done everytihng I can to make it look and act like 2K). However, with more and more mention of games that will be "vista exclusives" I am starting to wory that I will eventualy actualy HAVE to switch (I stuck with DOS untill I had to use windows for games, then with 3.11 till I had to "upgrade" to 95 for games).

    So for those that have been ussing Vista, Can you strip out all this silly extra garbage and make Vista look and act like 2K?
    Can I make all the gadgets/widgets/whatever they are called quickly disapear and not waste CPU cycles?
    Can I turn off all the bubbles and colouring and effects?
    Can I make everything flat? (I like sharp edges, one of my largest dislikes about OSX/XP/others is this urge to make defaults rounded and pretty looking)
    Can I make the colour scheames nice and simple? (a solid blue title bar?)

    yup ,set in my ways, and loving it.

    (btw, a quick link to all this info that I have probably missed would be highely apreciated).

    --
    Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
  12. Re:Aqua, Aero, Terra, Pyro? by talornin · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
  13. Re:Despite the proof... by Apocalypse111 · · Score: 5, Funny

    PC: Hi, I'm a PC.
    Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac. Hey, what do you have there?
    PC: Oh, just some games.
    Mac: Oh neat. Can I play too?
    PC: No.

    --
    There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.