Slashdot Mirror
FSF Launches "BadVista" Campaign
FrankNFurter writes to note the launch yesterday of the FSF's BadVista campaign against Microsoft's new operating system. BadVista's aim is to inform users about the alleged harms inflicted by Vista on the user and about free software alternatives. Quoting program administrator John Sullivan: "Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new 'features' in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care."
How about the third link on the right side: 25 Shortcomings Of Vista
Most of the 'shortcomings' listed in the article are either purely speculative or worse, revealing that the author lacks insight. Just to pick a few examples:
Purely speculative.
More guesswork.
Hardly relevant, any hard drive sold within the last few years will allow > 100GB.
No, do not back up the full installation, only your personal data.
That hardly qualifies as a shortcoming... to anyone but MS of course.
These are not issues specific to Vista. A platform switch will always be a costly affair (the cost of retraining your staff is several orders of magnitude greater than anything else).
And so it drags on... It might very well be that some of the issues raised are indeed actual problems, but as the article stands it's mostly FUD.
Also, #18:
Funny, some might have said the same thing in WinXP, until they realized there is a classic view. Vista also has this classic view.
And, #25:
Are they serious? Who the hell uses WordPad to open
#8:
I suppose the author of the article missed the article on their own website about key management servers, and also on the Microsoft support website, which states:
Last but not least, #6:
No... just, no. Vista does use more RAM than WinXP, but why do you think that is? That's right, Aero and the Windows Sidebar. Between those two, I'm using a whopping 48 megs of RAM. You can always turn them off if your system is strapped for RAM. Right now my system is sitting at 696MB usage, which might seem like a lot, until you read that 452MB of that is for cache. So, I'm really only using 244MB.
The complete change in how Video works in Vista should be a primary reason for people to upgrade, but you don't see many tech people out here that get it.
Vista's new graphics system is not about eye candy, although that is a good side effect. Here are just a few things that the new Vista graphic system has that you can't do on earlier versions of Windows.
- It can multi-task GPU RAM with system RAM intelligently. Meaning if your Video card only has 128mb or RAM, and you want to run all the extra High Quality Textures in a game that would normally want more GPU RAM, Vista will let the game do this, seamlessly with existing games.
The multi-tasking of GPU RAM also extends to GPU multi-tasking as well, which is a new concept and works even marginally already with current generation boards from ATI and NVidia. So you get GPU RAM and GPU multi-tasking that also extends beyond a single game or application or even the interface itself.
On Vista for example, you can load WoW, SWG, CoH, and pick a good FPS, put them all in a Window and they will run side by side with VERY little FPS drop in any of the applications. Now take into consideration they all want the GPU to themselves, and they all want all the GPU RAM. However, it just freaking works in Vista, and works well. This example I give is one demonstration one of our techs uses. He will set the characters to auto-run in the applications and he will then hit Flip 3D, angling all the applications in perspective on their side with all the Aero effects, and point out to people how the FPS didn't change in any of the applications. And this is with a 256MB NVidia 6800 card that is almost two years old.
- Accelerated drawing. Everyone should know Vista adds 3D technology to the basic desktop and desktop applications, but another fact missed is that even the old 2D drawing of applications uses the 3D GPU functions to accelerate rendering. And this happens on even old DirectX 7 cards from 1998 that couldn't dream of running Aero/Glass.
How does this affect everyone? Well the display, rendering and movement of bitmaps and vector images is significantly faster than on WindowsXP, or any other OS. Take an application like CorelDraw or AI, they will draw very complex vector images and are are pre-Vista made applications, yet on Vista they will display and redraw their graphics 10x faster or more. I have one layered image that on WindowsXP and OSX takes close to 30 secs to redraw fully, yet on Vista it will redraw in less than 2 secs fully.
So if you work in the graphics world, Vista will impact your life tremendously. So existing and old applications get a tremedous speed boost when they are very graphically heavy applications.
- 3D composer. Vista like OSX sports a full Composer, so images never tear. Again this is a performance improvement over WindowsXP. It also features a full vector based composer, meaning that newer applications using the WPF side of Vista get even more of a performance increase, as it can talk to the composer in pure vector and redraws and changes can be communicated in vector instead of full bitmap redraw changes being shoved to the composer. This again not only adds more performance for applications that haven't even been released yet, but adds interface quality as Vista can properly anti-alias the vector images, etc without any work from the application.
Another nice 'visual' side effect of the graphics composer in Vista, is that is can scale 'old' application on high resolution displays. So if you want to get all the use out of the pixel on your 17" 1920x1200 display and don't have perfect eye sight, you can still run your desktop at 1920x1200 and Vista will scale things up to a level that you can see and look like a printed page.
- User Mode Video Drivers - Video in Vista has been put back in the user mode. This means more stability if a video drivers crashes. However, one clever side effect of how Vista has implemented the WDDM