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Information Technology Pros Debate Windows Vista
An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
As an IT manager, I can plainly see Vista offers no benefits to my company. The only feature that piqued my interest was the Bitlocker technology but we use PGP's Whole Disk Encryption product already and that works fine.
I see nothing that will make our employees more productive or save us money on IT. We'll be sticking with XP.
Having used Vista, realised the issues, then gone back to XP, my perception of Vista now is that it is basically the new Windows Millennium Edition.
Staying with XPSP2 strongly advised.
Roll on 2009 and the next version, however in the meantime if you are going to have the hassle of nothing working anyway, you may as well take a look at switching to OSX or Linux.
What the hell does Aero have to do with business use? You can disable it if you don't want to use it in a business environment, which I'm sure that many businesses will do for hardare reasons anyway (Intel's Extreme Graphics / GMA900 can't run it anyway).
Would you claim that Mac OS X's "glitzy" UI makes it inappropriate for business use? Or that Beryl makes Linux inappropriate for business use?
I've been running Vista Ultimate for 3 days now.
So far, my experience with Vista has been mostly positive. The intergrated search is quite useful and the re working of the explorer shell is a noticeable improvement.
On thing I have noticed is that Vista has re-done the menu layout and prompts and it now closely resembles KDE, imo. Not a complaint or a compliment though I do imagine the layout change is going to confuse a lot of people. I can see why it was re-done though and I imagine once I've gotten used to it I will find it an improvement over XP.
Really I can't say much else as I've only just scratched the surface of what Vista can do. Is it better then XP? So far yes. Is it worth years of delayed devlopment and several hundred dollars? That remains to be seen.
>
> Anyone with a job title like that is sure to be a Master Debater.
its all about the apps, most windows shops have heavy investments in windows based infrastructure. that includes exchange, .NET apps, and all sorts of someware and middleware.
.NET is a good thing.
replacing it all is not easy, and many shops dont have the stomach for it, or the talent. and in some cases the shops have windows apps that can only run in windows. that all said:
when you really look at Vista objectiveily its a huge improvement over xp and 2k.
but sure it does have some things that are odd and different that annoy you, but in some and most cases that can be changed.
and some of the postive stuff like low rights framework that IE uses is exposed so other apps can use it. and
-Nex6
Huh? Of course it'll be widespread. It works fine. It's got all of the features of XP, and then some. MS is gonna stop selling XP eventually. What else are people going to use OSX? Linux? Turn off Aero, and it looks and acts like Windows XP 95% of the time. It's run every Windows XP app that I've tried to use on it. It's really not a big deal from a user point of view.
I don't respond to AC's.
Given Microsoft's history of releasing operating systems at least six months before they are ready for market, I think I'm going to wait for now. I'll stick with XP/FreeBSD any day of the week over a new MS offering.
.sig
Vista is just not ready for the desktop
You are trying to post the same damn Vista joke for the 10,000 time.
[ Allow ] [ Cancel ]
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...
I can't tell if that is the setup or the punchline.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As for corporate computing, nothing wrong with it, so if it comes preloaded figure business will eventually use it. Hell it took my company until a little over a year ago to deploy large number of XP machines. All under the guise of thorough testing but the real truth is, the PC group is slower than molasses in winter, lazier than the people in a welfare line, and more interested in new gadgets than running an OS through the testing requirements we have.
For the masses its just fine, my parents recently bought a new laptop which has Vista. Other than finding a few items moved or renamed they just use it. The key is, its just a damn operating system. It doesn't mean DIDDLY to them. they don't care. they saw a laptop with features they wanted at a price they wanted to pay. OS be damned, it didn't matter. All they wanted was to get mail while on the road, connect to wireless, and use WORD.
As for AERO, fwiw, if you have a video card with 32mb of memory you might just see a performance boost with it turned on, especially with low system ram installations.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That's not the entire story though. You see, I used to do OS/2 tech support back in the days. I got pretty familiar with the guts of OS/2 and Windows and OS/2 share a lot of early design. And early design flaws. In my opinion the most frustrating one of these is the fact that the application itself handles window frame messages. That means if the application is poorly written and stops handling frame window commands at any point you can't even minimize the window until it gets done processing. Minimize, kill and move should pretty much never stop working for any given window, even if the application is displaying a goddamn modal dialog box (Another pet peeve of mine and Microsoft seems to encourage programming by modal dialog.)
Meanwhile OSX and E17 demonstrate that you can put a glitzy interface on an OS that's quite suitable for server purposes. I'm pretty sure the only way that Microsoft could design an OS that didn't suck would be to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch, though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
one word:
"cache"
Vista will pre-load stuff it thinks you might need next. It's using your RAM to speed up your computer, which shockingly, is the idea of RAM.
Genius idea if you ask me; and I believe UNIX has been doing it for a while too - or at least something similar?
throw new NoSignatureException();
It's called SuperFetch and it puts your RAM to good use when it's not needed for anything else. You can disable it if you'd like.
The difference between 98 and XP was huge in comparison though. The whole architecture was different - and thus XP (and indeed its predecessors 2000 and NT4) is a lot more secure than 98.
Real features like NTFS filesystem, properly done process separation, a more robust TCP/IP stack, better support for windows domain features etc made it worth upgrading 98 to XP.
I can't think of any such compelling features for business IT in moving to Vista from XP.
Am I the only one that thought all the interviewees were idiots?
There's a huge number of so-called "IT Professionals" that just don't have a clue. Lots of middle-aged guys who managed to get a job running the FAX machines at some corporation 20 years ago, and eventually ended up being the "IT guy". But they don't know ANYTHING. They buy whatever new hardware they think is neat, and that the salesmen from their vendors tell them they need. And then they pay for all-encompassing support contracts, so that they don't have to configure anything, or troubleshoot anything, because they don't actually know how to do that stuff.
I sometimes wonder if those guys are the majority of the IT employees in the United Stats. Guys that use the company's money to hire other people to do their jobs. The only reason they get away with it is because their boss is even MORE clueless about how IT should work.
Sorry, kind of off-topic, but I just can't stand the attitude of rags like "Information Week".
This seems like a pretty interesting definition of "superior" you're using. The fact that Mac OS X will not run on most pc hardware does not make it a worse OS than Windows. Thats about as logical as claiming that Linux is an inferior OS to Windows because less people use it! While I agree with you that OS X is lacking in hardware support, that doesn't make it inferior in terms of a side by side comparison of the actual OS, just inferior in terms of its availability...
"Everlasting peace will come to Earth when the last man kills the last but one." - Adolf Hitler
After checking out Vista at the local Best Buy & Circuit City (for hours...), I decided that I didn't want M$'s latest & 'greatest'. If running Aero the machines all acted like XP with a 600Mhz Celery processor. Boy, only 20 days after Vista was released & all the retail stores are on the Vista bandwagon, no 'mo XP in sight. Wonder where all the old gear went ?
I wanted a hot laptop, AMD TL-56 64bit DP, 1GB memory, DVD+-, good screen, Nvidia graphic card, etc. Best Buy had one that was everything I wanted but it was Vista. Ugh ugh. So I started cruising the web & found the XP version of the same machine, $100 cheaper too ! At Best Buys web site. Quick, they only have a few left... And SuSE 10.2 installed just fine...
Windows Vista is the new Windows ME
try playing a game, or doing something else, I have a system with 2gb of ram, running nothing but Windows Messenger I use 1.02GB of ram at idle. The weird thing is if I open HL2 I'm only using 1.14gb of ram, right now I have a ton of applications open and am only using 1.09gb. Vista's memory allocation is quite a bit superior to XP's I think in part its because so much is loaded into memory that most applications don't need to load much and so load much faster. Oh and some other ancedotal evidence
Until Uru (predessor to Myst Online: Uru Live) could use upto 1.5gb of memory before refusing to load anything else. On this system with XP That meant I was using 1.83gb of Ram, running it on Vista first I was only using 1.89gb of ram. Its something that has been annoying me for sometime just how does an OS with a much larger memory requirement not use that much more memory for gaming than Xp?
The Aristocrats !
Pros:
- Scheduled defrags without third party software
- Aero interface looks less dated
Cons:remove a syllable and you'll have it right
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It looks just *awesome* on the shelf in the local computer store.
I'm sure if I actually bought and installed it, though, I'd have a different opinion...
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
That was fixed in Vista (for Minimize and move, anyway), but only while running Glass. It's because the actual application is no more than a texture thrown onto a frame (the glass). Killing an app is also a tad easier than before: if an app isn't responding and you try to kill it, Windows asks you if you'd like to wait for it to come back to the light or if you'd like to hack it to bits. I haven't had an issue with it so far.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I've seen it. It looks OK, but here's my story.
I was over at my friends house, he's all excited "I just got this new Vista Ultimate! Check out the Media Center". He turns on his TV, grabs the remote and starts up media center... goes to his recorded TV shows, hits play on a show from a couple days ago... we watch it for a couple minutes, then he goes back hits play on another show and.... Crash "Do you want to send a message to Microsoft?", no, start media center back up, hit play again on a different show, plays for about 3 seconds, crash again.
Then he says "Yeah, I can't get it to play more than one show per reboot... I don't know why, once you hit play on a show you have to watch that show all the way through, if you stop it or try to play another show it crashes. Once that show is done, it crashes, and you have to reboot to get it to play again"
His is just set up on a whitebox that he built and I don't know the stats or hardware he's got in it... but seriously, after seeing that and my other friend had it on his laptop (uninstalled and went back to XP after 2 weeks, couldn't get his development environment working under vista, also HATED UAC) watched him work for about 30 minutes one day, he had to have 15-20 UAC warnings in those 30 minutes, all for very normal things to do (like joining a wifi network) I'm never installing Vista, I'm glad I've got a non-OEM copy of XP that I can install on new hardware.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"
You're joking, right?
I hope so. Otherwise, you're not real observant. Of *course* it'll gain traction among corporate users. Because they have not fucking choice! What part of "vendor lock-in" is hard to grasp?
See, too many companies have millions of dollars of infrastructure tied up in MS-Windows, and other Microsoftware. They are not going to replace it overnight. And, by the time they really start to feel the burn, the worst will be over (at least as far as up-front cost goes: the pain never truly ends, but that's true no matter what). New PCs will come with MS-Vista (the 'MS' is to distinguish it from the health-care package that's been around for 20 years). Corporations will soon not have a choice. It'll be MS-Vista or nothing.
How many times do we have to go through this? We had this same debate when MS-Windows XP came out. This isn't our year. Maybe next year, but not this year.
Microsoft might be dying (I believe it is), but it takes a long, long time for a giant to decompose.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Yeh, I guess Wireless, VERY useful GPOs, Remote Assitance, IPSec, Remote Desktop, Firewall, improved event logs...etc means nothing to you.
I currently support networks with both XP and 2000, 2000 are by far much more difficult to manange them XP. By your statement I have to assume that you either don't manage multiple XP and 2000 workstations or you don't know about the added feature in Xp to make your life easier.
I maintain one Vista machine for testing purposes. I do as little work as possible on it because quite frankly I prefer Linux. In particular, I make sure that LedgerSMB runs on Vista. LedgerSMB in turn depends on PostgreSQL, Vanilla Perl, and Apache.
Compared to XP, Vista is a mixed bag. There are some user experience improvements, and way the menus work on the start menu is an improvement. Aside from the initial disorientation, the UI is closer to what XP's should have been.
However, there are many complaints I have about Vista. UAC is the biggest one, and this can result in corrupted installs of some software (including Apache), and it is simply way too tempting to turn off every security improvement that Vista offers. Whatever Vista does, it will *not* make Windows that much more secure-- it just allows Microsoft to blame the users.
I also find Vista to be surprisingly slow (granted I only have 512MB RAM in this system) and some settings like UAC are hard to find. I think that Vista is going to be a support headache for everyone, and I do not recommend that people upgrade.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?
Yes, because in 6 months, you won't be able to buy a new computer without Vista on it. And in two years, you won't be able to get support for XP. And then in about 4 years, you won't be able to get software compatible with XP for love or money.
Corporate users never really saw a lot of value in XP either. Moreover, it took about that long for it to "gain traction", in both the consumer and corporate markets. I've been working in the ISP industry since 1994, and tech support has watched as every new OS Microsoft has produced in that time get snapped up by a small percentage of early adopters, followed by the rest of the computing population as they upgrade their computers over time.
Most people find installing an operating system too much work, too time consuming, too difficult, or they just don't think about it at all. It *came* with the computer after all. Isn't it just a part of the computer? IT departments in companies see it much the same way. You have to upgrade the computer to get the next version of windows, so why not just let Dell or IBM do the install when you do your next upgrade? To install a new OS across an existing network of any size is too disruptive to the users, and too time consuming. A user would have to do without a computer for the better part of a day at the very least if you upgrade an existing system.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I'm running my knoppix remaster, kernel 2.4, and "top" shows:
Cpu(s): 0.5% user, 2.0% system, 0.0% nice, 97.6% idle
Mem: 256268k total, 251592k used, 4676k free, 3856k buffers
Swap: 1405648k total, 2156k used, 1403492k free, 159616k cached
As you can see, this is only a 256 MB of RAM machine, and quite a bit is "used", also the Swap is being used. I'm running Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2, and using IceWM for "X". (See screenshots, below)
I know from experience, that if I now want to fire up GIMP, I can work on a bunch of images if I want to, and this setup will have no problems with that. I use a HD partition for a gimp-swap. I suppose that Vista can do the same thing, but requiring a dual core, and 2 GB of RAM, the norm for a lot of machines Dell has for sale now. I have seen one of these machines, but with XP, and was amazed at the number of apts that can be opened at once and run successfully for hours, without any problems. There are a lot of applications available for XP, and I have noted that the users tend to load up their desktops with a ton of icons for the apts, very impressive indeed to someone who maintains a livecd linux, with a defined set of applications, not very expandable, but do-able with the "persistent home" hard drive partition. If I can get ahold of an application in a tarball, such as a new, or perhaps a nightly build of Firefox, for instance, then I can add that to the running linux system, and have it come back the next time the box is booted. OK for a livecd linux such as mine, but not in the same league as XP or Vista. I'm thinking the world would be a much duller place without them, sorry to see so much bad press about the expensive Vista OS, and the powerful machines that run it.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
Windows 95, 98, 2K, XP, all were seen as a big improvement over their predecessor. People lined up to get their copies and to upgrade their machines.
But here we are, months after the business introduction of Vista and people still debating it's merits with no sign of commitment. New machines are still being sold w/ XP by default, with the "option" to upgrade to Vista. It turns out that a Mac running Parallels w/ XP can run more Windows software that a PC running Vista. Developers are still writing for XP and are just not pumping out the Vista apps.
Microsoft used to be criticized for being backward compatible to the stone age. Vista is different. Vista breaks lots of Windows software. Lots. '
I see this rollout as being a complete failure. Much worse than Windows ME, more like OS/2.
ive tried it. it even more of a pain in the arm than XP. I hate XP 'cause it's a pain in the arm. As it goes, OS X is a pain in my arm the same way XP and Vista are. My number one pain in the arm is the fact that, regardless of OS, software thinks it has a right to have your attention right _now_ 'popup *bing* focus change, etc). Until any O/S Fixes it so that only what I damn well want to be the focus of my attention is the focus of my attention, will I start to loose my O/S Rage. Goddamnit, they all do the same job. I like the ones that let me do my job.
Darwin Hawking Blackmore
Arguing that Vista or Microsoft products in general are not always the crap they're made out to be is never going to work on a website that pictures Bill Gates as a borg and doesn't render correctly at all in IE7. However, for those of you who actually care about facts instead of clinging to some crazy notion that blind evangelism is going to lead everybody realize the glory of Steve Jobs and OS X try reading up on what's new in Vista.
o ws_Vistae w_to_Windows_Vistaf eatures_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Wind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_n
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_
Turns out the changes really are substantial. The large number of brilliant developers working on Vista for 5 years created a good deal more than just a pretty interface. Read up on it, how is OS X superior? It's not. Can OS X catch up? Probably not.
OS X may have been gaining ground on XP, but Vista buries it.
95% of people buy computers, not operating systems.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Seriously. Since when have businesses gone out for a "glitzy" UI? Of course, some people would use any excuse to "upgrade" ....
Actually, this is the reason that windows sells at all as a server.
At the top enterprise end, little can beat a highly tuned linux server in most areas. However, for the smaller business, the idea of doing this is too frightening whilst a M$ box just seems easier.
The thing to watch out for here... OS X Leopard Server. For a significant number of small businesses, this would mean a glitzy UI, ease of use, and a pretty good feature set as a server. Not to mention that apple doesn't hit you with much in the way of per-client licenses as they make their money selling hardware.
More expensive and slightly less good performance than a well tuned linux or BSD box, but with ease of use and stability that M$ struggles to deliver on.
Just my 2c worth
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Each succeeding Windows generation always runs WORSE on the same hardware than the older one.
Untrue. On higher-end hardware, new versions of Windows (along with other OSes) are usually faster because they are updated and tuned to make better use of that higher end hardware (which probably didn't even exist when the previous version was released).
Vista on, say, an 8-core machine will be substantially faster - especially under load - than XP or 2k on that same machine.
With OSX this is just the opposite. Each newer version runs faster on a vintage Mac of similar age, than the one before.
Well, when you start of with the abominably bad performance that OS X had on release, there's nowhere to go but up. Windows can't really follow that lead.
Don't expect this to conitnue, by the way - eventually (probably after 10.5) Apple are going to run out of those "easy" optimisations that Microsoft were doing to NT back in the early-mid '90s and those "free upgrades" you get with each release are going to stop.
Compare ebay prices of 7 year old Macs with similar aged Windows boxes.
But don't forget to compare the _new_ prices those computers were 7 years ago, and their relative performance.
The 400Mhz iMacs Apple first introduced in July of 2000, will run the current OSX10.4 faster than any earlier versions of OSX and in its FULL capability of eye candy.
No, it won't, because Macs that old don't have the video hardware to handle Quartz Extreme.
Try to get VISTA ultimate with Aero to run on any PC box of that age.
Done it. I've got an 800Mhz, 1GB RAM P3 running Vista just fine. Only upgrade was a $30 video card.
You may not change the computer in any way other than stuff it with as much RAM as it will take.
Ah, as is typical with Mac Zealots you apply a ludicriously arbitrary restriction so your "argument" works.
Macs may be a bit more expensive, but in the long term they are a much better buy. Kind of like our Hondas.
No, they're not.
My day job is supporting Macintosh computers. However, due to the ever changing IT market, I always to stay up to date on what's going on with Windows and Linux. It's in my best interest to be cross platform, especially when I need to explain to a Windows user how to do a specific procedure on the Mac, and vice versa. I have been a Windows user much longer (3.1) than I have been a Macintosh (didn't get involved with Macs until circa OS 7.6.1) user, so I've seen my fair share of kernel, UI, graphics, and other changes on both platforms over the years.
I was excited to hear that our Windows Vista (Business) Licenses had arrived via our MSDNAA account at work. So, I grabbed a license for testing and went at it. I wanted to leave my Mac alone and not try to force a Vista boot with Boot Camp + hacking. My original test box was:
Dell Optiplex GX270 P4 2.4 GHz, hyper-threading enabled.
1.25 GB DDR 400 RAM
80 GB HD (7200RPM/8MB Cache)
GeForce 4 MX 400 64MB Video Card (AGP 8x)
17" Flat Screen display
Install went perfect. After installation was complete, there were three or four Windows security updates awaiting me. After installing those, I started to play around. Unfortunately, my computer scored a 1.0 on the performance scale, mostly because of the video card. I was also disappointed that Aero was not supported on my video card as well, so all I had was the "Windows Vista Basic" theme available to me, without any of the new eye candy I was looking to see.
I really wanted to see what Vista had to offer, so I didn't want to settle for the reduced package. This is significant though. Microsoft wonders why they haven't seen to many upgrades to Vista yet- well this is one of them. A large amount of users with existing computers will not see the biggest UI improvement that Aero has to offer. This is different in comparison to Mac OS X 10.4, where, except for not being able to run a few screen savers, and not getting a few fancy effects here and there, your experience is pretty much the same visually, from a G3 iBook, right on through to the newest Mac Pro. Sure, there are applications that need core image, but, for the basic OS X install set, your experience is pretty much the same right on down the line.
Getting back to Vista... I decided to upgrade the computer as much as I could to get the full Vista experience, so I bumped myself up to 3GB of RAM, a 250GB 7200/16MB Cache hard disk, and, a GeForce FX 5200 128MB video card (best I can get for a low profile card w/bracket for this Dell). This brought my performance rating up to a 2.5, again, with the video card being the weak point.
Now I was getting Aero in all of its glory. Despite my video card being the bottom of the barrel for Vista/Aero, I haven't had any performance issues with any of the special effects (all of them are turned on). The only thing I'm kind of peeved about is the lack of NVidia support for this class of video card. NVidia has newer drivers out, however, but I had to use beta drivers from November for this card, because it looks like NVidia is in the process of dropping support for it. Despite being beta drivers, I haven't had any BSOD's or issues with them, and they are still faster than the default Microsoft drivers.
As for applications on Vista, its a mixed bag. Most things installed and worked OK. All my typical Internet applications and plugins (Firefox, Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Sun Java JRE, etc) worked without a hitch- even Gaim/GTK worked. Divx and RealPlayer are giving me issues where Windows has to switch out of Aero mode when they are running. It's kind of weird... the screen goes black for two seconds, and then comes back in Windows Vista "basic" mode. When you close the application, the reverse occurs, and you are back to Aero, with transparencies etc. VLC won't show most movies, just a bunch of changing colors in its window. iTunes worked OK for me, but I don't have my library saved on this computer. Office 2003 worked as well.
How about people like me, who tried a Linux distro, had trouble getting it to even install, then had trouble getting it to recognise most of his hardware, gave up and went back to an OS that I can actually find drivers for and play games on? Where do I factor into your frankly ridiculous assessment of the current state of affairs? Honestly, sentences like "Linux is just plain better" should be seasoned with a good heavy dose of "I acknowledge that this is my opinion, so I shouldn't try and pass it off as fact".
Did enjoy the "be firm in their believe that their proprietary OS is just the only way to go" comment. Talk about irony. Replace 'proprietary OS' with 'free OS' then look in a mirror.
Then replace 'believe' with 'belief' so that it makes sense.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
A programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate. The bartender asks, "What is this, some kind of a joke?"
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
(1) DRM. As DRM is a serial chain of single points of failure you end up with three problems. Firstly, the MTBF of that chain is the MTBF of the weakest component. Secondly, the probability of failure increases with the number of components involved - with Vista this move from being a probability to being a likelihood (even ignoring the fact that it's an MS product which ups the ante even more). Thirdly, to that likelihood of failure you have to add that all DRM components are version 1, hardware as well of software - in the Microsoft world this is in principle a public beta. In summary, catastrophic failure and data loss is as good as guaranteed. Go ahead, implement this on a corporate scale..
(2) The 'advanced' GUI. I've been using Compiz and Beryl on Linux long enough to have played with eye candy and you know what? I switched it off. It slows my UI down, not because of computing power (plenty available) but because all that fancy stuff needs time to show itself. Opening a window that zooms or rolls or whatever takes longer than one that just appears on the screen, for example, and there's plenty of it. It gets in the way, period. The only thing I use in Beryl is a slightly transparent cube so I can see where things are because I can have quite a windows and desktops on the go.
(3) The licensing problems. I've been fighting the misnamed 'Genuine Advantage' on other systems which were as genuine as they come and, frankly, I've had enough. From what I've read Vista has even more of that nonsense in, and that, coupled with my unwillingness for any system to be allowed to 'phone home' without me knowing what details it sends is enough for me not to use it. I have client information I need to keep confidential and I have nil trust in systems that do things without me knowing. Apart from that, I get very little for the money - I rather spend it sponsoring an Open Source project that creates value for me and others.
(4) The eternal upgrade cycle, but that's more based on my experience with XP. I installed a couple of new systems 3 weeks ago, and I set it up so I have to authorise patches and updates. Well, it happens on a daily basis. Worse, one of the patches bluescreened one of the box to the point of me having to restore it from backup. I've only ever had that with Linux, 6 years ago, when a kernel patch went wrong - and that is easy to recover from.
(5) As with any version of Windows, the absolute dependency on the GUI for it to work. If there's a modal window somewhere hidden under the stack of others on your desktop it will stop the machine and actively prevent you from getting to the window. And you can't cancel the task because you need the GUI for that too. That leads me to another HUGE and related annoyance: if I say 'shut down' I want a machine to SHUT DOWN, no if, buts and maybes. It needs a shutdown that simply does what it says, no further questions asked.
And I don't buy into the 'hope cycle' that the next version will at last fix all the problems. Realistically, MS will NEVER willingly make such a version.
Who would buy the update?
Insert
Truth is, you own gear made by people who just wanted your money, they don't care about providing an actual benefit to the customer.
I'm glad you told me that. Means I can scrap this RAM because it doesn't provide me with any benefit. I'll chuck this ATI card because ATI obviously don't want me to have any benefit from using it so I don't need it, right? Honestly, that whole paragraph was total crap. If it didn't provide me with benefit I wouldn't have bought it. Just because it's only usable in one fashion, doesn't make it worthless. It might be worthless to you, but that's entirely your own prerogative. I wouldn't expect you to buy it, even if you seem to expect me not to.
As it stands, I have fun using my PC, and that's the main thing I care about - I don't give a cack whether it's Linux, Windows, or OSX as long as I enjoy myself, and the terrible time I had trying to run Ubuntu wasn't fun for me.
When it boils down to 'choice' I still have plenty. I can choose to use hardware with standard interfaces and migrate to Linux or I can buy non-standard hardware and stay on Windows, as you so rightly pointed out. However in that same breath, I have the choice between spending nothing and being miserable trying to get Ubuntu or Debian or whatever to actually work, or I could spend something disposable and actually have a good time when I'm home relaxing. Just because I personally limit my options because of what I want to do when I relax and use my PC, doesn't mean I don't have a choice at all.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien