Is Vista a Trap?

logube writes "BBC has up an article about the trap of installing Vista in your existing desktop. Written by Tim Weber, a self-confessed 'sucker for technology,' this article is a good introduction to the pain and extra money required to get going with the newest version of Windows. See how you can spend an extra 130 british pounds, and still have no working webcam! Says Weber, 'It took me one day to get online. The detail is tedious and highly technical: reinstalling drivers and router firmware didn't work, but after many trial and error tweaks to Vista's TCP/IP settings, I had internet access. Once online, Creative's website told me that my sound card was a write-off. No Vista support would be forthcoming.'"

Comments

Does Vista have anything we need?

[koan]

Anyone using this malware? Does it have anything we need?

Re:Does Vista have anything we need?

[causality]

Before the idiot mods come out and mod you as "Troll" or "Flamebait", I want to point out that THIS IS OBVIOUSLY HUMOROUS.

Starting to annoy...

[HateBreeder]

What's with all these anti-vista posts?

No one forces you to use it.

You can stay with that ol' linux box that doesn't have a single decent image-browser, dc++ client, office suite, ... etc.
Not to mention decent looking fonts (anti-aliasing in linux is light-years away from cleartype - seen the major distros, xorg 7.1 w/latest kde - it's still crap)

I don't mind paying for good 3rd party apps. just that they don't exist for linux.

Re:Starting to annoy...

[HateBreeder]

Oh, give me a break.
Gwenview - sucks completly compared to something like ACDsee. (90% of the other linux apps are mere rip-offs of ACDsee)
Picasa - I like the windows version, didn't know they had a linux version. Okay! You win this point. but ... A single app in 2007. and we're just talking about image browsing.. not something fancy.

Office - these MS-Office clones you mentioned are crap. why? because they can't inter-operate with the rest of the world flawlessly. I don't care that microsoft is to blame for closing the format... My professors sometimes send out home-work and papers in word or visio, or lecture notes in power-point... i need these to work! i don't wanna meddle around with things.

and don't give me apt-get install msttcorefonts. In gentoo it's called microsoft true type fonts or something. its not the font that's bad .. i suspect it has to do with the X-Server. when rendering small fonts it just seems blurry. not as sharp and pretty as in windows.

and if we're at it with X - until the composite extension came out, you couldn't even drag one window over the other without forcing a full repaint - Slow as hell! but composite is SO unstable it's barely usable.
these kind of small things make you wanna give up.

Not to mention the horrifying ordeal i had to go through just to set-up my legacy atheros card. madwifi-ng broke it. madwifi-old stopped compiling on kernels over 2.6.19... i manually patched the driver just to get basic things going.

I am the parent. I am not a troll.

I've been using gentoo for years. The only thing keeping me in linux is the ideology. philosophically, you can only trust open-source software. .. that and work. I'm a kernel driver developer.

But i'm getting really frustrated with the utter lack of support for basic things..
When you combine that with fanboys flaming vista... it's very annoying.
First get BASIC things right with linux before you flame MS windows.

Re:No.

[multisync]

How would they enforce it? If a company just puts out a binary driver, what's to stop the user from installing it? Can YOU think of a way?

The usual coercion and strong-arm tactics should do the trick.