Slashdot Mirror
Vista is Slower, But XP Is Still Dying
An anonymous reader writes "Though the Redmond software giant may be extending the lifetime of XP on low-end laptops, the end is nigh for the aging OS. That extension makes perfect sense, as recent studies have shown XP is far faster than Vista across a number of platforms. Still, Microsoft is 'sticking to its guns' when it comes to drop-dates for most other uses of the XP operating system. 'There are several dates that apply, but the one you're probably thinking of is the June 30 deadline that Dix referred to. That's the last day when large computer makers -- the Dells, HPs and Lenovos of the world -- will be allowed to preinstall Windows XP on new PCs. It also marks the official end of XP as a retail product.'"
For now it's up to the users to decide if and when XP "dies". There are two ways I can think of for Microsoft to kill XP: (1) They could develop and release a useable next-generation OS(which remains to be seen) or (2) Putting on the tinfoil hat, I guess Microsoft could "accidentally" leak hitherto-unknown XP vulnerabilities so that XP will be so exploitable and unpatchable that it will eventually be unuseable...but that scenario is unlikely given Microsoft's support lifecycle policy. I doubt that they could handle lack of innovation and 1 or 2 more crappy OS releases before *NIX and Apple eat MS' marketshare. Also, MS' foray into the services market may go bust and after that, supporting their legacy software may be one of the few things that will earn them money.
MSDOS is even faster! Seriously you can't just say "Vista is slower so it must be worse". There are other factors to consider - functionality, aesthetics, hardware support, security, and so on.
There is a significant difference between "dying" and "being killed."
As in "the death was ruled a suicide after the victim died from three self-inflicted gunshots to the head."
I've had to reactivate my legal copy of Windows XP so many times that I finally gave up and downloaded a pirate version...I expect many people will do the same...I purchased a copy of XP, I think it's reasonable that I should be able to replace my hard drive without having to contact Microsoft and convince them that I'm not stealing their product...If you treat your customers like thieves they just might meet your expectations...
The problem is not the increase in resource use. This is nothing new. Every release of Windows, most releases of OS X and even some new flavors of Linux have increased resource use because they do more. The big problem for Microsoft this go-'round is that Vista really doesn't give you enough reason to accept the increased resource use. XP is a perfectly fine OS and to get people to move away, especially if that move is to a resource hog, you really need to drop the hammer and give people a kick-ass must-have OS. MS clearly failed to do that in Vista and they're paying for it now.
Seriously, can we just stop doing this everytime there is a new release of windows? When XP was released it was "OH MY GOSH, NOBODY LIKES XP!!! WINDOWS2000 WILL BE AROUND FOREVER!!!!". Now we're doing it all over again with Vista. There isn't a pattern or ANYTHING. Like maybe large enterprises that move at a snail's pace tend to adopt one rev behind.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/15/0035209
So in the big swap from M$ to Linux there are going to be a lot of delays and a lot of hassles. People will just stretch out the old stale piss (and yo will it get stale) for as long as they can, as they stop investing (throwing away) money into windows.
So basically you stop buying or upgrading applications unless they are Linux variants and you get used to dual booting, windows the toy OS for play and Linux for work and the web. M$ with their consistent lies and customers abuse have forced the situation, Linux didn't create the alternate OS market M$ did.
For the PC games companies, Linux will be a huge bonus, as all the old windows boxen die, all those games will have to be replaced, all the way back to win98, literally a market of hundreds of millions of games.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
How does he run them under Linux, as you suggested? Citrix or a VM STILL USE WINDOWS. The point is to NOT USE WINDOWS, remember?
Not on the eee they don't. Nor under any of the 50 low cost MIDs and mini notebook pc's coming out in the next few months. For the two pound laptop with six hours of battery life Vista is dead on arrival.
Lies, damn lies and statistics. All the way up at 14% after a year and a half with under a year to go before the next version is out? That means it's going to peak at something under 30%. Sure, they sold lots of licenses nobody is using. They made Billions doing that. I hope that's not the kind of trick you can get people to fall for over and over. I wish I knew it for sure.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What I'd like to see is a more concerted effort to address the problems with Vista. Microsoft could make Vista as fast and usable as XP today if they would just get through their thick heads that some of the policies they came up with for vista are bone headed.
Consider:
1. Drivers. There's no reason Vista can't be made compatible with XP's faster video drivers, except that Microsoft is being stubborn.
2. 64 bit support. Microsoft has willfully hamstrung Vista 64 by not providing compatibility with 32 bit drivers, and by making the Vista 64 driver model more restrictive than the Vista 32 bit. If you look at Apple's systems, they have a much better model where 32 bit drivers work *fine* on a 64 bit system. There's no reason your video card driver needs to be 64 bit anyway...
3. Background tasks. Here's a hint: Let us easily turn them the fuck off. There should be some kind of Windows performance control panel that provides a central place to switch off file indexing, and the endless other miscellaneous tasks that spin the drive on Vista *constantly*.
Until those issues are addressed, it's stupid to expect gamers who need good graphics drivers, and laptop users who can't have the spinning harddrive wearing down the battery constantly to take a second look at Vista.
I gave Vista a good 6 months, and really did appreciate things like not having to run as administrator constantly. I felt much more secure running with lower privileges user like I do on my Ubuntu and OSX installs. However, dispite the fact that I tweaked the hell out of my system (including turning off file indexing and switching off aero in favor of the win2k look), and the fact that my system *should* be ridiculously overpowered by looking at the hardware specs, the background services made my system run like a *dog*.
I've switched back to XP, and it is like night and day. Suddenly, my machine no longer locks up doing some stupid task in the background. Suddenly, the stutter is gone from my games. Suddenly, everything is snappier.
What's more, I now actually get to run with file indexing ON, by using the google desktop. This gives me all of the same search functionality as I got on vista, but with no noticeable performance overhead. Hell, I could probably start running as a non admin user on XP, now that applications have finally been forced to learn to live with reduced permissions for Vista compatibility...
It isn't as though MS changes driver requirements all that often. There has been a real long time between XP and Vista. MS isn't requiring people to release new drivers every 6 months, more like every 5-6 years. That isn't unreasonable. Have a look at how often nVidia has to change their Linux drivers and tell me who requires more.
Also, as you noted, it isn't as though there hasn't been some time. Vista has been on the open market for over a year now, and MS told their developers at Beta 2 that all the driver interfaces were stable. That's a lot of time to have developed a new driver. If you still haven't, well I have trouble feeling that it is MS's fault. If you can't learn the new (very well documented) interfaces in a year's time, well then there is something wrong on your end.
Computers change, that is simply a fact of life. If you can't deal with that, then you are in teh wrong business. You can't expect to release something and not have to change it for 30 years. Interfaces (serial, USB, firewire, etc) will change, buses (PCI, PCIe) will change. OSes will change. You are going to have to update to support those.
When Vista first came out, I told people to lay off the hardware companies. It takes time to build a stable driver on new architecture, especially the video card companies who had some really massive changes. Now, I don't defend the hardware companies at all. You've had a year, and just about everyone does have a stable, tested driver out. If you still can't, well that is your problem, not MS's.
He's not asking "How do I use Linux to solve a problem?" He's asking "If I use Linux, how do I still give Microsoft money?" If the question were the former, the question would have been "How do I deal with these .docx documents?" In that case my answer would be to use OO.o to convert them to a standard format, except for the ones that stupidly require vendor specific software. For those you still have to use MSOffice apps to convert them until you can get your contacts to use an interoperable format, and that means probably Citrix.
We don't tolerate people sending us .WP documents or VisiCalc spreadsheets any more, do we? Unless we must, and then we convert them.
For gaming the problem is the same. Game developers are developing on the Windows platform not because DirectX is such a joy to work with or because it's a nice reliably consistent platform. Neither of those things are true. They're doing it because they sell a lot of copies and because they're evangelised to do it. The sooner they're weaned from that the better, and shifting to console games for a while can ease the transition. The point of playing games after all is not to play them on your PC. It's to play them. So play them on a platform that's designed for them. Duh.
If he wants to just give Microsoft money for no reason, he can continue to overlicense unused software like most enterprises are doing right now. That's a hearty way to flush some serious cash down the Redmond toilet for no reason if that's what you want to do. As abhorrent as the idea is, it's still better than actually using that stuff.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Mandatory activation.
Vista in all of its flavors requires activation either at the mothership, or via an activation server on your network.
This one requirement, has ZERO benefit for the end user. Microsoft made this mandatory to close the "Volume License Key loophole" that allowed corporate copies of XP to be widely and easily pirated.
Now the anti-piracy cost falls to the end user. Corporations that deploy standard images must now manage the activation process in addition to all the other things that make a Microsoft network tick. There are a million ways that activation causes problems - remote users, computer rental companies that re-image after every use, schools that re-image labs frequently...etc.
I don't see Microsoft "fixing" this problem ever.
-ted
If you're a developer and you need a full-blown IDE you may need to run VisualStudio and XP or Vista on the machine you use for development. Same if you're a graphics artist. You might have to spend $600.00 or whatever it is to get Photoshop, and get used to the idea that you'll have to run it in Vista whether you want it or not.
But that's not most people. Most people's needs are actually better met with FOSS projects if they are mature enough (just like proprietary software) and have a healthy community of users and developers supporting them.
If you are a pro, or a serious amateur, it may be worth your the investment to buy Photoshop, even if you have to purchase a machine dedicated to the task of using it. But if you have a cubicle farm full of people using email, a word processor and an accounting package and maybe sharing printers and doing some simple file sharing, you can do that all very efficiently with Linux. Spend the money on the departments that may need an expensive piece of proprietary software - and the hardware required to run it. But don't assume it is the only solution, or even the best solution, especially for departments (and users) with more modest needs.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Until they sell out the rest of the way Eclipse makes a nice development platform to replace Visual Studio. If they do sell out there will be a fork. You'll find that if Eclipse isn't included in your distribution you'll find it in the Applications installer. All linux users can develop applications on day one if they want to. They don't have to, but since it's built by developers they served their own needs first. It turns out programming is not some occult science after all.
As for J#, C#, VB and WebDev, we're back to the same "How do I keep giving Microsoft money" question again. Those are not standards. They're proprietary solutions and stuff you build on them will obsolete every time Microsoft decides it needs more of your money. It's a trap. Don't fall into it. If you must program in those soon-to-be dead languages then you've created your own predicament and nobody can help you.
Photoshop? Enough with the photoshop. I don't care about photoshop. If you need a dedicated photoshop box it's no excuse to chain everyone in your enterprise to Windows when it's only you that is determined to suffer.
3d? You have to be frimping kidding. You don't really think Windows is a cutting edge 3d platform do you? On what planet?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You say gaming will catch up; so your solution doesn't work now, but somewhere in some possible future? You say that eventually people will move to standardized file formats, sometime in this glorious future.
How can you expect people to use a product that you readily admit doesn't suit their needs instead of one that actually does fulfill all the requirements with a few very notable drawbacks? The point is that with this "wrong" solution requirements are being resolved with a trade-off. Your solution doesn't meet their needs now and also has notable trade-offs. Guess which one people will consistently choose?
I still don't understand why you bothered bringing IBM into this to explain why you suggested that instead of giving money to one evil corporation, that getting a PS3 and thus giving money to another evil corporation is better? You're acting like you've got scruples, but it seems they're just blinders. Do you so intensely hate Microsoft that you're willing to allow wrongs done by another corporation corporation slide unnoticed? Once again, a compromise I'm not willing to make for another non-solution.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, and I know from first hand experience that a decent sized company can be run almost exclusively on open source software. I've got 3 linux boxes, a gaming pc, and a 360 all sitting on the very same desk. It didn't burst into flames or anything. The point is, I love and support FLOSS, but I hate when people propose it for solutions for which it isn't intended (yet) because when it inevitable goes wrong it hurts the chances of any other FLOSS projects seeing the light of day within these restricted environments. So cut it out, will you?
you trailed off before you came up with a suitable alternative to VisualStudio
I'm sure that you can come up with all sorts of programs which justify keeping Windows. ("well I *must* run microsoft office")What about Photoshop?
I'm sure you can come up with all sorts of features which prevent you from using free alternatives. ("a fully-featured graphics editor? that's no use; it doesn't support CMYK natively")
I'm sure that no matter what the free software world provides for you, you'll be able to find some fault with it.
And that's fine. You can stick with your current supplier and hope that it all works out okay.
This article is about their next-generation OS being unusable though, and about the end-of-life for the OS which everyone uses. Still feel confident about keeping all your computing tasks tied to that supplier?
The answer isn't to respond to every offer of free software with "well it doesn't do x, therefore I'll pour scorn on its authors and remain with a homogenous Microsoft solution to everything". A more sensible approach would be to start moving what you can to free platforms while you still have a chance.