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Windows XP Lives, Thanks to Linux
CWmike writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts his thumb on what really happened to spur Microsoft's change of mind on sparing Windows XP: The smashing success of Asus and others' Linux-powered UMPCs and mini-notebooks caught Microsoft completely by surprise. It turned out people wanted inexpensive, hard-working Linux laptops rather than overpriced, underpowered Vista PCs. If anyone thought this was a flash in the pan, that Asus just hit it lucky once, they haven't been paying attention. Intel is putting big bucks into its Atom family of processors, which have been designed for UMPCs, or as Intel would have it, MIDs. Intel has encouraged both the computer makers and the Linux companies in its Moblin initiative to run desktop Linux. The Linux companies have picked up on this. Canonical, Ubuntu's dad company, has come up with an UMPC-specific version of Ubuntu 8.04, the latest version of this popular Linux distribution, for Intel Atom UMPCs. At Computex, by my count, more than a dozen new UMPCs were announced both from vendors you've never heard of and from big name companies like Acer and Asus. You can also expect to see Dell releasing its 'mini-Inspiron' with Ubuntu by June's end."
I'll be checking out the new systems to see if they would make great portable multi-media systems.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I wonder, with the surge in this UMPC form factor, if not only efficient OS's are favored, but perhaps new networked games with cross-platform ports (and a smaller footprint).
I scent a market opportunity for game companies to port more games to Linux...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
So Microsoft has to keep XP going to slow the adoption of Linux? Yet malware writers are now using Microsoft's patch cycle for XP at least (and can Vista be far behind?) to rapidly create exploits. And of course XP is still rife with security issues. I wonder how long XP can stay afloat with malware on one side and Linux on the other? (especially if Microsoft stops fixing XP security issues)
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
EEE PC already has enough horsepower to play movies and music as well as anything else. Battery life could be improved and it already is up to 7.5 hours.
Apple dominates the high end market and GNU/Linux rules the low. Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out. Vista is a failure and it has taken M$ down with it.
The change is permenant. Vendors have revolted, M$ won't be able to come back. Good riddance.
I do not think MS is going to completely spare XP, more likely it is just delaying it's execution. As time goes on, the hardware will be caught up enough to run Vista and MS will have had time to "fine tune" it enough to make people get along with it, then they will kill XP.
OK, so they're extended the life of XP Home Edition until 2010 to capture more of the mini-laptop market. So? Name me one network admin who will use XP Home on an ultra-portable. These things are perfect for someone who needs a small, lightweight laptop to administer a network rack, and XP Home is practically useless for that.
The target market for XP Home has had Vista pushed on it for the past year and a half, and most of that target market probably doesn't know enough about Windows to care about XP vs. Vista.
Only extending the life of XP Pro will have any meaning.
Anybody want my mod points?
well, microsoft had been moving toward a media-centered model for years now, and vista was supposed to deliver just that - a way for users to use their computers not just for computing, but for media applications, home networking, etc. None of the UMPCs would really be able to deliver that, so microsoft never paid much attention to the issue.
XP really fills that niche for people looking for an ultra-mobile but also not willing to move to a linux OS. Which really is a much larger market then those who would gladly use linux on their mobile machine. I'd be surprised if microsoft will not fight hard to regain control of that market.
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
Anybody want my mod points?
So far anything on the market ran either both Windose and Linux or just Windoze.
IMO what got MSFT really scared is that many of the crop of the new and cheap PCs went as far as not being bothered to be Windows compatible on release. Asus is a prime example - it could not run Windows XP as shipped without MSFT doing some work on it. Half of the UMPCs are on its heels as well.
This is not something Microsoft has ever experienced in its history since the days of DOS vs CPM - the hottest PC product on the market based on customer demand for the Christmas season to be Windows incompatible.
It is not the linux market penetration that they are worried about, it is the change of attitude in major OEMs. The entire MSFT business is based around a B&D relationship with OEMs which keeps OEMs doing exactly what MSFT wants. An OEM rebellion is what MSFT is most scared of and it will do anything and give out any candy it can to prevent it.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
No one is going to spend $400 on an OS so they can run a $450 word processor. The Microsoft era is closed.
Those new "little" CPUs coming out aren't so little. They're above 1GHz now, they're going into machines with 1 GB of memory, and some of them are superscalar. They even have GPUs. That's more than enough power for any reasonable portable system. Mail, web browsing, video playing, the occasional PowerPoint presentation - you don't need a quad-core 3 GHZ CPU part for that.
What you need is battery life. The next frontier may be less CPU power but a full day of operation or more between recharges. Note that phone battery life was a huge issue until it reached a day or two of moderate to heavy use. After that, it stopped being a major factor in buying decisions.
And in the mobile phone market, it seems like Google and Apple (Goople?) are playing nice with each other, which will allow iPhone to rule the high end and Android to dominate the middle-to-low-end phone market. I don't know anyone who loves Windows Mobile, but a lot of people are pretty excited about their iPhones and/or the promise of Android.
The CB App. What's your 20?
... but I'm still dissapointed that most of those laptops are promoted with XP on it anyway.
:-(
Here in Belgium I saw an ad voor an asus EEE last week, but with shiny happy 'Windows XP' logo and specification besides it.
I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. It makes sense that supermarkets (the ad was from one) might try to sell XP rather than linux, so they can sell some other software that's needed.
With linux, a lot needed software is installed by default, and that does not translate in money to earn.
(The day when proprietary software wil be perfect against piracy will be a day to rejoice: Empty your wallets, or stop being lazy and try something like open source for a while, it's not that bad when you only need basic stuff done!)
Dependency hell? =>
Only complacent management at Microsoft.
Here's the loong tale of how this stuff happens.
This is how it works people. Smaller companies hit on a good idea all of the time. Every once in a while, the idea appeals to a very large group of consumers. Big companies just wait. Sometimes for quite a while.
All big companies, Microsoft included, have one guy running around corporate going "This UMPC thing is going to be big! We need to target it." This guy is completely ignored because there's no market data and Management pretty much ignores him because he's saying stuff like this all of the time.
Meanwhile, Asus figured out how to deliver the goods on the cheap. Microsoft's Asus rep ignored Asus's info about UMPC's because Microsoft's rep is used to waiting for corporate to deliver the pinata filled with money.
When Asus gets things rolling, Management panics because their high-priced market research has just come back with a new report saying cheap UMPC's are growing into a huge market. Some ass-kisser in Marketing is then tasked with stomping on the Linux Distro by preparing a pinata filled with money to deliver to Microsoft's Asus rep.
There's more waiting. More market research. More waiting. Presentations. Approvals. Meetings. More waiting.
Microsoft corporate delivers pinata to Asus rep. Microsoft's OS is then available as a SKU worldwide ~1-3 years after Asus's product launch.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Nah. Just because they were caught by surprise doesn't mean that they won't adapt. They don't even have to do anything beyond maintain XP. I am happy that Linux has been able to provide the competitive pressure to keep Microsoft on its toes, but to suggest that MS is going to keep reinforcing failure is a pipe dream. They are already on the OLPC, you can get the EEE with XP if I remember correctly, and so on. I predict that there will soon be a windows "light" based on XP or even NT, and the cycle starts all over again.
Still, it's nice to see that after 10 years or so of stagnation, the free market in software is finally healthy again and doing its job.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Just like with ME, I'll contiue to use XP until a sutiable replacement comes about.
Whoa, you waited for a "suitable replacement" for Millennium Edition?
Head Asplode
Vista is not a failure. I'm not trolling (though many will see it that way) - vista has made MS a bunch of money, and if anything, has given them a great wake-up call to shape up or ship out. It'll only be a failure if they never release another version of Windows, and don't learn from their mistakes. +5, Troll expected - slashdot, don't let me down!
A man "silicone augmenting" his computer... hmm, pretty soon you'll have something to make into a movie.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Actually I'm pretty pleased with my Treo 750. The ability to SSH, change providers, and easily develop software is what made the decision over an iPhone. I'm not trying to start a flamewar, just saying that there are plenty of people out there that are quite happy with Windows Mobile. That isn't to say however that I wouldn't by an Android capable phone the minute it came out.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
We use them exclusively in the field, when somebody drops it or somehow breaks it (and people can get very creative about what they do) we're only out a few hundred dollars compared to the over $2,000 we used to spend on toughbooks.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
What?
He is mistaken. This is the year of the Laptop Linux!
Desktop Linux isn't scheduled for release yet. Perhaps next year.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Vista has made MS a bunch of money, if you count the people who bought Vista, didn't like it, and then bought XP. MS sold a bunch of site licenses to businesses which allow them to install XP over the Vista that their new computers came with.
This is not sustainable growth, and their customers are massively pissed. MS is going to have a really hard time ever selling anything to these customers again.
I feel part of this is a reaction of people to slow, buggy computers that crash all the time: a computer is useless if it doesn't actually work. User don't care how fast the computer is. They don't care how fancy the OS is or how many bells and whistles the applications have. As long as it does what they need it to do, they're happy.
I've actually met people who are suspicious of Macs. They're too easy. They're too reliable. They're not like other (i.e. Windows) computers. There has to be a catch, somewhere. Us Mac fans just say this is how computers are supposed to work, and it's Windows that has it wrong.
...laura
Well, that was random.
Coke needs to come out with a blue-flavored cola.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The Year of the Linux UMPC?
Well, let me have a stab at this. For some time now, it 'seems' like MS business decisions might have been made by looking at the chairs scattered in the hallway outside the boardroom like so many tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.
Whether you like MS or not, clearly Vista was not the big deal it was supposed to be, and has failed to live up to expectations of even many MS fanbois. With users and businesses requesting XP be installed on new machines, and requests for longer lifecycle for XP added to the growth in GNU/Linux marketshare plus GNU/Linux shipping on some big name OEM machines. The trend here is not a positive one for MS. MSN is not making money, Zune is not making money, XBox isn't making any real money, XP is not causing the finance group to be all smiles either. Clearly the bid for Yahoo was a sign to everyone that MS does not plan to innovate it's way out of the maelstrom they find themselves in right now. When you get caught bluffing at poker, your hand is played out.
MS will have to do something rather extraordinary to turn the current trend around. Trying to do that in the midst of a recession might be difficult. There are very large organizations (whole countries even) that have decided to dump MS Windows products for various reasons. It really doesn't matter how good XP was or is, MS marketshare is leaching away in many areas. Wii helped with that. Ubuntu et al have helped with it. Dell et al helped too. In a recession Free sounds a lot better than 350 bucks, especially when it runs better on your old hardware than Vista does on brand new hardware. Of course there is the whole DRM thing to think of also. Then there is the iPod halo effect bringing more Mac customers.
There are plenty of reasons for NOT choosing Vista or MS products. Linux is one alternative, and it does deserve some of the lime light in this situation. If Linux wasn't working so good, MS would be making money off of Vista de facto.
The fact that there is only a very minute chance that you managed to post your message without relying on some version of Linux sort of technically means that Linux *IS* related and germane to a whole lot of things in the world today.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
From the article
I think that honor belongs to Microsoft Bob http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
XP does the two things you really want an OS to do well. Run all the software you want, on the hardware you want. But XP is getting long in the tooth.
The market is going to things like these UMPCs. It's going to tablets and other exotic hardware. Windows is losing one of the two things here. Vista doesn't run at all on them. Microsoft's only answer is keep putting out XP. On these systems, even XP doesn't run on the hardware as well as Linux.
Next up is software. These aren't gaming PCs. Linux is running the software people want to run. Firefox, Pidgin for IMs, It plays media without hassles. It has an office suite. Toss wine on there, and it will even run Office. Look at all the solutions that mac users use to run a couple Windows programs on OSX. The market is coming around to just using emulation for that last 5% of Windows software they want or need to run.
If Windows loses the only two reasons people put up with it, why would they continue to run it? OEMs are seeing this as well, and are just putting out Linux machines. Dell is going "If people buying Apple machines will use Parallels to run Windows stuff they can't in OSX, why can't they just use Crossover to run them on Linux"? In a market like PC, that $20 they spend on that Windows license is $20 they can't lower the price to compete with others. That $20 is a difference in someone buying a Dell, and going elsewhere.
Windows may end up being a niche market, with business that just need native Windows for one reason or another. But considering they are losing the two reasons home users RUN Windows, and then the added headaches associated to running it, why are they going to continue to bother?
If Vista didn't suck so much and wasn't as bloated as a dead whale carcass, Windows XP wouldn't have a reason to stick around. It's not just Linux, give credit where it's due.
The fact that Vista took 6 years to get here meant that the minimum specs for running Windows.CurrentVersion didn't change for 6 years, which created a market for ultra-cheap subnotebooks that would run like shit if they had to run Vista. Linux wins there, and XP's Microsoft's stopgap to try to compete with it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Humm. I wonder. If you take all the Tivos, WAPs, Cellphones, and other embedded devices that come with Linux install on them you might actually beat Vista "Sales" :)
You might also beat Vista sales if you only count retail boxes of Vista vs sales of Linux
BTW
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
They will ship you a Linux CD for free.
So no download, no compile, and if you really don't want to you don't even have to install it to use it. It will work as a live-CD.
Should be as easy to install as Vista if not more so.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This isn't the desktop. It's the micro-laptop. But it's a beginning.
We had one of the women from upstairs come down to the IT dungeon a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to get her (personal) laptop set up so she could read email while on the road, which meant configuring it to connect through a 3G USB stick, then bookmarking the company's webmail in the browser.
She'd bought it, having done without laptops in the past, because it was small and cute and pink and cheap and fit in her handbag. Yep, it's an Eee.
In case anyone's wondering, yes, they work perfectly, at least with the Vodafone sticks; there's a free download of the necessary software, with a version especially for the Eee that adds an icon in the Internet pane, and Vodafone even run an apt repository for it. I was expecting to get to play the Unix guru, but this was simpler than it is on the bloody Windows boxes!
So: someone wholly clueless bought this machine because of its size and price and cute factor. She wouldn't know what Linux was if you beat her about the head with a plump contented well-fed penguin. Wouldn't know an operating system from a hole in the ground. But she'd been playing happily with it for days and loving the damn thing. Best of all, the usual question of 'what happens when they try to install [INSERT DUMB USER PROGRAM HERE]' doesn't arise: Eee's got no disk drives :-)
These machines are going to produce an army of users who are used to Firefox and OpenOffice.org and all the rest of our beloved open-source applications. Once they've found that they can do everything they expect of a computer with these systems... well, Joe Public isn't tech-savvy, but he'll notice the price premium for Windows, remember how their geeky nephew Timmy said it was because those ones go to pay Bill Gates The Richest Man In The World even more money but these don't, and make the obvious decision.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's worse than just the retail numbers. Microsoft takes credit for every machine that is sold with Vista, whether or not that machine is sold with an XP install or whether the user subsequently wipes Vista and replaces it with something else. So basically every laptop sold to a business with a site license has counted as a sale of Vista, even though almost every large business replaces it with their own image.
My company (over 50k employees) took four years after the release of XP to adopt the new OS. They're moving more quickly on Vista, however, with rollout scheduled for 2009. It'll be really interesting to watch--about 50% of our entire workforce and 80-90% of our management are over 47 years old. There's going to be a great deal of bellyaching when users are suddenly confronted with the brand new user interface for both the shell (Aero will be on by default) and office suite (2007). I'll adapt fairly easily, I expect, since I'm still in my 20's, but I feel sorry for the poor folks at the Helpdesk when it hits.
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
Actually I know quite a few people who love Windows Mobile, including myself.
Many of those people are hardcore Linux users on the desktop, too.
The iPhone is a toy. It's shiny and cool but it isn't very flexible. My AT&T Tilt blows it out of the water in every aspect except user interface, and the UI of the Tilt is good enough for me, especially considering the significantly better functionality.
Android looks like it's going to cater to the Lords of Lockdown (carriers).
It's really sad that the most open mobile phone platform out there is Windows Mobile. Everything else is a nightmare of signed applications and lockdown.
(Yes, Windows Mobile has application signing, but every WM device I know uses this for warning purposes only, not lockout. In addition, WM will remember when you say "yes, I want to run this unsigned app" and not bother you again.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Have you ever installed Vista?
i thought not.
Vista sold on the same number of machines that XP would have sold on otherwise.
Don't try to confuse anyone into believing that Vista is a real product in it's
own right. It's just another version of Windows. So what if the latest version of
MonopolyOS sells as many copies of the latest version of MonopolyOS.
Even the current version of MacOS selling as many copies as the last wouldn't be
terribly exciting.
Pointing out the fact that Vista is the latest iteration of a monopoly that
stretches back to DOS doesn't alter the fact that alternative(S) are growing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...you mean the same IBM that came back with a vengance as a server company. ...or the same Sun that's still around as one of the dominant server vendors. ...or Netscape which is starting to chip away the monopoly/OEM acquired marketshare of IE?
Even Novell is doing pretty well by way of SLES.
AOL is the same sort of dinosaur as Microsoft. Microsoft never eliminated them. The internet
made them both look foolish. Although AOL was enough of a success based on it's own merits
before to linger on for awhile anyways.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Android will have a very hard time against this: Ericsson , Nokia , Panasonic , Samsung , Siemens and Sony Ericsson. And no, they are not using windows mobile. They are all shareholders at Symbian.
May I remind all of you that windows mobile is a smartphone OS. Not middle to low phone market. It is a "niche" OS. "Everybody else" just landed 18.5m Symbian mobile phones shipped to consumers. That is 73% market share.
On what phones will Android be shipped? Only on Motorola? If that is the case, Android is dead before it was born.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Gentoo is not hard core. Any monkey that can use a command line can do a Stage 1 Gentoo install (I'm proof!). Linux From Scratch is hard core.
emerge "teh hardcorz"
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
I have the same phone and IMO the phone is great except for WM sucks big time. I like OSX on the iPhone, but at the end of the day it lacks a lot a very basic functionality that WM has. When Android come out though, I'll be on that bandwagon in a heartbeat
Anyway, I strongly suggest looking into flashing it with a new radio and WM6.1 ROM. You can enable all sorts of great functionality like GPS, EVDO Rev A, and ICS (if you have VW and the bastards disabled it). Check it out here
actually, a friend of mine has been working on creating a durable-ized eeepc. Current method he's trying is encasing pretty much the entire outside of the thing in about a 2" layer of modified (mixed with some kind of metallic powder to allow decent thermal qualities, as it would have to be passively cooled.) soft silicone, along with a sealed keyboard, watertight plugs for all the ports, and gasketing around the edge of the screen and keyboard interior, covered in some army surplus untearabillium-infused fabric (same fabric as the older green Canadian combat uniform pants) to protect the silicone from abrasion.
No idea how well it's going, as I haven't talked to him in a few weeks (He's currently working with the base forces for the summer, but is doing this project on his own time), but it seems like a workable idea. The eeepc is sufficiently cheap that it's almost ideal for this kind of prototyping.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Have you tried ordering from the likes of Dell recently? Just go through the motions, no need to actually buy. You can still get XP, but its specified as "Genuine Windows® Vistaâ Ultimate with XP Professional installed". Says it all about Vista sales figures as far as I'm concerned.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
On my Ubuntu box, I just install the OS pull up Add/Remove software, click a few boxes for the stuff I want, hit apply and I'm done.
Anybody who uses Linux on a regular basis I'm sure can identify with the groan inducing tediousness you prepare yourself to put up with when a friend or family member asks you to help them install Windows.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I disagree. Now, it seems like you don't ever "own" any of your devices, your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider, your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux, the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you if you use a modchip, and all your media you haven't pirated or downloaded off of a DRM-Free site is tied to your account. So no, it isn't the greatest time, because now, you don't own a single thing.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
No, of course you're not. You're just some dude that created a Slashdot account three weeks ago with a grand total of 60 comments, most of which are spent shilling twitter's posts and those of his other nine accounts.
It's just all a big misunderstanding.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
This is absolutely true. However, keep in mind, that first of all, it's generally set and forget. You click the boxes, hit apply, then walk away. When you get back all of your software is installed and ready to go. No, next, next, next, etc. like on Windows. There are exceptions, java, VirtualBox, and a few others come to mind where you actually have to do something during the install but not very many apps are like that. Also, on *nix with so many shared libraries, the downloads for a particular piece of software tends to be much smaller than for a comparable piece of software on Windows.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
"Who BUYS a PC with Linux?"
did you not read the article summary above?
"It turned out people wanted inexpensive, hard-working Linux laptops"
The entire story is about XP being kept alive simply because people are BUYING a PC (er, laptop) with Linux. So yes, people are buying Linux PCs, enough so that M$ is scared.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I disagree. Now, it seems like you don't ever "own" any of your devices, your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider, your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux, the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you if you use a modchip, and all your media you haven't pirated or downloaded off of a DRM-Free site is tied to your account. So no, it isn't the greatest time, because now, you don't own a single thing.
This is total tripe and pessimism! One of the defining characteristics of a geek in this age is that they are able to discern what a load of garbage this stuff is. They use unlocked GSM phones, they avoid DRM like they've been born to do so, and they do all these things with the full knowledge of what makes Quality.
And this wonderful Internet that lets us discuss this, allows them to share their ideas and feelings with similar-minded people from around the globe!
How is this not a golden age?!
If there's not a critical mass of people avoiding DRM and working with unlocked hardware, it just won't be available any more. That's the point. It'll become a very niche, if still existent, market. The golden age will be when everyone has proper, unencumbered information sharing.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Translation : "WAAAH! WAAAH!". That's what your post sounds like.
your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider
Sure, if it's an iPhone. And yet. Otherwise just buy an unlocked one/unlock it yourself.
your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux
You know, there are other alternatives to Linux than Windows Vista, which is all you can possibly be refering to. Anyone using Vista on their home computer needs to hand their geek badge over anyways. So your point is moot.
the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you if you use a modchip
Oh no, the makers of a product try to ruin your experience with their product if you try to ruin their business model which is sell underpriced hardware for no profit (even loss) to make money on games which the only purpose of a modchip is to play for free.
all your media you haven't pirated or downloaded off of a DRM-Free site is tied to your account
Oh noes, the only alternatives to DRM-free solutions are.. DRM-based solutions! WAAAH!!!
I'll tell you why it's a great time to be a geek, I can watch TV shows that are not broadcasted in my country on a device that fits in my pocket, for free. I can play every game I would play on Sega Genesis as a kid on the same type of device, for free as well. And I can administrate the company that employs me's infrastructure from my bed, with the same wireless device. Oh my, what an awful time to be a geek!
You just got troll'd!
Up to two weeks ago, the XP machines had Athlon 64 CPUs in them whilst the Linux machines had Athlon XP CPUs in them.
Two weeks ago, I bought two new (cheap) Intel Dual Core motherboards to put in the XP machines to get a little more power for gaming. So I put the Intel motherboards in the XP machines and moved the Athlon 64s to the Linux machines.
After migration, the Linux machines booted absolutely fine - a ten minute kernel recompile on both machines, job done.
On the XP machines, they wouldn't boot the original XP installations, they blue-screened. I had to reinstall Windows on both and, even though both of my XP licenses are entirely legitimate, I had to ring Microsoft to get different license keys. It took me the best part of a day to reinstall Windows and longer to reinstall all the other games and apps that now wouldn't work because of registry bits missing.
I've decided that I'm going to change the Linux PCs to run 64-bit Linux. I use Gentoo Linux so I accept I'm probably going to need to do a reinstall using a 64-bit bootdisk and I suspect there will be some headaches getting everything to compile properly as 64-bit Gentoo is a bit less mature than 32-bit Gentoo. But I'll copy off all the config files in home directories and /etc, rebuild and copy all the stuff back and most of it should pretty much work as before. Plus I can build one machine, get it running okay, then just copy everything over to the other and do another simple kernel recompile because the two AMD 64 motherboards are different.
With Windows, I have to buy two new 64-bit XP licenses or, if I completely lose my sanity, by two Vista licenses. Yes, maybe the included migration tool will do a lot of the hard work for me but ultimately it's another two rebuilds, no chance of just rebuilding one and copying across.
Oh, and BTW, using all of 4 gigs of ram is simply about how much memory a 32-bit environment can address - 64-bit Linux can address and use 4 gigs of RAM equally as well as (64-bit) Vista.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Sure, if you listen to the sensationalist, bandwagon-leaping-on news stories about Vista raping cats and giving people AIDS, then you're going to get a very jaded view of the OS's adoption. I doubt you've read many articles covering people who are very happy with Vista, yet those users (and those stories) are out there. Those folks will probably buy Windows again. Vista has been doing rather well in stores, too. Sales have picked up rapidly, and couple that with the number of companies who are buying Vista VLKs (cue the tried and tested "ooh monopoly/vendor-lock-in/FUD-victims/linux-haters/whatever" response), and non-hardware-bundled Vista sales are doing very well. Those folks will probably buy Windows again, too. It is sustainable growth. You might not think it, if all you read is the aforementioned sensationalism, but that doesn't change reality. Making massive generalisations like "their customers are massively pissed" betrays the tenuous foundations (maybe wishful thinking) your argument is based on.
I happen to disagree with you both, it's always good time to be a geek. It was when my father brought home a Sharp MZ whatever. It was a good time when he was soldering in his first transistor radio. It was when my grandfather bought his first motorcycle in the 1920s and crossed the Alps with it. It was when one of my ancestors got his first water driven hammer mill. It probably was when the first person was tinkering with steam, gun powder, paper or fire.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
Well, it finally happened a few weeks ago. No looking back now - I bit the bullet and reformatted the whole kit and kaboodle and installed Ubuntu 8.04 as my only OS to see how long I could go without Windows. Getting Warcraft/DOTA working on Wine was the point of no return. Boot up time is a fraction of what it used to be without all the usual Windows and antiVirus/spyware overhead crud. Everything else is much snappier and I no longer need to fear the day when I have to deal with Vista.
Add one more to the converted masses.
I installed Ubuntu Linux and did a "first run" of Microsoft Vista, side by side, and Ubuntu won the race. I assume that means Vista didn't really come "installed," but rather with just an installer pointed at some .CAB files.
There really wasn't a significant difference either way, and I didn't do much other than wait and confirm an occasional dialog/default. The idea that Linux is harder to install than Vista has never been true. Linux installations became insanely easy long before Microsoft shipped its Edsel.
By the way, the Vista installation was on my teen daughter's new laptop. Performance was so poor that I reformatted and switched her to Ubuntu. The original Ubuntu installation was on her grandmother's PC. Both are working out just fine.