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Why Windows Vista Ended Up Being a Mess (usejournal.com)
alaskana98 shares an article called "What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective." Ben Fathi, formerly a manager of various teams at Microsoft responsible for storage, file systems, high availability/clustering, file level network protocols, distributed file systems, and related technologies and later security, writes:
Imagine supporting that same OS for a dozen years or more for a population of billions of customers, millions of companies, thousands of partners, hundreds of scenarios, and dozens of form factors -- and you'll begin to have an inkling of the support and compatibility nightmare. In hindsight, Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect. An organization, sooner or later, ships its org chart as its product; the Windows organization was no different. Open source doesn't have that problem...
I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to "patch" kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel -- the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I like how the essay ends. "Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet... Hindsight is 20/20."
I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to "patch" kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel -- the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our "friends", the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies?
I like how the essay ends. "Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet... Hindsight is 20/20."
I'm not sure you could say it "failed". It ended up becoming Windows 7, probably the best of the ms desktop os's ever, with a clean upgrade path to boot. So, if you think of it as "Window 7 v1"...it sure beat "Microsoft Bob".
Lots of revisionist history going on here.
Microsoft was just getting used to separating user space functions, which had turned XP prior to SP2 into an eggshell, so easily exploited that even bad script kiddies could pop a bubble and p0wn a machine.
Virus makers were a red herring. So were driver makers. It because impossible to regression test Windows because the software communities had build so many dependencies into the system, which were changed just as quickly by Microsoft.
Vista was simply a turd. There's no better way to describe it, and it's only after screaming hostilities did Microsoft pour sufficient resources to fix it so as to negate Vista into the more stable Windows 7-- which killed a lot of legacy problems, but also software compatibilities, libraries, functions, and functionality/behaviors.
Microsoft needed the money-- back during the phase where they made money on CALs and discrete licensing fees. In the middle of it, chaos ensued. It was a disaster.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
When Vista initially came out it was rife with performance issues and other flaws that were astonishingly bad and it was clear that it had been released prematurely. So I can understand the initial hate. But after SP1, its initial problems were corrected and SP2 made further fixes and minor improvements. I used Vista as my main PC's OS for nearly 8 years and I was quite satisfied with its performance and capability. So why the continued Vista hate so long after SP1?
You know why we dug into the fucking mess you call a kernel? Because it was a NECESSITY to get anything to work. The security of Windows up to 7 was such a catastrophic failure that the only way to defend against malware was to dig even deeper into your kernel because you had NO, ZERO, ZIP safeguards against malware actually doing something like this.
What did you expect us to do? Run on the crap you dared to call a kernel and rely on its nonexistent ability to defend against malware undermining it? That would make the whole idea of protecting the system absurd because the system's functions you're supposed to trust cannot be trusted.
The reason Vista was the mess it was? Because it was a damn atrocity from a security point of view. It tried its best to obscure and obfuscate its inner workings, mostly because as soon as you noticed just what they were like you realized that the problem is way bigger than you could possibly imagine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mojave (Windows Vista SP1) fixed a lot of the technical problems with Windows Vista. Was Windows 7 worth the price of the upgrade from Mojave, other than for three more years of patches?
It depends on who you ask. Vista demanded a lot more from the users, with the much stricter access controls. Because users hates having to make decisions, this was severely dialled back in Windows 7.
If Vista had received the same additions and bug fixes that Windows 7 did, but without the dumbing down and trading security for convenience of W7, I would have chosen Vista as the superior OS of the two. But support died down quickly.
I remember our tech lead in 2003ish insisted on following MS's API and structure recommendations, which included warnings that certain calls and other aspects would be deprecated in the future. Our software worked perfectly in Vista. Many products by bigger companies failed with security ot other issues. By post-hoc fixing some of their issues, you could get them working in Vista. Win7 had the advantage of arriving after all those companies fixed their software. I'd imagine tht had far more to do with it than "MS pouring in resources".
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I got a new laptop in 2007, with then new Vista. I also put Vista on some of my household machines. I hated it at first, as you said. Then, it improved with SP's, and it got better, as SP's tend to do. And, as time went on, I got used to it. I learned to live with it. Yet I rarely had a session where I did not have some reason to swear at it. On my main desktop machine which was my computing center, I continued to run XP (I loved XP, still do). Work with anything long enough, learn its quirks, and you can learn to live with it even if not love it. In the end, it turns out that Vista preserved the majority of computing paradigms that MS introduced with 3.11-95-98-200-XP, so once you got over the shock of what changed, it wasn't really so bad.
There were some big objections such as UAC, "min spec" debacle, security, etc., but there were also a zillion little sniggling things that were wrong. Technical architecture aside, an OS has two components, what's under the hood, and the user interface. Regardless how well or poorly it did with under the hood architecture, there was no reason to alter user paradigms that everyone knows and uses, especially since MS had invented or at least promoted and entrenched so many of them. Imagine suddenly all autos have the steering wheel and driver switched to the opposite side. Imagine that suddenly screws, nuts, and bolts have an entirely new system of thread sizes, that suddenly the qwerty keyboard is replaced with some new scramble of letters dictated by Steve Ballmer. I do a lot of work with font design. Vista suddenly broke font handling. File management via Explorer was suddenly deficient. Utilities such as Classic Shell came about not just because a few old fogies could not keep up with changing times, but because there is no reason to break basic functional paradigms just to be different.
Regardless who "invented" this, that, and the other OS feature (Xerox, Apple, IBM, MS, whatever), MS had its pivotal role. When MS made those earlier versions of Windows, they were not constrained by prior notions of what it should be. Right or wrong, they worked through the issues, and tweaked the interface, to get something that worked and people liked or at least got accustomed to. When Ballmer and Vista were in play, they tried, for better or worse, to fix core architecture problems, but they were not obliged to fudge the user interface paradigms, but they did. In so doing, not only did they disrespect and disregard the entire world user base, but they disrespected their own company forebears, second guessing what 20 years of MS engineers had developed before them. A lot of it was just change for change's sake, dumb and misguided.
Anybody could have learned to live with and adapt to the UAC prompts if that is all it was, or just corrupted font handling, or any other single thing. But, everything all piled up made it unpleasant, even after getting used to it and accepting that it was not too different than prior versions. It was different enough, and mostly for no sound reason, and that is why it was hated. It was better than Win 95. It wasn't better than Win 2000 or XP. Good riddance.
I wasn't sad. I celebrated. Creative got what they deserved after what they did to their competitors. It's funny that the one that would knock down creative was the os. But creative brought about it themselves. Their spaghetti coded drivers and associated bloatware was a major contributor of unstable and slow windows systems. Since creative wouldn't fix their drivers up microsoft took the initiative and removed direct access to the sound hardware from the drivers. And creative couldn't really complain because they were a lone voice fighting the change after getting rid of their competitors (what irony!!!) through dodgy tactics that would have made microsoft proud. The other big manufacturers of sound chips was the motherboard makers and they didnt care about direct hardware access because generating 3d sounds wasn't their bread and butter. So Creative fell by their own sword, from monopoly to not in one swoop after the release of vista. And maybe they would have had a better chance convincing microsoft not to remove direct hardware access if they hadnt knock out their competitors and if they hadn't mistreated their customers with shitty driver support.
vista was actually a good OS. it had a file copying bug before SP1, other than that its only fault was that it was too modern and advanced for the time. vendors were selling still old hardware, and in some cases selling hardware that was too slow for the OS.
people actually required having a faster computer than they had, so it ran slower than 98. fast foward a few years later, almost the same OS with a nicer skin and some UI enhancements was released to public fanfare. it was called windows 7, and was built on top of vista.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
In my last job we ran some binaries designed for RedHat 6.2 (kernel 2.2 if I'm not mistaken) on RHEL 6 with kernel 2.6. Worked just fine. The thing that keeps binaries from running isn't usually the kernel; it's the C library and dynamic linker loader. In my case I had to set up a complete RH 6.2 chroot environment to run this app in. Think about that. Redhat 6.2 user space running on a then-current 2.6 kernel.
I'm fairly confident the same binary would, with the chroot environment and supporting libc and ld.so, run on RHEL 7, and probably would work fine with kernel 4.x (though I doubt it would work with selinux without some serious tinkering).
By and large, the Linux kernel is quite compatible with older binaries, if you can get a linker and libc version that work with the binary in question. Certainly it's much more compatible than you claim.
3. Vista was the first version of Windows which enforced admin/user separation. Unix-based OSes (Linux, OS X) have this built-in since Unix was designed assuming a multi-user environment. Users are given just enough privileges to run their programs, and likewise user programs are written assuming these minimal permissions. Windows was built upon DOS and the assumption that there was a single user who had total control of the computer. Consequently, even though Windows 2000 introduced the concept of admin/user separation, it was widely ignored. Most Windows programs were written assuming they had admin privileges.
When Vista took away admin privileges (for programs run from a non-admin account), lots of programs stopped running. The ones which did run triggered countless UAE elevation request dialogs - so many that users became trained to just click OK every time it popped up, which pretty much defeated the whole purpose of requiring privilege elevation. Over time, programs were modified to run limited to user privileges, which is why it isn't a problem to run Vista now. But if you had to use it when it was first introduced, it was a nightmare.
4. Microsoft's system requirements for Vista were totally unrealistic. Most XP systems at the time had 128-256 MB of RAM, with the occasional 512 MB system. 1 GB was profligate with XP. Microsoft didn't want to freak people out, so set Vista's minimum memory requirement at an unrealistic 512 MB. With that little RAM, Vista begins swapping the moment you try to start your first program. Realistically, 1 GB is the minimum, 2 GB a comfortable amount.
5. XP was developed from 1998-2001 and released in 2001. Vista was developed from 2001-2006 and released in 2007. 2004-2005 was when Intel ran headfirst into the brick wall of physics (higher clock speeds resulted in excessive leakage and power consumption) and processors stopped doubling in clock speed every 1.5 to 2 years. Based on Windows 3.x, 95, 98, and 2000, Microsoft had assumed CPU speeds would increase by a certain amount from development to release. Consequently, XP was a dog when it was being developed, but by the time it was released computers had gotten fast enough that it performed well on customer machines. Vista was a dog during development, and was still a dog when customers began buying it.
Those of you claiming Vista runs well and was unfairly maligned should try running it on period hardware - a Pentium 4 or Core Solo/Duo (not Core 2) with 512 MB of RAM. I'd say run it with period software too just so you can experience getting a UAE elevation prompt a dozen times a day, but it'll probably be tough to find period software.
Omitting the key sentence in the post you're replying to: "Although you don't have to, since all the distros already have."
+3 "insightful" instead of -1, "Can't fucking read". Yep, this is Slashdot.
And I'm gladly telling average users that, if they are stupid enough to not do due diligence. Buy stuff which is compatible, or suffer. Not to mention that if your hardware needs some funky driver under Linux, it's probably going to be an unreliable POS under Windows too!
As for the rest, Linux doesn't need a BS in CompSci to install, and it doesn't shit itself. Shitting itself is Windows territory. All it takes to install Linux is a rudimentary understanding of the OS and compatible hardware. The exact same premisses as for Windows, the main difference being that you have a slightly higher chance of having your piece of hardware "kind of" working out of the box with Windows, and a massively bigger risk of being left at a later point with a fully functional device but no working driver, as opposed to your having drivers which improve over time. Really important to people who just needs to get shit done, you know.
Why Linux doesn't take off has nothing to do with these non-issues. It has everything to with inertia, lack of mind share and general resistance to change, fear of the unknown as well as outright corruption and sabotage from Microsoft and their stooges who realize that the day people get rid of them, they are fucked.
That said, I'm off to a customer setting up their office with openSUSE later today. Windows 10 with it's incessant spying, vulnerability to malware, inclusion of crapware and planned obsolescence proved too much, for no material gain at all.
One of my first computers had DR DOS 6 on it, and had no problems running Windows 3.1. How much of this is heresay?
It only affects a single beta version of Windows. No shipping version of Windows 3.1 had problems running on DR-DOS.
UAC hell was deliberate. There was no other way to make developers behave without completely breaking their apps, which users would hate even more.
UAC trained developers to avoid doing things that triggered them as much as possible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The thing about open source is that, for all the arguments and chaos, a technically correct solution more often wins out
That's the theory, but it's often not true. Often the person who has commit access to the branch that people use gets to push their code, instead of the person with out-of-tree patches that are technically superior. Or the person who simply keeps arguing after the people who are correct have got bored and moved onto productive things wins out.
This is because it's inherently a meritocracy
The term 'meritocracy' was originally coined to refer to the way that British class system created the veneer of selection on ability but actually selected based on in-group characteristics. If that's what you actually meant, then I'd agree. Particularly for the Linux kernel, but also for a lot of other open source (and proprietary) software projects.
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