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Hey, good question.

Well, I think they are on par, mostly. Simply put, SLED 10 has all the advantages and disadvantages of being Linux ánd has a pretty interface, while Vista has all advantages and disadvantages of being Windows ánd has a pretty interface.

They both failed miserably in the touchpad department, in any case.

Edited 2006-11-13 11:47

But still Vista needs more hardware to run. And Linux mostly runs better than Windows given the same hardware. Right now, the only thing that gives Windows any advantage is the applications that run on it.

Maybe it's just me but on two computers I tried SLED it's really slow, don't even get me started on YaST or this auto-updater thing using Mono. It's just as slow or maybe slower than Vista.

There are other distros that may be faster than SLED. And mono apps are really slow to start. Too much hyped. It reminds me of java 5 years ago (don't know about today improvements).

miscz said: "Maybe it's just me but on two computers I tried SLED it's really slow, don't even get me started on YaST or this auto-updater thing using Mono. It's just as slow or maybe slower than Vista."

I thinks its you. I just tested this on a Via CPU @ 1000Mhz and it was incredibly snappy. (Surprised me)

"Just" the applications you run? Well, IMHO, what really matters isn't the OS itself but the apps you can run on it and how they perform.

Nice review Thom, but I'm afraid that Vista isn't doing it to my desktop anytime soon.

"First Superficial Response. No thank you. More glitz isn't what I want from an operating system. I want something that recognizes ALL of my hardware, is very fast, and stays out of my way so I can use the programs I need to do my job."

Yeah, I agree. MS is continually trying to "improve" Windows, but all that really mean is they are just dumping more crap into the OS and its interface. I used to think that the 'Category View' in XP was horrendous...until I saw the control panel in Vista. Now you have to look in the main window and the sidebar just to find anything. If you turn on classic view, you just get bombarded with icons.

Edited 2006-11-13 13:13

So you want OS X.

touché

Did you have time to test how the slightly deeper things worked, like having mails as separate eml-files, and persons as separate contacts?

Those are things for the thorough review, expected in a few weeks.

Acknowledged. I'll be looking forward. Separate mails and contacts are the two features I cannot understand haven't been implemented earlier - it was possible already in win95. And it makes indexing mails and contacts so much easier.

We'd all love to see everything moved into individual files or SQL. Microsoft JetDB and any other propritary database file structure needs to go ASAP.

I cannot understand haven't been implemented earlier

Because of FAT and storage space concerns, probably. The typical message in my inbox looks to be about 2-8KB - not much of a problem on a modern filesystem + large disk, but that could take up a significant amount of space on a small drive, especially thanks to the large cluster size in FAT.

DOH! Should've thought of that. It sounds plausible - at least with FAT16 (and to some extent also FAT32).

"For those of you with Vista, press Ctrl+Alt+Tab for a third option"

You will end with arthritis in your left hand

Edited 2006-11-13 14:51

There's also OpenExpose:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/openexpose/

The latest version of Nero which came out in mid October does work on VISTA RC2. I am running RC2 and have had no problem installing and using this new version of NERO.

Is there any burning software that actually runs under Vista? The last time i checked Nero wasn't compatible.

http://www.imgburn.com/

Well...the beautiful thing is, even though MS has a monopoly in the OS world, you don't have to use any of their products if you don't want to. There are still plenty of alternatives out there that in many ways are just as good if not better.

Sure, as long as you manage to use Windows only formats in your Linux box (as I do, sometimes painfully) screaming and bitching to Windows users for the shit they send to you without knowing anything about interoperability and freedom.

"Sure, as long as you manage to use Windows only formats in your Linux box (as I do, sometimes painfully) screaming and bitching to Windows users for the shit they send to you without knowing anything about interoperability and freedom."

Hostile, but funny

"Hostile, but funny "

When you receive by mail a "game" created with Excel you start to understand why I'm being a little hostile

i send documents in formats that can't be read by ms office or other microsoft programs

"i send documents in formats that can't be read by ms office or other microsoft programs "

I did too, but they bitched at me, as if it was my fault they couldn't open a damn PDF or a report generated in HTML didn't show well in IE. So I said "f--k them", and now I export every report they want from me (I do payroll) as RTF and rename it .DOC and done. They will always ask for a Word or Excel. Damn suckers!

Sure, as long as you manage to use Windows only formats in your Linux box (as I do, sometimes painfully) screaming and bitching to Windows users for the shit they send to you without knowing anything about interoperability and freedom.

Hilarious. Your concept of "freedom" requires the rest of us to become enslaved to your choice of OS. And this is progress? No thanks.

"Hilarious. Your concept of "freedom" requires the rest of us to become enslaved to your choice of OS. And this is progress? No thanks."

No way. That's why there are standards. Standards Microsoft don't respect in order to maintain their monopoly. I don't pretend people use Linux just because I don't like Windows. I pretend people use standard formats for information interchange. No more than that.

Talking about progress, Microsoft didn't help much in 10 years of development. What you have now is mostly what you had 10 years ago with a little more eye candy. No innovation, no progress at all.

And my concept of freedom is right. You should check with the dictionary what freedom is. My freedom doesn't require anything from anyone. It's something personal. I choose FOSS because I'm a free person that values his freedom and most important, I want to stay free. People's freedom to use a Windows & Microsoft only application that uses files in a non-standard format prevents me from easily accessing that information. They are free to choose, but still want me to use MS Office to be able to open and save files in the format they use. So who is enslaving who?

yes you are fully right.

I use linux for 2 years now and since a few months a mac, too ;-)

i've used macs since 1996

I don't like peas, and I won't eat them...

Edited 2006-11-13 16:50

just give them to me

Reminds me of a line from Red Vs. Blue...

"We're in the future now! Everything is verrrry shiny here."

Rumour has it that the new abilities of Vista's audio mixer are thanks to an ex-Be employee that Microsoft hired.

http://www.bedoper.com/bedoper/2005/32.htm

The only problem with gaming in Vista is that the audio and video stacks are completely new and no longer in kernel mode. So the hardware companies have to write new drivers from scratch, and as such, the actual driver performance is quite abysmal at this point.

Will it show the full pathname of the destination folder so I know that I've dropped the stuff to be copied on the right target? Will it show total bytes to be copied and completed?

Yes, see link below:

http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/vista/rtm/images/Copying%2...

There's also a mouse pointer tip that shows the location to which you're dragging items, so you have a visual queue before you copy/move them.

Edited 2006-11-13 21:33

Sweet merciful crap, it's about time. Maybe now it will actually be smart enough to check if a destination volume has enough space before beginning to copy/move files to it.

Yes! Thank you. That's something which has been bugging me for a long, long time. :-)

Oh, and by making the statement that you never much liked the popular girls is the typical geek response. Let's face it, they wanted nothing to do with you, and thought that most chubby guys who play dungeons and dragon from the time they got home from school, until 1:00AM is just plan creepy...

That is probably the most offensive post on OSN ever.

The first part: "Actually I was making a pun at the original poster. I don't Vista, and won't use it. Same response as you...good...don't use it; shut up and move on. I've actually used a number of OS's, and they all have their share of pros/cons. User's choice... " is quite fine. Totally agree there - except you originally replied to the wrong person.. *sigh*

But, true - all OS'es have pros and cons. Doesn't matter if it is CP/M+GEM or DOS+Windows or WinNT or Mac OS Classis, AmigaOS, OS/2 or whatever. There are ups and downs.

As you can see here http://news.com.com/Study+Vista+could+create+50,000+jobs+in+Europe/... , Microsoft is "creating jobs" with the introduction of the new Windows Vista...that is why you need more memory and more processor to do the same

Adam Smith would say: "The invisible hand of B. Gates" :-)

Edited 2006-11-13 20:27

I know Compiz works just peachy on almost anything with a few megabytes of memory and hw OpenGL, but there's one difference about Vista's Aero and AIGLX (I'm not even mentioning XGL here, it's even worse): if you've got AIGLX running, your framerate in any and all OpenGL apps will drop to about 1/3 of what it was before or even more...As such, I find gaming impossible if I have AIGLX enabled, and I seem to be getting lots of glitches in OpenGL apps/games/screensavers..I've tried this with both ATi and nVidia cards with the same results. In Vista though, they did it a different way, apparently not causing such a framerate drop, so could it explain the harder hardware requirements too? I don't really know, but as the situation is now, I guess I gotta disable AIGLX on my machine. As much as I dislike Windows, atleast they did something right too.

It primarily comes down to quality, efficiency, and support.

Aero is not an accurate indicator of the system's full capabilities. It covers most, if not all, areas graphically, but it's meant to be out of your way rather than a tech demo. There are many applications and samples that are better showcases for platform capabilities. Aero does, however, use features not guaranteed to be in earlier fixed-function hardware. Programmable GPUs are more flexible, efficient, and can achieve higher quality. They support things like floating-point color, better AA and filtering, programmable shaders, higher quality video rendering and acceleration, etc.. D3D 9 GPUs are about 4 years old at this point, can be bought for ~$50 or less (64MB and Shader Model 2.0 is the minimum for Aero), and have been available in many integrated hardware designs for a almost as long as the GPUs have been on the market.

Aero relies on a new display driver model (WDDM), and it was/is unlikely that IHVs would want to write a completely new driver to support older hardware which could never be fully utilized in the first place. So, with that and other considerations, Microsoft chose not to support those video cards in Aero or future versions of Direct3D (D3D 10 emulates the fixed pipeline with a shader program), which also simplifies D3D (D3D 10 is a totally new architecture).

WDDM supports current graphics hardware, but is built with the future in mind (several iterations of Windows will build on this model). It includes basic and advanced driver models, and features like scheduling, virtual memory, command stream validation, and resource sharing between processes, to increase GPUs' availability to the system for visual and non-visual tasks. Most D3D 9 GPUs will likely use the basic model, wheras D3D 10+ GPUs will use the advanced model, and gain performance and reliability benefits (context-based scheduling rather than batch, hardware stream validation rather than software, demand paging, etc.).

"D3D 9 GPUs are about 4 years old at this point, can be bought for ~$50 or less (64MB and Shader Model 2.0 is the minimum for Aero), and have been available in many integrated hardware designs for a almost as long as the GPUs have been on the market."

...

but you still can't replace an integrated Intel graphics chipset in a notebook with one. Nope, my brand new laptop is doomed never to get Aero.

Isn't 256MB of video memory the minimum before Vista will enable Glass by default? That was the thing that seemed most crazy to me.

but you still can't replace an integrated Intel graphics chipset in a notebook with one. Nope, my brand new laptop is doomed never to get Aero.

If you had any intention of running Vista with Aero Glass, you should have checked the system requirements before purchasing the notebook. The requirements have been available and unchanged for 3 years.

Isn't 256MB of video memory the minimum before Vista will enable Glass by default? That was the thing that seemed most crazy to me.

No. You will get Glass by default with a 64MB GPU as long as it has WDDM drivers and supports Shader Model 2.0 or higher. If those were the actual results of someone testing Vista, only a few things would cause that behavior:

Bad or wrong drivers (most likely as drivers were alpha quality during the Vista beta) -- could affect initial performance testing and prevent Glass from starting. You need WDDM drivers. Glass won't work with XPDM drivers.

Running at higher resolutions and/or with more monitors than the card(s) can handle with good performance for 3D.

Bad hardware -- if the hardware just has unusually bad performance for 3D operations, doesn't have enough bandwidth (memory or bus), etc., even though it claims PS 2.0 and 64MB (the hardware is most likely defective).

Nah, I think what he really means is that those 50,000 people will be needed to be trained as Linux administrators, since no one will either be able to afford the upgrades to Vista, nor will they need them in businesses. But if Microsoft stops supporting anything but Vista, then businesses will have to migrate to something else, and since Linux and other operating systems don't require as much hardware to run decently, they'll just switch.

Seriously, how many businesses will want to upgrade their crappy Dell workstations that run XP just fine with 256mb-512mb of ram and onboard video to more expensive hardware, simply to able to run the latest Operating System from Microsoft?

Windows is far behind Mac OS X

Mellin: You do realize that OS X only runs on their own hardware so they don't have to supports loads of weird and wonderful hardware and they have limited applic