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Damn, this sounds almost like Get-The-Facts. I don't really like SJVN's articles either, but some of the points he brought up are quite fair. For instance:

* It's not my case, but I do know people who change their date and time quite frequently for the simple fact that they travel abroad with their laptops and they don't always have immediately-available Internet connections. As far as I'm concerned, it's a pretty fair point, and I'm sure this is the kind of people who would complain about a poorly designed Date&Time window.

* There are a lot of people who do need a serial driver. I, for one, need one that works well because I often used the serial port for development reasons (e.g. interfacing with SBCs). I realize that Microsoft doesn't really care about what their customers need, but "there aren't *THAT* many people who need serial ports" is a very lousy excuse.

* I do prefer to shut down my computers when I have to, for a lot of reasons. When my hdd is getting claustrophobic, the last thing I need is Vista taking up some space to hibernate. If I know I won't be working on my laptop for several days, I don't want it to sleep for even a second (I don't care about "saving some battery power" -- if it consumes even the smallest amount, it's not good for me), I don't want it to hibernate (for hdd space reasons), I want it to shut down for good. Even if I didn't have any practical reasons for prefering to shut down my computer over sleeping/hibernating, I still wouldn't care. What I do with my computer is my choice, and I could hardly care less about what the Vista development team thinks I should do with it. "Vista is slow to boot and shut down but you won't need that anyway" is another poor excuse.

Pointing a finger at Linux advocates for not knowing the technical details of the OS-es they don't use is a bit too much. Linux advocates know about Windows just as much as Windows advocates know about Linux. Besides the fanboy-ism which you'll obviously find in any camp, most of the fair points which were brought up against Vista before it was released really stood up.

Who said that serial ports do not work anymore? I don't have one, so I couldn't test anything myself... that was my primary point there. Now, the issue that Lance had with his Wacom tablet was in the Wacom driver and there was an easy solution for it found by googling.

If you travel, you change time zones... this is different from changing the system time (which affects the timestamps put on files on the hard drives and appointments on your calendar and stuff). Time zones can be changed by any user (maybe not Guests). I just tested this on Vista and it works... have you done any even rudimentary checks before writing your response?

I don't think bootup is that sluggish. I was responding to the question in Mary Jo Foley's blog entry about hibernate and sleep "masking" a sluggish bootup. My response is that bootup is pretty reasonable, and hibernate and sleep are much faster. If you really don't have space or battery, don't use the faster means.

Edited 2007-04-23 21:06

"""
Linux advocates know about Windows just as much as Windows advocates know about Linux.
"""

It all depends upon who you are talking about, of course. But I would wager that Linux advocates, in general, know more about Windows than Windows advocates know about Linux.

I suspect that the average Linux advocate knows more about Windows than a significant portion of the Windows advocates.

I would further generalize, and say that the average user of any Non-Microsoft OS knows quite a bit more about Windows than the average Windows user, simply out of necessity.

Note that I did switch around a bit between "advocate" and "average user" there. And nowhere did I address that class of multi-platform aware people that OSNews attracts. So be careful to note that I am not calling eclectically educated Windows advocates stupid. :-)

Edited 2007-04-23 22:37

PlatformAgnostic, I have seen the serial driver performing badly on some systems myself. It was around the time I read SJVN's article and (having some problems digesting his articles myself) and I was convinced it was not Windows-related, but it does happen to work perfectly well with Linux.

My problem with Windows and timezones (and why I'd rather change the time than the timezone) is related to what timezone really means. I'm not sure if this is leftover in Vista, but it's a habit I've had since Windows 98 I think, and which remained in 2000 and XP. The notion of "timezone" is strictly related to time (something I got used to from *nixes), but when I change my timezone in Windows, it also understands that I am changing my location as well -- so that it changes my local currency, decimal commas into dots and so on, which I simply don't want.

As far as I'm concerned, I was never bothered with boot times because I actually caught not just the days when it took a few seconds to boot into BASIC but also about two minutes to boot a crawling OS on slow hardware. However, remember that Microsoft promised incredibly fast boot times. To whom were they promising that, I do not know, but any Gentoo or FreeBSD user will laugh at anything longer than 15 seconds.

Don't get me wrong, SJVN (and MJF, in some aspects) really *should* open their minds -- what I really mean to say is that much of Microsoft's advertising is seriously inflated. Not that it would be a solitary practice the likes of Apple don't do -- but it still holds. I don't think there was a single piece of software not to be unfairly criticized.

But if you look at many of the points that were brought even before Vista got final, you'll see how most of the criticism comes from users of other platforms. I didn't trust them too much either (the same happened with Windows XP a few years ago). I did manage to understand these critics because I haven't used Windows consistently myself, and next to none of Vista's "novelties" were anything new to me.

Nevertheless, this doesn't justify unfair criticism, which is something about which I agree with you :-).

Most people don't seem to care about facts. Why do I care?

Because I respect some of the people working on Windows and some who have developed it. There are serious screw-ups in there, but the Kernel mechanisms invented by Dave Cutler are quite well-designed with the lessons learned from UNIX and other systems.

The USER subsystem that Raymond Chen and many others have worked on has many warts and compatibility hacks, but it was for a long time the fastest way to draw a desktop to the screen.

The distributed file system, which was partly written (in its original form) by Larry Ostermann solved problems that the Unix world left to applications, much to the detriment of portability and correctness (do you like those .nfs files that appear when doing shares? or the necessity of creating .lock files everywhere?).

I care because, although I haven't met these people, I realize that they are engineers to look up to and not some organs of a corporate leviathan. I care because I don't want to see other students be seduced by the "worse is better" mentality that many UNIX denizens espouse.

Edited 2007-04-23 21:20

I care that I had to buy a cheap PC today for my ex's parents, and that I couldn't get a single one with XP at the local Future Shop. I didn't have time to shop around, unfortunately, so I had to pick one up with Vista.

I care that it took two and a half hour to reinstall it in French (while installing a language pack in Linux takes less than a minute). I care that it is extremely sluggish for a 512MB system, while it could really fly with a lighter system on it.

I care that it took two minutes and 25 seconds to boot into a working Vista desktop, while it took two minutes and 10 seconds booting into Kubuntu 7.04...from a live CD! I also care that the system was more responsive from the LiveCD for simple tasks (like exploring files, surfing the web, moving windows around and the like).

I care that I didn't have access to the Samba shares on my LAN because the new PC came with Home Basic. Or maybe you can, but I couldn't find it because they changed the control panel UIs again.

This was my first contact with Vista. I've installed and used a large variety of MS OSes in my time: Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000 and XP. This was by far the most disappointing one (then again, I never installed ME). Sure, some great engineers work for MS, and they have my respect. That still doesn't make Vista a great Windows release. For starters, all the backwards compatibility cruft are making it incredibly bloated.

Look at it this way: if it was such a great product, there wouldn't be *that* much negative opinions about it. The engineers may not be to blame (I personally think the responsibility lies above them), but that doesn't change the basic fact: the "Wow" is elsewhere.

512 MB is too little RAM for Vista. Maybe if you turn Aero off, it might be okay, but I don't think anyone (besides Microsoft) will tell you that 512 is enough. I'm not going to defend the indefensible.

I also don't think the language situation is perfect. But if you needed the OS in French, why was it in English in the first place? This doesn't help you, but enterprises can get multilingual packs that can be installed on a per-user basis... you also get these if you buy Ultimate edition. If not, I guess you're consigned to reinstalling the OS.

Well, obviously HP and Future Shop believe that 512MB is enough, since they sell the systems. As I said, FS no longer sold any systems with XP (none from other OEMs either). How is the average consumer supposed to know that the *new* PC he's buying is not powerful enough to adequately run the OS it's shipped with?

The bigger point, of courses, is that Vista *should* be able to run on 512 MB. 512MB, while not that much, is still quite a lot of memory. XP runs very well on such a system - I find it mind-boggling that MS, with all its talented engineer, wasn't able to produce an advanced OS that could run with that amount of memory.

I was almost tempted to leave the Kubuntu LiveCD in the CD-ROM tray and not tell my ex's parents...



Um, because that's what they were selling at the store? Hey, I know some of this criticism is not MS's responsibility, it's the OEM's and the store's, but what is the average consumer going to think? He's going to be staring at his computer screen for two and a half hours, wondering why it takes so long (why *does* it take so long, incidentally? It takes less than 20 minutes to install the whole Kubuntu OS...). Oh, and after these two and a half hours, it's another forty-five minutes of updates before you have a completely ready system...great!

There's no real engineering reason to require a reinstall if you want a different language...it's a business reason, and these are what plague Windows the most, in my view. It'd be a great OS if it was open-sourced, and didn't have to serve to maintain MS's revenue stream. I won't even mention the times when you need more than one language on the same computer...



Yes, and the Ultimate version was worth as much as the PC I was buying. This was not an option for the future owner.

Should have bought a Dell

They didn't have any Dells under 500$CAN at the store (tax + extended warranty included). Even then, all the Dells had Vista on them.

If I hadn't been in a situation where I needed to get the computer NOW, I would have shopped around town to find a place that still sold PCs with XP. As it is, the new owners will probably have to fork out more cash in order to get more memory (then again, maybe they'll just learn to live with the sluggishness - they aren't heavy computer users).

I care because I don't want to see other students be seduced by the "worse is better" mentality that many UNIX denizens espouse.

We prefer "simpler is better." Surely with enough talent and man-hours, you can create a gigantic tangle of complexity that manages to function as an operating system. But is that better than a set of simple components that fit together in a logical way?

Students learn UNIX because its design is comprehensible, elegant, and fundamental to understanding computer systems. They don't learn Windows because there's no reason to mimic its design. Maybe its feature-set, but not its design.

I'm sure there are countless top-notch developers working on Windows, and the kernel is actually pretty decent these days, but the platform as a whole is screwed. Microsoft can try their best to improve their code quality, but they cannot immediately abandon unfortunate design elements (e.g. the registry) or police their crappy third-party drivers and applications. You can't put sour milk in the fridge and expect it to become drinkable.

What the Windows faithful don't understand, and many of the Linux advocates as well, is that third-party software is what makes running Windows insecure and unreliable. I have no problem with third-party software as long as it's open source, but I'll only accept proprietary software if the vendor offers full support for their product. Microsoft can't support the vast array of proprietary third-party software that its customers use, but when this crap fouls up their systems, it reflects poorly on them. People install a couple dozen applications that all disclaim any responsibility if anything goes wrong, and then when things go south, they blame Microsoft.

So excuse me if I'm not dying to see all sorts of third-party proprietary software on Linux, because the result will be much of the same. I like the fact that my software vendor supports nearly all of the software on my system, providing timely fixes and easy upgrades. If I use proprietary software, I have to live with the fact that flash might not work in a 64-bit browser or that the NVIDIA drivers might not work with the latest version of Xorg for months. I don't try to file a class-action lawsuit when the proprietary drivers don't work properly. I understand that with proprietary software, I'm at the mercy of the vendor, and if I don't like the way their software works or what environments they support, there's nothing I can do about it.

I find it amusing that journalists are going to such great lengths to rationalize the public's general distrust of Microsoft or criticisms of Vista on technical grounds. In the end, it's not UAC, DRM, WGA, or the various UI quirks that create the sentiment that Vista is simply more of the same from Microsoft. It's just that everybody is fed up with the proprietary software industry screwing us over and making us deal with the mess. We can't keep blaming Microsoft forever. We have to give credit where credit is due and point our fingers squarely at the proprietary vendors, particularly the graphics vendors. They suck at shipping good drivers for Windows almost as much as they suck at delivering them for Linux.

Thanks for a thought-out reply. You're absolutely right about third-party binaries and their detrimental effect on the stability of the system. The applications I use the most on Windows are either written by Microsoft or Open Source, so I definitely live by your statement. I have no choice with drivers, but I'm lucky to have mostly intel hardware with pretty decent drivers.

I have a pretty strong philosophical difference with you on the nature of simplicity in the OS. The Linux/UNIX method of simplicity is great for certain tasks, like high-performance-computing and portable servers. It's also great for bringing up new hardware, as you said in a recent post. But when it comes to making applications that have to have many interactions with the underlying system or which have to get a naturally complex task done, I think it's better to put some intelligence into the OS.

File-locking in distributed filesystems is the first issue that comes to mind for me. Windows has a pretty interesting mechanism to do distributed locking in the SMB protocol. UNIX used NFS for quite some time, which didn't even attempt to solve this problem, so it appears in applications. This is fixed in newer DFSes like NFSv4, but it's an example of what I consider "worse-is-better."

The registry is a Windows solution to setuid. It's basically a filesystem for storing key-value pairs which can be ACLed separately from each other. It also has atomic operations and in Vista, MSFT has implemented ACID transactions on the registry so partial installs can be transparently rolled back. I'd see the registry as a design strength of Windows rather than a design flaw.

I'm sure you've seen this before. I don't necessarily believe everything in here, but I think it's pretty funny and accurate in areas:
http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

I respect your opinion in general, and I'd like some specifics in areas where you think the Windows design is deficient. I'm sure I'll agree with you on a lot of them, but the disagreements could be interesting. How would you feel about doing a joint OSNews article? It could be high-quality.

Edited 2007-04-24 06:19

The Linux/UNIX method of simplicity is great for certain tasks, like high-performance-computing and portable servers... But when it comes to making applications that have to have many interactions with the underlying system or which have to get a naturally complex task done, I think it's better to put some intelligence into the OS.

What I mean by simplicity is that a complex system is made up of simple and often interchangeable components that interface in a well-defined manner. Each component can be developed in loose coordination with its neighbors and completely ignorant of other components in the system.

The complexity isn't in the components themselves so much as the way they fit together. This is why UNIX and free software has excelled in the server space, where systems are often logically structured as a stack of components. The choice of where to draw the lines and how the components communicate isn't really that difficult in a stack.

But a desktop is more like a tree or even a more general form of graph. Some components form a sort of stack, others connect to a bus, some synchronize, others stream, and many participate in a combination of these relationships. Where to draw the lines and how to connect the dots is a harder problem, and as we watch the free software desktop develop mature technologies like DBUS and KParts, we see more powerful ways of connecting the components of the desktop becoming central pillars of the platform.

But as the componentized system that evolved in a distributed development environment becomes more powerful, or intelligent as you say, the complexity of each component stays in check, and the complexity of their relationships scales reasonably. The monolith forged in the halls of the Redmond campus, on the other hand, becomes harder and harder to maintain as new features creep in.

I shied away from your NFS comment before, but I'll agree with you that NFSv3 had its shortcomings and that NFSv4 is arguably even worse overall. Of course, Linux and other UNIX-like systems have SMB and CIFS support, but that doesn't mean that this is the best possible solution. There are other DFSs like Cargenie Mellon's AFS and Coda, IBM's GSA, and Red Hat's GFS, among many others. Then there's the trend of tunneling anything and everything through SSH to arrive at some interesting solutions like sshfs.

I have no problem with a registry in theory, such as the gconf registry in GNOME. But the Windows registry was subverted by malware authors early on, and Microsoft has seemed powerless to do anything about it. Maybe you could better explain how this happened, if you agree that the registry has become a weakness for Windows, that is.

"What the Windows faithful don't understand, and many of the Linux advocates as well, is that third-party software is what makes running Windows insecure and unreliable. I have no problem with third-party software as long as it's open source, but I'll only accept proprietary software if the vendor offers full support for their product. Microsoft can't support the vast array of proprietary third-party software that its customers use, but when this crap fouls up their systems, it reflects poorly on them"

Hear Hear. I think poorly written drivers are one of the biggest problems for Windows, follow a BSOD, and you'll usually end up with a 3rd party driver. Add on top of that AV software (with hooks into the kernel), spyware scanners, and the user running as Admin, and you have a recipe for disaster.

"I care because I don't want to see other students be seduced by the "worse is better" mentality that many UNIX denizens espouse."

If you're going to make inflammatory statements like that you better put in some effort to explain exactly what you mean. Who says worse is better? Why is it worse?

You are right that much of the work being put in Windows is high-quality. They have to live with a huge amount of obsolete code, but they manage quite well.

Still, whether it is all right or not, and no matter who is to blame (notice many windows haters now say linux is insecure because a out-of-tree driver had a security problem, fixed 4 months ago), Vista isn't that great. It might need time to mature, right, but it took 'em 5 years to get it out of the door, and it still isn't stable nor much more usable (in hindsight, XP wasn't that bad...).

And no matter how great Windows technically is or will be, Microsoft still doesn't care about their users, implements all kinds off freedom-limiting technology and uses unfair and market-value destroying strategies to keep their monopoly. The company might not be 'true evil' but it sure is bad for humanity right now, and thus I considder it unethical to use, sell or promote their software.


Still, facts matter, so in that sense, your article is appreciated.

That only works because Windows really hasn't changed much for years. The first thing I noticed when I fired up Vista was how much it looked and felt exactly like XP. Notepad, Paint, so many of the configuration dialogs, all of it looks and feels very much like XP. After 5 years of development on Vista they still haven't found time to improve Notepad or Paint? Lots of people actually use those basic tools and having a few more features thrown in would really help.

But I just chuckle when someone complains about anti-MS FUD, when the FUD going the other way is much larger, by orders of magnitude.

I'd say it's about even, given all of the rumor-mongering, FUD, paranoia, and conspiracy theory that I see being spewed from people that should really know better...

I read the 'get the facts' campaign, and I certainly don't see anything wrong with it; sure, like *any* companies product analysis, there are going to be assumptions based on 'best case scenario' but if you were to make a decision involving large amounts of money, you'd look at a number of sources for analysis.



Nice to see you complain about FUD and yet take the interview with Balmer completely out of context as to what the point of the interview.

The interview was relating to software patents; the issue was relatign to patents and how it affects Microsofts software.

He pointed out in the interview that Microsoft does its best to make sure that the software they write do no infringe on others patents, but its not an easy thing to do.

It then goes on to talk about others that might violate Microsoft's patents, to which Balmer quotes another source, completely unrelated to Microsoft, who said that Linux violated a number of licences. One only assumes that its based on 'well, Linux does this, Windows does this, so therefore patent violation (compatibility doesn't necessarily mean violation as there are many ways to implement a given thing).

Interesting how you completely ignore the summery at the end; that is, Balmer stating that this was an *industry* problem that needed to be resolved through a combination of patent reform *and* cross patent licencing - hence the cross patent licencing agreements between Microsoft, Novell, Sun and Samsung.



Interesting, you talk about these 'analysts' on Microsofts payroll indirectly or directly, and yet, you ignore the fact that these are disclosed. You also ignore the fact that IBM, Novell, Sun, HP and OSL all either pay for or conduct their own 'analysis' of the products they sell.

I certainly don't attack them when they do it; what I do say, like I say about those conducted by Microsoft - look at all the information that is out there on the given product, both positive and negative.



Who? who flame against Linux? I certainly don't; I simply point out the reasons why *I* don't run Linux. For any well adjusted individual, the reasons for me not running Linux shouldn't impact on their reason for running Linux.

My reason for choosing not to run Linux should require a tonne of replies to posts on my blog completely missing the point of the article let alone failing to read the replies I make to those replies.

I would say the greatest problem I find with Linux 'zealots' are their inability to read all the article, read all the replies, and the replies I made, and coming up with a constructive reply that challenges me rather than demanding me copy and paste the same reply I make to others who make the same statements.



And what did SCO pay for? thats right, Microsoft paid for SCO intellectual property (patents and source code) - so I guess since Linux hates code, its all ok to start stealing code off SCO? nice attempt to grab the moral high ground.

Don't keep your mind so open that your brain falls out.

For some, that's the only path to enlightenment. ;-p

come on, thats funny... why mod him down?

The ones that felt he was talking about them?

Edit: oops, I read that as "who modded him down?", my subconsciousness probably wanted the joke to fit or something

Edited 2007-04-24 06:52

Still trying to figure out why...

Try a different keyboard, this happens with oldand/or cheap keyboards

Try a different keyboard, this happens with oldand/or cheap keyboards

He did say this only happened when the system is under load ;-).

That's a weird one. Seems like interrupts are getting dropped on the floor. What sort of load do you mean? Is the keyboard USB or PS/2? That's pretty curious.

Given the interrupt priorities, you would only suspect the routines connected to the hardware tick.

Int 0 -- system timer
Int 1 -- keyboard
Int 2 -- connected to another PIC.

Unless this has changed, you seriously have to point to vista on this.

Having said that, responsiveness under load always has bene a problem somehow with different versions.

Many people will be switching to Macs and Linux because of Vista.

Yeah, all 3 of them with be switching.

"Yeah, all 3 of them with be switching."

You must mean 3 billion.

You must mean 3 billion.

Who is your dealer? I want some that stuff you're smoking...

"Who is your dealer? I want some that stuff you're smoking..."

If you think Vista is wonderful, then you don't need to smoke anything, you are high enough already.

3 billion Windows users? I'd say that's a hair larger then the 90% market share they are supposed to have.

Who will be switching? Let's face it unless either Linux gets native Office and Adobe suite (or their open source equivalents improve astronomically) or Apple lets Dell and HP sell OS X boxes, there is nothing that will seriously threaten Microsoft's dominance on the desktop over next 18 month. And 18 month is plenty of time for MS to sort out any problems there might be.

"Who will be switching?"

People who think they own their computer, not MS.

"Let's face it unless either Linux gets native Office and Adobe suite (or their open source equivalents improve astronomically)"

OpenOffice and GIMP are good enough for the vast majority of users, for the rest there is CrossOver or Wine.

"Apple lets Dell and HP sell OS X boxes"

Apple will gain marketshare, but they would get much more if they did let Dell and HP sell OS X boxes.

"there is nothing that will seriously threaten Microsoft's dominance on the desktop over next 18 month"

Vista is the biggest threat to Microsoft's dominance on the desktop. Abusing customers will send them fleeing to alternative products.

"And 18 month is plenty of time for MS to sort out any problems there might be."

The Drm/activation/WGA, high prices, bad EULA and absurd system requirements will still be there in 18 months.

OpenOffice and GIMP are good enough for the vast majority of users[i]

I disagre. Gimp doesn't have the high end features to compete with photoshop and it doesn't have the ease of use to compete with low end consumer packages. And I'm saying that as a gimp user.

[i]The Drm/activation/WGA, high prices, bad EULA and absurd system requirements will still be there in 18 months.

We'll see. If there is a genuine revolt against DRM and WGA that threatens their market share, there is nothing stopping microsoft from reworking them in a servicepack. That being said I doubt most people are that bothered by the two as most people here are. As for the system requirement in 18 month they'll be positivly low end.

Look I love Linux, and don't like Vista in the slightest. I'm however not letting that stop me from being realistic.

Actually, if more companies jump on EMI's bandwagon andd start selling DRM free music and Movies, there may not be DRM in Vista in 18 Months.

Vista's activation is nothing, it neither gets in the way or is restrictive, it is no less annoying then XP's.

The System requirements are in no way absurd, the same bullsh*t was spouted when XP came out, and Win2k. Vista ran just dandy on my Athlon XP 2800/1G ram, and it runs acceptably on mY 1G Celeron with 756. Even with Aero running. and Firefox, OpenOffice, Gaim and thunderbird all running, it still ran ok.

OK, the prices are high, I'll give you that.

"Actually, if more companies jump on EMI's bandwagon andd start selling DRM free music and Movies, there may not be DRM in Vista in 18 Months."

MS removing DRM from Vista........not likely.

"Vista's activation is nothing, it neither gets in the way or is restrictive, it is no less annoying then XP's."

Activation does nothing to stop pirates, while annoying paying customers.

"The System requirements are in no way absurd, the same bullsh*t was spouted when XP came out, and Win2k."

The system requirement increase for XP to Vista is MUCH more than the increase for 98 to XP. Linux is MUCH faster than Vista. Vista is a slow, bloated, drm infected mess, that will give Linux significant marketshare gains. Apple will probably get a marketshare increase also.

"OpenOffice and GIMP are good enough for the vast majority of users, for the rest there is CrossOver or Wine."

Your being delusional. I am a fan of Open Source (pats his LAMP box) but to think GIMP is the equal of Photoshop is like saying a Buick is on par with a Rolls. You might wish it was but it just ain't so. I even like the way OOo handles databases better then Access and how much cleaner Writer is then Word. We get submissions for our site in Word format we open and clean them up in OOo first and then they go to FCKedit. But I don't think it ready to be a straight up replacement for Office.

And don't give me "but they are free." That is what you are competing against. Your competing with free. You have to make them better then free Windows and free Photoshop. Bill G knows this. It isn't just because he is a nice guy that he is practically giving away Win/Office in China($3 a copy). You may notice lots of requirements to keep people from pirating Windows. Yet you don't for O2k7. Why? Because you need Windows to run that free copy of Office.

I am not condoning piracy. I am pointing out market facts.

"Your being delusional. I am a fan of Open Source (pats his LAMP box) but to think GIMP is the equal of Photoshop is like saying a Buick is on par with a Rolls."

I did not say it was equal, I said it was good enough for the vast majority of users. Most people don't need the extra features that Photoshop offers. They also don't need MS office, OpenOffice can easily do the job for most people.

"Who will be switching? Let's face it unless either Linux gets native Office and Adobe suite (or their open source equivalents improve astronomically) or Apple lets Dell and HP sell OS X boxes, there is nothing that will seriously threaten Microsoft's dominance on the desktop over next 18 month."

Some groups of people (include tech journalists and Windows advocates) have a psychological need to find Linux lacking.

I love Linux and use it every day. For many things it is by far my favorite platform. However anybody who can't see that linux is seriously lacking in several areas are just fooling themselves.

>>MS needs to remove the Drm/activation/WGA, lower the price/system requirements, and change the EULA. Many people will be switching to Macs and Linux because of Vista.

> And 18 month is plenty of time for MS to sort out any problems there might be.

Are you implying that in 18 months MS will remove the DRM/Activate/WGA, lower the price/system requirements AND change EULA?

Wow. I wish I could share your optimism.

So you completely missed my point. Thanks.

"blinkered world view"

Assuming someones motives