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Aye; sheep are people who have only ever used Windows and think it the beat to march to. There's nothing wrong with /liking/ Vista, on new machines it just works, but it's still Windows to me.

Im happy dual boot XP and (quite happy) Ubuntu user (Im writing this from Ubuntu) and i call Vista a complete disaster (even worse than Windows ME) and best thing that happen to promote open source and Linux ever since its creation.

Not much can be worse than ME and Vista is certainly not worse than ME.

"Not much can be worse than ME and Vista is certainly not worse than ME."

DRM/activation/WGA, pricing, EULA, and system requirements for Vista are worse than ME. Vista is a DOWNGRADE.

So those things you mentioned, in your opinion, make Vista a DOWNGRADE from ME?

All this talk about DRM actication and WGA...
I'm using Vista and I've NEVER have been limited by any form of DRM so far. I have no HDDVDs or BluRay movies though, so that's why maybe.
WGA and activation? Activation takes like... 30 seconds after install, and you're done. It's gone. Never bothered me again.

System requirements are of course higher - no suprise here really, but my 3-year old Athlon64 (2GB of RAM and a gf7600 gt) system runs it flawlessly.

", after 5 years and billions of development, that would be sad!"

Only three years of work; they threw out all the work they did on the XP codebase and switched to Server 2003 SP1 in mid-2004 in the Vista reset. Miguel de Icaza said they threw out 60% of complete bad quality code they had written at that point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista#Mid-2004_...
http://wsjclassroom.com/archive/06jan/bigb_microsoft.htm

Edited 2007-05-08 14:34

60 % != everything.
Therefore the development process took _more_ than 5 years. Add to that the fact several of the most advertised technologies didn't make it into Vista (and most likely never will materialize) despite having been worked on for more than 15 years.

If you take a look at the wikipedia article you linked to you'll see this statement: "Successive internal builds over several months gradually integrated a lot of the fundamental work that had been done over the previous three years, but with much stricter rules about what code could be brought into the main builds."

Therefore. More than 5 years of development (6 years actually not counting parts in development since before 1990 and yet to materialize).

C'mon, Like there's no bad code in open source. There are tons. Everywhere.

Or you checkout the sources of every oos you use? And peer review them? Sun's OpenOffice as well I guess

What you report at least shows that time has been used productively. I prefer one feature taken out, than a broken one...

Edit: fixed typo

Edited 2007-05-09 00:24

Haha, well we don't know what the quality of code in Vista is like, now do we, since it's closed source!

I haven't written ANYTHING about quality of code. Of course there is bad code in FLOSS. Some of it is horrible though I've seen some beauties as well (but some code has been horrible to look at... my eyes my eyes).

I merely responded to a poster incorrectly claiming that Vista hadn't been in development for more than 3 years. This is incorrect. It's been in development for more than 6 years. That's all I wrote. I never wrote anything about FLOSS being better. I only wrote Vista had been in development for more than the incorrectly claimed 3 years.

How you managed to turn that into a claim that FLOSS is alwaya better is a mystery to me. I wrote no such thing.

>>The only people that I know that critisize Vista to death are people who use open-source operating systems.<<

Not me. I know people who have used microsoft exclusively for the last 20 years, and they *hate* Vista.

Major complaints: too much obtrusive drm, doesn't burn dvds correctly, lacks essential drivers, and is too slow.

I don't know anybody who actually likes Vista. Most people I know just see no reason for it.

Major complaints: too much obtrusive drm,

What? How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?

"What? How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?"

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

"What? How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?"

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

I'll repeat:

How exactly DRM is obtrusive in Vista?
Say, I'm a Joe User. Provide an example of how I'm supposed to feel the obtrusive nature of DRM.

There is no obtrusive DRM, my DVD's burn fine, it has almost all the drivers I need at it's faster than XP. So my experience is exactly the opposite from what you have "heard".

I have three friends that bought brand new laptops with Vista; they "enjoyed" all the eye-candy and the "everything in another place" features and after two weeks, they all went back to Windows XP SP2.

As they said to me, XP SP2 feels lighter, faster and fulfills all their requests.

I use Windows XP and Windows 2003 at work, here at home I use Kubuntu and I prefer having 2 GB of RAM for MY USE instead of having the 2 GB of RAM for the OS USE.

I think you are pretty off the mark when you say the 2 gig ram for my use. Vista does not use it for itself but rather for apps and its all memory resident. Supre Prefetch. Bottomline, Vista out of box is bloated. If you use vLite and tweak it as speedyvista website suggest it can work extremely well. It is definitely an ugprade to XP however I wont use it till SP1. Then I will definitely switch.

Yeap, I know I am exagerating about the memory usage, but I do not see huge benefits on SuperFetch (TM); all your memory is allocated with applications the system thinks you are going to use some time on this session [I do not know the MS algorithm to determine what applications should be loaded; but the OS cannot be never totally sure that you are going to use those applications]; the process of loading applications into RAM consumes processor resources and makes access to the disk; turning your computer slower while this occurs (maybe "uselessly" if the applications are never going to be used on this session).

Anyway, if I need to launch another application into my system, the preloaded applications will be unloaded from the RAM [again, unnecessary memory deallocation and CPU consumption].

As far as I have experienced the caching into memory happens kind of silently. You wont even notice it....other than your RAM getting filled up!

Yeah, the caching to ram and hard disk doesn't slow down your system at all. In xp all that hard drive thrashing would but it isn't the case in Vista.

I think you have some misconceptions here... the OS has a priority scheme for both disk IO operations and memory pages. The pages that are loaded speculatively by SuperFetch are given the lowest priority when they are loaded, so they're the first to go if someone else really needs the memory more. Disk IO is also priorities, so if someone else wants to touch the disk, they get to go before SuperFetch, so the boot-time disk activity shouldn't make a difference.

Superfetch is not allocating and deallocating memory. This isn't like malloc() in C. Instead it's moving moving "pages" (4KB chunks) of data from the disk to the physical memory. Most of these pages are read-only (since they come from EXEs and DLLs), so dropping (you could conceptually think of this as "deallocating") pages costs nothing... you just overwrite the memory with the new page of data because the old page has not changed since it was read from disk. Unaccessed superfetched pages are dropped before any other pages on the system, so you really lose nothing from this optimization except for the memory and resources superfetch itself takes to maintain and run its fetch scenarios.

Superfetch is not preloading. It's totally different from the OOo preloader or anything else like that. It is actually a cache-warming system that's pretty advanced. If you'd like more info, look up Russinovich's article about it.

Vista uses the ram for your use. It just caches everything to it so it launches faster. When your apps or games need that ram it is instantly freed up for it.

Essentially what it does is make use of idle ram by caching to it before the pagefile. This is a good thing.

When the only people who criticize the dominant product in a given market are those with experience with other products, it makes you wonder...

FWIW, folks have been criticing Microsoft's practices and technology for far longer than Linux has been a popular alternative -- look in the Google Groups archives in the early and mid 1990's, for example.

Vista doesn't need to be special, it just needs to be. That's what you should expect from a stagnating monopoly.

Vista doesn't need to be special, it just needs to be. That's what you should expect from a stagnating monopoly.

Yeah sure. Welcome to 2007, most people know they have a choice (OS X, Linux, Windows). For now, most choose Vista. I suggest also you go read the wikipedia article on whats new in vista (Im not going to link it, its been linked here too many times).

Im happy dual boot XP and (quite happy) Ubuntu user (Im writing this from Ubuntu) and i call Vista a complete disaster (even worse than Windows ME) and best thing that happen to promote open source and Linux ever since its creation.

Thank you for telling. However, in order to raise this discussion to the level it deserve, would you care to explain _why_ its worse?

I will give you my arguments for Vista;

* Vista is NT based. Its made with security in mind, and is already proven to be quite secure.

(Secunia: The most severe unpatched Secunia advisory affecting Microsoft Windows Vista, with all vendor patches applied, is rated Not critical)

* Vista got great hardware support. Its loaded with tens of thousands of drivers.

* Vista is great for gaming with DX10(In my opinion, gamers run the IT market. Win the gamers, you win the market)

Thats just some.

Does Ubuntu have anything like Time Machine? I'm not aware of it shipping with anything similar (not that I've ever thought to look for such a thing)

Linux does have some simular alternatives, but nothing built into Ubuntu. It would however be a nice feature. Submit a feature request, it might get added

Being a gamer, I have to say:

Games run slower on Vista than XP in most cases.

You can't really call Vista secure yet as its been out for all of 5 months. When it has replaced XP, then the malware and virus writers will target it. Then we'll see if its secure. (it may be but you can't really know yet)

Hardware support is a bit fuzzy. I see lots of instances of companies not supporting Vista for older peripherals. Who wants to buy all new gadgets because they upgraded to Vista? Plus there were (might still be) major problems with Nvidia's driver.

DX10 isnt out yet. So how do you know its going to be great? Plus, I wonder how many DX10 games will be Vista only(Halo3 at least). Makes it pretty hard to compare when it wont run on XP.

Add to that the fact that I can tune XP down to use less than 64 megs of ram after a full boot, and you cant seriously argue that games will ever run as good on Vista. Not with all the DRM crap that is taking up resources in the background making sure you dont pirate stuff.

EDIT: Bad grammar

Edited 2007-05-08 15:08

Drivers are not really Vista's fault. Games run slow cause of crappy drivers mate.

There is no DRM crap running the background. Nothing prevents you from pirating anything.
The ONLY time the DRM is active is when watching protected HD content. That's it. It doesn't monitor your illegal activities, it doesn't report them to anyone.

It's the same copy protection on protected HD discs that also affect your set top box and TV. If you don't play this on your PC you will never notice anything.

For me Vista is as fast as XP for gaming. But then I have an Intel chipset and ATI video card so I have good drivers. Nvidia users on the other hand are having problems. I don't blame microsoft for that but rather Nvidia.

Vista is a good gaming OS? What are you smoking. On the same hardware Vista is alower, takes longer to boot up, takes longer to shutdown, existing games run slower, often severely slower, and sometimes not at all.

No games currently use DX10, when they do, you'll be looking at 2GB realistic RAM requirements, if not 4GB for any serious gaming.

Sorry, what you've been sold is a polished turd.

On the same hardware Vista is alower,

On modern hardware Vista is faster.

takes longer to boot up

Roughly the same time or 2-5 seconds slower than XP (15 vs 20 seconds). Which is still considerably faster than OSX, not to mention Linux.

takes longer to shutdown

Rougly the same time, cannot discuss the exact times since I rarely boot or shutdown the OS -- sleep/hibernate works better.

existing games run slower

Can confirm this. It's shocking 5-10% slower, which is due to still not polished video drivers.

No games currently use DX10, when they do, you'll be looking at 2GB realistic RAM requirements, if not 4GB for any serious gaming.

No big deal, considering 2GB will be standart at the end of the year.

It's only slower on benchmarks from BETA drivers several months ago. That's shocking! Nvidia drivers are still bad so performance is down a bit there but ATI users have the same performance as XP.

In fact anandtech has a review up showing oblivion running faster in vista than in XP.

4gb of ram is no where near a requirement. It's not even necessary. I speak from first hand experience.

Vista is NT based. Its made with security in mind, and is already proven to be quite secure.

It's practically impossible prove anything to be secure.
Not many desktop or server programs come with Vista, so you may well compare its base install to OpenBSD's base install and see how that comes out in Secunia.

Vista got great hardware support. Its loaded with tens of thousands of drivers.

Funny how some people here give the exact opposite argument (I can't really say anything on that myself, as I don't use it).

Vista is great for gaming with DX10(In my opinion, gamers run the IT market. Win the gamers, you win the market)

Gamers don't care if their game uses DX10. They care if the game looks good. You don't need DX10 for that, in fact most contemporary games depend on DX9 and not 10. Also nothing says you couldn't get the same quality with OpenGL. Both are just a programming interface for the graphics card! (Granted that in the case of OpenGL you might have to use extensions as its API is developed to be clean and thus takes longer to mature)

I don't have much against Vista since I haven't used it, but really, do you have any arguments FOR Vista? I find that some people seem to have trouble articulating them, even if they do.

The Vista hardware support is less then stellar. I am using a Samsung ML-2010 laser printer I bought less then 6 months ago. Plugged it into my Kubuntu box and it autoconfigged quite nicely. I went to network share it with my friends at school. Xp would find it with the aid of a driver cd,no complaints. However, as of a few months ago, there were NO vista drivers for it, and the XP driver cd wouldn't work either...

This used to be true, but is less the case nowadays. The PC gaming market has become a fraction of the overall video game market, and more people are using PCs for productivity/Internet and consoles for gaming.

I don't see this happening. The most popular subsets of games still don't map well to consoles: first person shooters, massively multiplayer games and strategy games. Plus, much of the PC gaming scene also revolves around the modability of games-- something consoles can't provide. In fact, from my perspective as a middleware developer, I see a rebirth happening in the PC game industry right now. Game development is slowing moving from large monolithic game houses to smaller studios. Linux has an opportunity to take advantage of this transition, but it will require a rather large effort to provide stable driver support and good tools for game development.

I will give you my arguments for Vista;

Ok, you gave some good arguements but none that would convince me to upgrade from XP. It's NT based and I haven't had any securety problems. I haven't had any hardware problems and DX10 gaming isn't a big selling point.

Why, because everything than can be done on DX10 can be done in OpenGL without the Vista requirements (but with the appropriate hardware). As for DX10 games, you won't be able to take advantage of many of those features unless you're running top end hardware. And I don't mean top end hardware now, I mean top end hardware when those games are actually released.

And the desktop. It fails to impress me. I want application performance, not pretty widgets. Same argument goes for other OSes as well.

>>Yeah sure. Welcome to 2007, most people know they have a choice (OS X, Linux, Windows). For now, most choose Vista. <<

IMO: wrong about both:

1) People don't have a choice. People have to use the OS that runs their apps, and runs their hardware.

2) Most people don't chose Vista. Most chose to stay with XP.

Most people actually buy buy a new computer that comes preloaded with windows whether they like it or not since most pc vendors preloades it in there factories and dosn't offer any alternatives, accept for Dell who is starting to ship ubuntu-pcs in a short future.
But it remeins to be seen if they will put some money in marketing of these computers. I might ad that i live in Sweden.
All I've seen so far when it comes to advertiseing is "Dell rekomends windows Vista", not a word about Ubuntu on Dells swedish webbsite.
Most Linux users have bought a wndows based pc at one point in time and then domnloaded an linux iso file from the internet because of the lack of linuxbased pcs on the market. Things are starting to get better though.
Lets hope that HP and others are following Dells exemple.

I keep reading Vista reviews hoping that something will convince me that Vista is worth the money and effort to switch. As an enthusiast, I don't need much of a carot to convince me, but sadly, Vista fails to accomplish it.

It appears to me that most of the effort in producing Vista was spent attempting to drag a legacy of poor design choices into a truly novel and fresh OS. In so doing, it fails on many levels. To add insult to injury, MS demands a premium and couches choice in esoteric versions that leave users befuddled.

We need a clean break redesign. Not just a 2003 Server codebase wrapped in a shiny new face. Its time to rethink the PC architecture. It's become a deck of cards.

I'm absolutely with you. Great posting.

Microsoft could have done something useful and propellent to the PC world. They had it in their hands and they took all the time needed for it. But they failed on their own politics from yesterday.

Vista is a sad day for computing; the only thing I like about it is that it leaves field for the competition.

Does Tiger?

Not without a third party application but its a good one. Here's a link: http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

There are some things that are kind of like it. rdiff-backup. I like BackupPC the best, though, it's like (uncrippled) Windows Home Server.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/info.html#screenShots
http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_backuppc

Also, VSC is only the ultimate, business, and enterprise version of Vista. THe version most home users will get doesn't have that feature.

See:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_editions.asp

There was something like moocow fs on slashdot a while ago that had versioning built in. OLPC also has a revision filesystem, someone should port it. ZFS and Reiser4 take snapshots...

EDIT: It's called "ext3cow" http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/0413253&thres...

Edited 2007-05-08 14:15

How much RAM? Get at least a GB. Also try out the latest nVidia drivers. It really shouldn't be slower than XP on your hardware.

That is weird.

Compiz works fine on my Radeon 7200 (thank you open source ATI drivers, out of the box) which is six years old. Beryl works amazing (except for no water effect) on my 5 year old Geforce Ti 4200, even with Blur enabled when moving Windows.

For Eugenia's Ati Radeon x300, I wonder if she used the open source drivers or fglrx (only XGL)?

Edited 2007-05-08 14:32

>>Those that live in the Microsoft world are stuck, and can't/won't go elseware. Why? Lemmings menatlity.<<

IMO: that's not why. Think about what an OS does - it allows you to run your apps, and use your hardware. Without apps and drivers, what good is an OS? How many people run an OS just to run the OS?

And please understand, there are a lot more apps than just web-browsers, and mp3 players. There are tons, and tons, of specialized 3rd party apps that only run on windows.

It doesn't matter how good an OS may be. If people are not confident that the OS will run all the apps they will need - now and in the future - then that OS has no chance.

You must be a gamer, then.....

Well, I stay with (also) Windows for games. Also, all today's Linux users are former Windows users, so they are not as stuck as you suggest.

Also, I had to go back to my mates Windows laptop in order to use this MS office, because OOo can't do a very, very, VERY simple thing I need: That is printing power point slides , 3 on a page with commenting lines next to it - come on guys, what's up?!

I'm actually shocked; shocked that OOo cannot print a slide layout with commenting lines next to the handout page.

http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2005/11/printing_handou.html

oh you can. In fact its a template you can set it up as you want. Although I have to admit its a disgrace that its not the default template. I'm glad that you spent all that money on Office instead of say a wii + 10 games on Office to do something that took seconds to search for on google.

You guys can be really stupid around here at times, do you know that?? No, that's why I have to come back at times and tell you about it so that you can better yourselves. Why am I getting modded down on that perfectly valid observation?

It is not that the function is in your face or anything. After all, someome saw necessity to make a blog entry out of the issue, and the answer to it starts like this:

"Steve's question is in regard to one of the most unnecessarily complicated tasks in OpenOffice.org."

You, see, someone is in agreement with me that this is a very, very, VERY simple thing. Every student on this planet who actually does his homework relies on this function where slides are supplied.

Well, if you print in Windows, you get the options of the printer menu all the same, everywhere. In MS office, the printer menu offers the option, for OOo it doesn't - it is a fair assumption that you cannot do it. Actually, I suspected it might have to do with some sort of limitation of my 10 USD Canon printer driver, and so I went to university with potable OOo, but no luck. I did't buy office, I said I used my neighbour's machine, or did I not..? And in turn, you get modded up for that. Another good point in time to also point out again how wanting the modding function is aroun here, or how little you know how to use it.

Thanks for the link.

I know people who are now saving for a more expensive computer so they can run Vista... they're afraid of being "left behind".

I really don't understand this... MS products -hide- the way computers work from their users (example... shortcuts, "hide file extensions for registered file types", etc.) So how is updating Windows going to keep one from becoming technically "left behind"?

The author mentions "free", but not "freedom". As in the freedom of knowlege one gains the right to by using free software. This fact alone would stop me from using Vista, no matter how well it works.

IMHO too many of us are either brand-blinded into believing Windows is the only way, too dumb to think beyond the logo, too afraid to make the attempt to gain back control of the computer technology that's changing our lives (mostly for the worse), or simply too downtrodden and apathetic to care.

The things you said should be put in a manifesto of some kind. I agree 100%

(I commented from my IBM T40 Thinkpad running FreeBSD 6.1)

Go BSD!!!

For sure...T42 w/ FreeBSD 6.2

Wonderful system isn't it? Thirty years of bright people creating sensible software to solve problems and get your work done.