Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 14th Nov 2003 02:50 UTC
I am waiting for Longhorn. Thus, I was very interested in the new 4051 build. Here are my findings.
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*cringe*
I think the reviewer missed the point of Longhorn entirely :/
-- Speaking about stability is not very fair of course, in the pre-alpha stage. --
Wrong, it's Milestone 7 internally at the moment, which is far into the Alpha stage of development. Pre-alpha is called White Box, which means concept mockups done in Photoshop and with pens on paper. Soon as code is comitted to the Longhorn CVS, it becomes Alpha.
-- WinFS, for example, a real strain on your system's resources --
WinFS is only a high-resource application if you run it with default parameters. 4051 (and all other leaked builds) are designed to be run on Dual Xeon workstations with over 2Gb of RAM, at MS HQ. If you want to run it on a little P4 2Ghz with 256mb, then you need to reconfigure WinFS in order to reduce the resource usage. This allows you to keep all the functionality, but with less back-caching of the DB in active memory.
Also, installing MSDE/Yukon can have pretty much the same effect, as it manages the FS meta database more efficiently.
-- If this version of Windows were more stable, it would be an excellent candidate for a (free) upgrade, in my opinion. The reworking of the GUI and the newer versions of IE and OE could be released as a sort of upgrade, maybe even through Windows Update. --
What the fuck? That's like saying that OS X could have been released as a free upgrade to OS 9; or Windows 95 as a free upgrade to DOS.
The underlying core of LH is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to XP's; the majority of the kernel code was based on Windows .NET (Server 2003), which is why the first compiled builds of Longhorn followed the same version numbers as .NET Server did, before it went final, and Longhorn's build was reset to 4000.
Also, the re-written versions of IE and OE are simply not portable, replicatable, etc, on anything other than Longhorn itself. They rely on a heavily modified GDI system, with rendering done through DX .NET aka Milrender aka DCE (Desktop Composition Engine).
That's like saying "Oh, lets port Safari to OS 9." Isn't going to happen - a) Cocoa didn't exist back then, b) the kernel wasn't UNIX-based, and c) the GUI infrastructure had no support for rounded windows, shadows, brushed metal, etc...
Same things apply to Longhorn in regard to XP.