The First Boot
I have a 21" screen and I must confess that the first time I booted into my freshly installed system, I managed to understand why there are so many people switching back to the Classic theme. When it's big, Luna looks even more ugly than when it's small. I switched back to the Classic theme with no regret -- and not from nostalgia, but simply because of the few traces of good taste I still have. I don't know who designed Luna, but I do hope he's not working for Microsoft anymore.
Aside from that, the first impression I had was quite favorable. The interface is clean, the desktop is not cluttered with icons (does anyone miss "Connect to Microsoft Network" and "Network Neighbourhood"?) and there's an overall impression of consistency.
Indeed, compared to the TCL/TK, Athena, Motif, Qt, GTK and wxWindows hell from most Unices, the Windows interface has an overall feeling of consistency and through-thinking. Some HCI guidelines were surely used and abode almost thoroughly, both in the system and in most 3rd party applications not distributed with Windows. This means that an user will rarely find himself in trouble searching for the Copy command or trying to find how to open a particular windows inside a program. Compare this to the interface hell of programs like Gimp and you can clearly see who wins this set.
This is arguably the result of a real "cult". The Windows interface hasn't changed significantly since Windows 95. Fortunately, they did manage to realize that having a 1 px margin between the Start button and the edge of the screen is very bad. While some people doubt it's the most usable and ergonomic interface, being the standard one and, with the exception of the cluttering taskbar, quite bogus-free, few people are too unhappy with it. I was comfortable with it myself, despite being a WindowMaker user for a very long time. For those who would do anything to get rid of it, there are alternatives, like the LiteStep shell.
Two for the Drivers
Judging from the fact that Microsoft managed to put the Start button one pixel down, it seems that this was an important issue and I was not the only one who found it awkward. Therefore, I can only conclude that I am the only bastard who thinks that having to restart your computer after you install a driver is something not even the Flinstones were confronted with.
Turning Irony Mode off, I still can't help wondering why this is still happening. We are living a time when even hobby operating systems support loading modules on-the-fly. In my case, installing drivers in the last few years have been a matter of obtaining the module (or compiling it, which is trivial) and loading it with one command. Having to restart every once in a while is no big deal usually, but in my case, Windows only managed to recognized my graphics card. So: drivers for my network card, USB drivers, TWAIN drivers for my scanner, printer, drivers for using the extra keys on my USB keyboard and drivers for my sound card. That makes 6 times I had to restart my computer, not counting the seventh one for DirectX.
On the other hand, unless the peripherals you are trying to use are fabricated somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, the drivers are often better than their equivalents on most alternative operating systems. In some cases, the difference is only incremental (compared to OS X for example), but in other cases it makes a huge difference. For example, you will find that some printers work erratically or have some missing options when using CUPS. You'll hardly find a printer that doesn't behave correctly due to driver problems on Windows. In this case, being the operating system most people use does have its advantages. A hardware company can afford not to support Linux or Zeta, but not supporting Windows is not a good way of making it out of a niche.
Changing the system's configuration is quite simple to do using the Control Panel, but I have found the range of the options in there quite restricted. Most of the options are hidden in the Registry, and the Registry is simply the worst thing windows has to offer.
Plain-text config files have a lot of advantages. I can grep them, I can edit them on-the-fly, even non-interactively with sed if I know what I have to change without looking at them, and since there are separate files you are sure that none will become too big for the system to manage well. Compared to this, I find it hard to realize why someone would actually prefer a big, binary file, which gets corrupted and makes all other programs behave erratically or stop working as soon as one program handles it the wrong way. The Registry is effectively what some experts call an SOP (Single Point of Failure). That is, a part which is sufficient to bring down the whole system if it is damaged.
Furthermore, since there is no way to recompile the kernel, the options you have when trying to adapt a system for a specific purpose are quite limited. This is part of the reason why there are so few embedded systems running Windows compared to those that run Linux and derivatives. This also means that there are no ways to fine-tune your system to the point where you can fine-tune systems like FreeBSD or Gentoo.
- "Back to Windows, 1/5"
- "Back to Windows, 2/5"
- "Back to Windows, 3/5"
- "Back to Windows, 4/5"
- "Back to Windows, 5/5"
