Forbes takes a look at Vista, and writes: "More than five years in the making, more than 50 million lines of code. The result? A vista slightly more inspiring than the one over the town dump. The new slogan is: 'The Wow Starts Now', and Microsoft touts new features, many filched shamelessly from Apple's Macintosh. But as with every previous version, there's no wow here, not even in ironic quotes. Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out." They also look at Office 2007.
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Member since:2005-07-17
Linux desktop (meaning standard KDE desktop like in Suse or Gnome desktop in Ubuntu) is much more usable than Vista. It's not that Windows is bad, XP is quite good and very easy to use but Vista is a step back. Explorer and Control Panel, two most essential parts of user interface, are just horrible mess with incredibly cluttered design and lots of bugs. I suppose that most people reading OSnews are technically competent and there's no reason to be surprised that Linux was recommended before OSX, especially that former one is often considered too restricting.
Member since:2005-07-06
I would like to know why you think Explorer is cluttered?
And also, how yes, Classic View of the Control Panel is cluttered... that's why it's the classic view and they designed a new one.
Then you also can just type in the search bar on the start menu what control panel app you want and it will come up.
Member since:2005-10-02
Bllaaahh...
Linux today is much easier for a newbie than Windows XP or Vista or anything MS has ever shipped.
Linux is very good for experts - but with KDE or Gnome on a distro like uBuntu or Fedora, it's very easy to install, configure and use.
Linux is only difficult for Windows power-users.
Member since:2006-07-13
May concur with this assessment. I run a small non-profit that gives computers to those that cannot afford one. Many of whom have no computers usage experience. The systems we give away use Open SuSE.
What I have found is that I can teach people to use SuSE with very little effort. In so many ways KDE is just works and is easy to understand. Look at areas such as drag and drop - making links(shortcuts) - cut and paste - system maintenance (Yast) - the complete lack of a need to have AV and defrag maintenance. To top it all off – we get many computers because they were too slow when the company decided to upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP and found that the old computers were just too slow then. I can't wait for companies to start upgrading to Vista – I bet we stat getting some really great systems that just won't do Vista right or fast enough. For more information drop by - computers4all.org
May say thank you to MS for making so many really fine computers available to us on a continuing bases. Drop in to our site
Member since:2005-07-06
Ubuntu is definitely a nice distro, not without it's problems though.
One thing that really gets me is, why when I marked something for installation in Synaptic does it sometimes still fail to install something, giving some ambiguous error in the process.
Dependency hell is bad enough, but when the system designed to take care of that and download all needed dependencies still has unknown errors, there is obviously still something fundamentally wrong.
Member since:2006-02-06
"Linux is only difficult for Windows power-users."
As a former Windows Power user, I can confirm that.
Still, Linux still has some work cut for it when it comes to using sensible defaults, some software isn't there quite yet (e.g. useful software like KmyMoney still is in beta, Picasa for Linux is great but still has the ugly windows-style menu bar and file dialogs), some distros could use an easier way to add multimedia codecs, ...
Still, it's amazing what has happened in the last couple of years when it comes to Linux for personal use (a.k.a. 'the desktop').
As a power user I needed more time to adjust, more specialty programs to find a replacement for (e.g. Quanta instead of Html-Kit, ...), more habits I had to un-learn.
But now that all these hurdles are mostly past me, the feeling of absolute control over both my hardware and software just is *such* a nice feeling! The hardware control is why I'm doubting about getting a Mac; their hardware just seems so locked-down.
For example, I liked Konqueror but it was just TOO full-featured for me. So I installed Dolphin and I really like it. If I really wanted, I could've installed 10 different file managers instead.
Which is a really long-winded way of saying: I agree with you 100%.
Edited 2007-02-12 09:50
Member since:2005-08-11
"Linux today is much easier for a newbie than Windows XP or Vista or anything MS has ever shipped."
What? That's crazy, just getting 3D working properly can be a hassle in most distros, as they do not ship with the binary drivers configured, same with wireless, or multimedia. Every windows user knows how to install something off of a CD, but not many users are going to know how to install such things in a Linux distro, regardless how easy (or hard) it is.
Member since:2005-07-06
Givas,
That's a good question. My reason for including Linux as something to evaluate before Mac was because Linux is a free install, Mac you have to buy a new computer. So if you installed Ubuntu and ran Gnome (which IMO is a fairly consistent desktop) and were happy then I think that's a nice easy solution that was quickly attained. But if you installed it and hated it, then my next suggestion would be to get your hands on a Mac and see what you thought.
Member since:
2005-08-19
If you aren't expecting much you will likely be just fine. If you are expecting Microsoft to "finally get it right, like Apple" then you *will* be disappointed.
It's not that the tech is bad, it's just clear (from end to end) that the OS was kicked out the door with no serious time infront of a usability team that took their job seriously. [...]
[...] That being said, if you are NOT a gamer, I would strongly suggest you take a look at Linux (OpenSUSE & Ubuntu) and then Mac (in that order).
If you're talking about usability teams (i.e., ease of use for everyone) why do you suggest Linux? It's a system for experts and I haven't yet succeeded with making any of my (non-technical) friends happy with it. OS X is much better in this regard.