Flexbeta.net has got a few screenshots showing off the new Longhorn build.
Windows Longhorn 5048 Shots
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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92 Comments
Ok, it’s all mockup, all 2d and the frills are not in. ANyway, the design is wrong. Definitely BAD. And I’m not talking aestetics. The bigger the monitor we buy, the more space Microsoft is willing to waste with tons of stupid things.
Take this: http://anyweb.kicks-ass.net/computers/os/windows/longhorn/lh5048/lh…
Main window on the left:
We have an icon on top left with “computer” just on the right. Then we have again another “computer” just under it, so that you can navigate or type in an address. Of course you do have a computer on the left too, in the folders section. But guess what? the status bar (annoying already in XP) has grown to gigantic extremes and now sports… guess what.. a computer icon! (Of course with the most important pieces of information you might ever need… a text explaining to you that the windows contains 5 files (!) with unknown size (!!)) Now… where are the menus? of course they’re relegated in the worst position possible. At least I hope the menus won’t operate on the folders on the left otherwise microsoft guys should go back to college since they appear to be on the same level…
Then we have those pretty cute wizards microsoft likes so much putting into nour windows… like “Add or remove programs” and other stuff.. In the end we have something like 10 to 25% space used by useful (mostly… sigh) information with 75% of wasted space: borders, hues, gradients, icons…
Ok It’s not finished, but why waste time and resources into building something like this? But I guess Microsoft already gave us the answer… the more they go on, the more their interface looks like a flashy TV screen.
Hey people hold your horse, i can understand your frustrations, i to find some changes annoying in it,but the current realease it to be played by, developers only, users come in around beta 2 when all the things in Longhorn will be sealed and finalised. for now, try to find a way to let Ms know what wrong things they are doing and yes be chilled.
I enjoy bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this is not the final UI.
Let’s wait until September to see what Microsoft has up their sleeves.
>I enjoy bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this is not the final UI.
>Let’s wait until September to see what Microsoft has up their sleeves.
Indeed.
And people _please_ watch that WinHEC video. Longhorn looks much better there (without Aero) than in those screenshots.
Coudl somebody please confirm that I’ve just seen a scrollbar on the Start Menu, please? It’s just that I’m not sure I believe that.
On the second screenshot ( http://www.flexbeta.net/gsurface/lh5048/all_programs.gif ).
Watch the winhec video and you will see why it is there. Heck, you can even just RTFA posted yesterday about all this.
Confirmed 😉
I am a bit disapointed… It looks a bit do much like XP. Build 4074 was more interessting to me.
take a deep breath, then look at what they shipped with luna. while aero seems to appeal most to the 12-16 year old bracket, luna seemed aimed more at the toddlers and preschoolers.
seriously though, its an improvement and chances are it looks nothing like the end product will look like.
check this out
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1470
the flexbeta screenshot is in the background, compare that to the start bar in the foreground,
it’s all about resolution (screen estate) i guess, and i took that screenshot on a laptop running @ 1400×1050
cheers
anyweb
To you who have this new alpha build – you can enable the new Window Manager:
http://www.winbeta.org/articles.php?action=show&id=15&perpage=1&pag…
So they’ve cloned Finder, Control Panel, IE, added eyecandy which doesn’t work at all (in my University we had a so-called Microsoft Day where they tried to show Avalon but couldn’t persuade Longhorn to work properly).
I remember the old days of the famous BSOD Win98 failure =)
MS should release some kind of official UI theme pack. im sick of looking at the same old ugly xp UI for the last 3 years and it will be 2 more until longhorn. and i dont mean a wallpaper and some stupid icons, i mean a complete theme replacement. offer it as a free dl, spice up xp a bit since they have nothing else to offer us for a while… i know its not important, but a change of pace would be nice.
After using OSX on my 12″ PowerBook for the past few months, this just makes me all the more pissed off at the gaming situation on the Mac.
Seriously, I’m going to have to use that to play Half-Life 2? I can almost see where the whiners saying “Computers are not for games, get a console” are coming from.
Almost. you are still whiny bitches who “don’t get it”.
But damn if that isn’t a pretty lame looking OS after using Panther, and in a few days Tiger.
http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/longhorn3/Aero%20Glass~*~@…
This sceenshot shows more interesting features. Note the gnome scoop(vapor ware) thingie on the right.
The problem is not why it’s there, but why use a scrollbar on a menu. That’s all I’m saying.
A menu is supposed to be a reasonably fast way of reaching an action. You click it, roll your mouse, click the option. If you have to scroll it, it’s no longer so fast. If you have to scroll it with a scrollbar, it’s even worse.
Of course, one could argue that that thing that pops up when you click Start is no longer a menu…
Right on Meand You!!
Gates is confused. I think that he is confusing Tiger with Longhorn, after all it has all the features and more than Longhorn ever will, and it comes out in 2 days.
PC users check out http://www.apple.com/macosx/ and weap.
I have been a PC user since the early days of DOS. I switched to Mac 9 months ago and will never go back. Unfortunately, I am still stuck with M$ at work.
Aero glass is easy to enable in this build, plus it works on a low end machine without lagging.
I mean like a 1.5 ghz PIII with a Geforce4 440mmx 64mb.
Anyone know the font used in those screen shots?
until aero glass is unveiled, there really isn’t any reason to get worked up over longhorn screenshot.
nothing there that couldn’t have been done without a theme on XP.
But a nice theme none the less, looks like they realised the mistakes they made with XP defaults
There is just something wrong about these interfaces, especially Internet Exporer’s. Microsoft should take a look at the way GNOME organizes its menu(start menu for windows) and just copy it. They will be forgiven, because the start menu at present and those in the screen shots are really hideous.
I would trade this butt-ughly looking OS for ION-WM. What’s with start menu? Why it’s so huge?! In copy window we can see new progressbar theme and.. icons that looks so 1995. 🙂
Just thought I’d share a screenshot of my server OS ;-P
——————————
[phil@coney1 ~]$
——————————-
Hope you all enjoyed that…
From what I can see from the screenshots, the new features in Longhorn are:
1) transparant windows.
2) er,
3) that’s it
Am I missing something here? There is just no gee wiz factor here.
I think if you all want to look at what the UI will look like just look at any OS X screenshot and add some KDE and Gnome and I think we’d be there.
I don’t expect M$ will doing anything new with the UI. They’ll just hork bits and pieces from others.
Good thing Longhorn isn’t pitted as a server OS then.
then let me know and i’ll post it
http://anyweb.kicks-ass.net/computers/os/windows/longhorn/lh5048/
cheers
anyweb
Just move along!
ps: Without WinFS and Avalon, Longhorn seems as just a Windows XP with StyleXP or WindowsBlind theme engine…too bad
You cannot improve anything beyond certain limit. This fact is OSS greates weapon. No matter how Apple or MS work hard to get new “revolutionary” improvement to next version, OSS will slowly get there. Best example is GCC: Intel or MS invested lot of $$$ to make exe performance best available and therefore vastly outperformed GCC at the time. Butt GCC currently becomes tool that creates comparable fast programs, while maintaining platforms support MS or Intel cannot dream of. MS and Intel now realize that compiler cannot be improved more than few %, while each little gain will cost a lot of money. Then, who cares for 5% faster code, compared to *free* alternative? Who will buy it? At least Intel will eventually drop all ICC business and switch to GCC mode (as AMD and Apple already did). Same goes for eye-candy. As you see on screenshots, they cannot add more of it to Longhorn than Aqua has, because they reached point where lot (majority?) of customers asks for LESS eye-candy by default then Apple has. With each month and each new X.org release, they will need to invest LOT more $$$ to bring visible improvement in UI, File system, anything. Good old days back in 1994 when they could sell just for amazing Win95 screenshots, will never come back.
This for sure won’t be the final UI, it’s really TOO bad…even XP betas were completely different from the final release.
I really feel for the people who are going to have to work with this.
They still manage to screw up a simple process like installing software.
The Start menu, with a SCROLL bar if you don’t mind.
Options that make you read an entire screen full of text.
Shadow options: you know what the contents of a folder was before it got changed?!?
Windows Media Player. This is software that is not offered to the users, it is inflicted on them. Spare me the comparison to iTunes. You’re comparing a dog cart to an F-18.
The virus options, that come an interrupt you 15 times an hour, when you can’t be bothered, when you can do without. Which comes to haunt you like the Terminator…
What on God’s green Earth are these people thinking?
This for sure won’t be the final UI, it’s really TOO bad…even XP betas were completely different from the final release.
Yes, that’s very true. The look of the XP betas didn’t suck NEARLY as much as the final “Fisher Price” version.
I’m sure it will be different this time. Microsoft are well known for learning from their mistakes and listening to the needs of their customers.
Thank you! I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
This is just a Long Play version of XP. A new long play version of boredom.
Bored bored bored
Garfield
Next
I hope they change it, the new look is ***ugly***
Better use the theme used in 4053, (can’t remember the name)
that looked nice, this is ugly !!!
Call George Bush and Tony Blair!, this OS needs regime change!
Everytime there are new pre-release screens of Longhorn I get all excited to see what new stuff they’re working on. Time and time again I am reminded of one simple fact: microsoft has no reason to innovate. Innovation is a HUGE problem for a company which, despite yelps from the OSS community and Apple, maintains a 90% market share. What I imagine is happening with each of these milestone releases is that they get passed to a Q/A dept. which scratches it’s head and says, “this doesn’t look like windows . . . I’m confused.” There is a powerful force in Redmond to keep things simple, and by that I mean keep it the same. Thus, Microsoft is plagued with the necessity to evolve technologically while maintaining a consistent user experience. Historically, and I believe ultimately for longhorn, the conservative voice in MS will win out. This is unlike what happend in Cupertino five or six years ago, but MacOS X was the result of an old user interface that had no market dominance and sucked, arguably, more than Win9x. Consider the fact that even OS 9 had a number of conservatives who were afraid of change, and Apple had, what, 1% of the market?
Welcome to the stagnant revolution.
Damn it, people, this version is pre pre pre pre alpha, and u jumped on it as if it were the final release. With the resources MS has, believe me, they will find the way to estonish you in the next release (u know it and MS knows it). Relax, if u don’t like Windows – fine…
I don’t mean this as a flame, I’m genuinely curious about what MS are doing with Longhorn and why they’re taking so long. Since the WinFS is being delayed, the only other big thing seems to be the new shell and the GPU based graphics. It just seems like an incremental upgrade from XP. MS has loads of devs and money. It’s hardly about the lack of resources.
Unless they’re rewriting most of the OS in C#
Unless they’re rewriting most of the OS in C#</BR>No, SUSE is doing that 🙂
This is not aero glass, it’s the lowest version just ahead of Windows ultra-classic look. Nothing to see here, move along.
If you haven’t seen the actual screenshots of the new explorer nor the videos of Aero Glass in action please kindly shut your traps. Aero Glass will be a great and innotive (in places) UI. These screenshots are no more than Longhorn running in XP-like mode.
You were all bitching about XP when it came out, now you wouldn’t touch WindowsMe with a barge pole – stop complianing. You’ll be touting Windows XP as a POS compared to longhorn when, if ever, longhorn comes out.
So if you’re so informed, why the theme name is called “Areo” in the themes list?
I for one thinks it looks very nice.
It’s a theme not a UI. I don’t Aero is actually going to be part of longhorn until it hits beta.
… There should be an option to put it in the Taskbar in Longhorn, Ã la OS X/KDE/GNOME: maybe a rather trivial, but important thing.
BTW, one could say about the Longhorn Taskbar almost the same as about the OS X Tiger Dock: not much has changed during the years – and both should be improved and enhanced, eventually…
Where are the remaining 5040 screenshots the headline promised me????
I kid, I kid.. Looks like XP re-arranged for fresh sales..
MrX
The excitement and hype over Longhorn should now be well and truly over. It’s basically Windows XP with half a dozen extra features and a slightly better looking default theme.
If you haven’t seen the actual screenshots of the new explorer nor the videos of Aero Glass in action please kindly shut your traps.
Even with Aero Glass, functionally speaking, the whole thing is going to be the same. You can’t expect totally different functionality with a different theme. Just forget it and get yourself a copy of EclipseOSX or something, if Apple hasn’t sued everyone by then.
The Control Panel looks awful. I hope that’s a simply a mock-up for their sake. It just seems as though they’re completely devoid of ideas, and I can well understand Steve Jobs’ copying jibe. On this evidence, it’s true.
WinFS won’t be there for Longhorn, but we will get Transactional NTFS apparently which is simply a play at killing off database competitors. Yay! I think it’s fairly clear now that this is an interim version of Windows until they can get the stuff they want to do like NGSCB (Palladium basically) later (or sometime never).
So what ?
Longhorn uses a grey theme while XP uses a blue theme.
Is this what MS has been doing for 3 years ?
Is this really what businesses want?
I don’t think so.
I am not a windows or mac user..but after seeing what longhorn has to offer both in features and looks…I would take osx any day, not even considering whats underneath the osx gui. These longhorn screens.. It looks like the same old crap with some extra color here and there. Where is that innovation you keep talking about mr balmer? Is this all a multi-billion dollar company can do?
Heck, Linux desktop isn’t that great and it can put out decent stuff…they barely have 3d acceleration support too! Microsoft has everything at their disposal..and this is it. woo frickin hoo. Where are my monkey knife fighting llama’s. Hopefully by the time of Longhorns release it’s something that has never been seen or done before in the desktop realm…
As a user there is one thing I want to say when I fire up the longhorn desktop and that is “WOW”. Right now it seems like it will be more of a “WTF”.
Press Start and half the screen is gone…
Why…. why…. why… post such ugly screenshots :'( . First of all: There is something called PNG, that will give you more colours and no artifacts, making the pics much nicer.
Secondly, why do they still use some of the old icons? So much care went into making the graphics look nice, and then they ruin it with a few afwully old icons. To bad!
Well as always: nothing to see here… move along please!
zzzzzz… windows never changes
oh, a new skin for windows xp.
Well, i didn’t even like the old one, wasts too much space, and i still don’t grasp what’s modern about “bigger buttons and more wasted space”.
I just want to get my work done with the OS of my choice, and by seeing this, I’m sure there won’t be any time left for work.
“Looks like you’re writing a letter, may I h….” BANG!, STFU!
@ joey joe joe
“So if you’re so informed, why the theme name is called “Areo” in the themes list?”
because if you were informed you’d know that Aero is three-tiered. A classic WindowsXP look, and two levels of hardware acceleration. “Aero Glass” being the top level and including glass windows with the desktop underneath blurred. only tier one is shown on these screenshots.
@Up Start
“Press Start and half the screen is gone…”
I agree, really not user friendly there. The default XP start menu is full of rubbish, I have to remove half of the icons (set program access defaults included) to have anything resembling a sane start menu.
“There should be an option to put it in the Taskbar in Longhorn, Ã la OS X/KDE/GNOME: maybe a rather trivial, but important thing. ”
actually you can already do that, just drag the trash can onto the quicklaunch toolbar
> im the only man who consider that longhorns’s screenshots only a big shit ?
Most certainly you are not the only one
But I guess there are _many_ thinking “This is new, so it must be great, so if I don’t have it, I’m lame.” …I guess
What can I do with longhorn that I could not do with this: http://www.granneman.com/images/windows_95_screenshot.gif
And by “what can I do”, I mean, something useful worth my cash ! Not a new lick of indigo paint, or anything which purpose is just to change how things get done at the moment. Something that will really improve a secretary’s work.
Come on Bill! I’d like to hear from you! Because so far, Longhorn doen’t change anything, except the hardware requirements….. And that’s counter productive!
the big differences are under the hood. but no one cares about that. they just want screenshots, so they get this, an interim theme. then you all bitch.
i dont know what i expected when i decided to read the comments, i should have expected this.
you can do something productive with longhorn. or xp. or anything that isnt based on dos.
“the big differences are under the hood. but no one cares about that. they just want screenshots, so they get this, an interim theme. then you all bitch. ”
How your OS looks plays a big part in your productivity. OS X Tiger is beautiful, therefore I love to sit here for hours and get my work done Never any strain on my eyes!
I just don’t understand why MS is keeping things like those annoying little “Notification Icons” (?), and why does the “Start” menu keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger?
It’s just ugly UI design. Butt ass ugly.
Well, at least WinXP is a lot more stable than Win95, and that allows people to be more productive.
But I see your point, and I somewhat agree with you. People (especially companies) are getting very tired of all those hardware updates.
I haven’t been following the Longhorn gossip very closely, but the “ho-hum” screenshots don’t surprise me considering that Longhorn’s initial emphasis is on a re-implementation of the fundamentals – security, stability, etc. These qualities will not be apparent from screenshots, and I think at this stage we just have to believe that MS is solidifying the foundation of Windows.
What I’d really like to see are screenshots that show the directory structure. Is there still a “C:WINDOWS” directory that holds a gumbo-like mixture of INI files, DLLs, executables and miscellaneous temp files, or have they reorganized things in a way that makes it easier to look at a system directory and know that it hasn’t been barfed on? Is the registry still an enormous labyrinth of mysterious keys or is it now organized to better separate “Windows” keys from 3’rd party / aftermarket / user keys? Can I install a software package and expect my system to ever be the same again if I uninstall it? Is it any easier in Longhorn to mount user accounts on a separate partition from the system?
These are the things that I would hope MS has been working on, and I can appreciate the fact that it’s going to take some time without much obvious change from a typical user’s perspective. Windows was on the fast track for a while, but I think most of the effort was put into the front-end. Windows is flashy enough for the moment. Now it’s time to go back and make things right behind the flashy facade.
You can’t judge it on some screenshots.
You need to see the WinHEC webcast, and see some of the features in action (a lot of them not even shown in the screenshots). They are doing some pretty nice stuff.
some people keep on complaining without even seeing the winhec longhorn demo in the keynote video.. they showed some of the hardware accelerated effects and it was great, really looking forward to this releas.
/*the big differences are under the hood. but no one cares about that. they just want screenshots, so they get this, an interim theme. then you all bitch.*/
I thought the major changes “under the hood”â„¢ have already been taken out of longhorn e.g. WinFS…
“We have real-world applications that must be written using today’s technology. As developers who get paid to provide solutions for our companies and our clients, Longhorn is essentially a lot of background noise,” said Dave Burke, a senior software developer at LLI Technologies Inc., an engineering and construction company in Pittsburgh.
Haven’t they been working on this for 4 years? Thats a long time for something to be in alpha stage. And what features are alpha anyway? Microsoft has already stripped everything out they said would be in it.
I’m sorry, but iTunes is no better than WMP, and some might even say worse, because you can’t use any stores other than iTMS with it.
The scroll bar is there because what you do is type in that little text box below the name of your application, and it keeps narrowing down the list with each letter.
Now, it still has it’s rough edges, but I like what it could potentially become.
This is not a final release.
is it just me, or is it really hard to tell where a window starts and ends? whats with the arbitrary location of menus? it seems really inconsistent.
Do you know if Don Norman is still advising Microsoft on Longhorn ? I remind you he’s the pope of usability. Sadly, these screenshots don’t look holy to me.
WinHEC video: http://metahost.savvislive.com/microsoft/20050425/winhec_20050425_3…
/*You all think you are some kind of experts because you use Linux, or BSD, or whatever. I say you are all extremely ignorant and/or stupid.*/
Microsoft doesn’t want to show us more than screenshots, because _there is nothing more_ than screenshots…
/*Like the improvements to how you find any document on your harddrive, the new start menu, etc…*/
With WinFS nonexistent, and while looking at the “improvement” in the StartMenu, Longhorn is neither interesting, nor an improvement…
It’s simply something the world doesn’t want nor need, but Microsoft needs to sell it…
The ONLY thing that has been stripped out is the WinFS layer, which will be added later, and the UI enhancements to search is already going to be in place, including being able to search based on meta data. WinFS will just enhance what will be available.
They’ve shown quite a bit more than screenshots (these are not Microsoft’s screenshots).
Watch the WinHEC video.
http://rixstep.com/1/20050419,01.html
I read this recently, maybe it was posted on OSNews?, ironic indeed …it makes me grin that many of the “advances” MS are talking up are already available on free OS products, and there’s no vapour-arguing with that.
I use MS products every day, I don’t mind them so much, once XP is protected with a good 3rd party firewall and virus scanner it’s ok, it’s functional, and it’s reasonably quick. However there are some fundemental problems with it, poor memory management for instance – dealing with large images for print is a nightmare compared to the same task on a Mac (I have one of those too, so I know), NTFS is shitty, it’s OLD man, why the hell hasn’t it been updated already? Also, Explorer and Outlook are a security travesty, they should be scrapped for that reason alone. AND I’m one of the (seemingly) few people who hates “legacy”, I respect Apple for their balls in that respect, they moved their OS on YEARS simply by taking the decision to make major structural changes which they knew would be terminal to many OS9 apps. However the devs took it on the chin and even got excited about making better apps under X, and I didn’t mind paying for the upgrades where necessary.
MS need a similar total re-think of XP (not just a re-write), from what I’ve seen of Longhorn it’s not going to be their defining moment, and unfortunately (for them) it will need to be, as Apple grows ever stronger, and Linux desktop begins to mature.
Just my 2 cents.
Btw, does anyone know if the rumoured licencing re-structure is continuing? A friend called Microsoft to obtain authorisation for his XP after another re-install and got the impression they were limiting this process per-licence (so a licence is good for only five re-installs for instance), is this true?
You cannot improve anything beyond certain limit. This fact is OSS greates weapon. No matter how Apple or MS work hard to get new “revolutionary” improvement to next version, OSS will slowly get there.
You are right, but I don’t think OSS will be the greatest problem to Microsoft at least not in the near future. It is not wide spread enough yet, to do any real harm.
Their biggest problem is their own customers. There is no business case for an upgrade. Sure,there havn’t been since NT4. They will sell Longhorn with new computers, but that will not give them nearly as much profit as if people actually upgraded their old ones.
XP allready have this problem, at the end of life of its predecessor, XP only have 2/3 of the market, and the prepredecessor still holds several percentage of the market even if support is very hard to get. In fact the support program for NT4 had to be extended to meet customer demands. This is really bad figures considering the near monopoly situation Microsoft have for desktop OSes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft sees itself forced to extend the support period for win2k and XP as well.
The longer their customers keep old systems, the more out of touch they will be with Microsoft current offerings. Not that the OS changes that much from the users point of view, but APIs changes. This means that there might be compatiblity problems that people will need to upgrade their programs. As they upgrade their programs they will get costs for the upgrade itself, costs for training, and possibly costs for conversion of data.
This means that it all of a sudden becomes interesting to look at other options (FOSS is one of them).
I think it’s just the same registry and DLL hell it was before. That would take a complete re-write of the OS and that’s not going to happen.
If you haven’t seen the actual screenshots of the new explorer nor the videos of Aero Glass in action please kindly shut your traps. Aero Glass will be a great and innotive (in places) UI. These screenshots are no more than Longhorn running in XP-like mode.
Have you actually seen this “Aero Glass” you speak of? Presumably, it would look just as ugly but with smoother gradients, prettier drop shadows, and hardware acceleration.
I mean — if Microsoft knew that purple on grey is ugly, they wouldn’t have put it into the “light” theme either.
“because if you were informed you’d know that Aero is three-tiered. A classic WindowsXP look, and two levels of hardware acceleration. “Aero Glass” being the top level and including glass windows with the desktop underneath blurred. only tier one is shown on these screenshots.”
Then why can’t they make it looks as good as either of these two Windows themes:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/4790902/ – Velvet Waves
http://www.deviantart.com/view/9240396/ – Codename Opus 3
Screenshot of my desktop:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/15770022/
Is there a possibility for several virtual Desktops in Longhorn?
This was THE ONE feature that really makes the various Linux desktops different (and BETTER!) than the Windows windowmania. At least for me who has 3 projects to work on at a time, each with 5 to 10 windows open at a time.
This lets me switch between several desktops on each of them having the complete set of apps open I need.
In all other areas the desktops (Windows, Gnome, KDE, …) are only minorly different when it comes to getting project work done. So will be Longhorn when it might finally arrive eventually some day in the distant future
diots..
By helf (IP: —.gadsdn01.al.comcast.net) – Posted on 2005-04-26 13:41:25
Its a PRE BETA. you know, an ALPHA. So you know what that means? *gasp!* It means all the gee whiz and glitz is not in it yet. How bloody hard is that to understand? Morons.
Its a PRE BETA. you know, an ALPHA. So you know what that means? *gasp!* It means all the gee whiz and glitz is not in it yet.
The question is why is it still not even beta. A lot features have been pulled back. Their competitors seam to be much closer to deliver the features MS originally promised, or are allready doing so.
E.g. look at the new transactional file system, described in another arcticle on osnews today. It looks very much like ReiserFS4. Microsoft could have licenced that instead of rolling their own.
People here will complain, the public who do not work on computers which is 99 percent of the population will buy it preinstalled to replace their aging computers, HP and Dell will report a new increase in PC sales and they along with Microsoft will make a lot of money. The 99 percent of the population will think it is great and love it and the linux community will gripe about it even though they get paid very well to support ands RedHat and Novell Stock will slip furter still into the toilet.
That’s just the way it is folks…..
hmm, when i installed it today the ‘release notes/readme’ said Beta 1. No mention of alpha at all.
look at this screenshot to confirm what I am talking about. http://anyweb.kicks-ass.net/computers/os/windows/longhorn/lh5048/lh…
I’m using it right now and it seems much more stable than lh4074, very little services loading up at startup, and even hibernation worked.
cheers
anyweb
Quote
“XP allready have this problem, at the end of life of its predecessor, XP only have 2/3 of the market, and the prepredecessor still holds several percentage of the market even if support is very hard to get”
Um 2/3 is still ALOT, if Linux got to 10 percent of the home market you would all be claiming a REVOLUTION OF EPIC PROPORTIONS *in God voice*…..
Is there a possibility for several virtual Desktops in Longhorn?
This possibility exists already in W2K and XP; I hope they will include that officially though.
For XP – search for XP PowerToys on Microsoft, this is most native way. There are lot of other free- and not freeware tools either, some of these are very interesting (possibilty to run different desktops with different shells or under different user accounts for example).
theyt need to hire someone who is going to clean up their mess with icons … they are inconsistant throughout the system … i cant beleive they didnt fix that yet
even this theme is no good
this is one of the most anoying things about windows
this version made me really depressed.
trying to incorporate already existing techniques and it still takes more than 5 years to finish. and that for a company which has lots of people dedicated to that work.
please dont come up with “but its alpha status” blah blah.
i remember from the good old days that os/2 wps could run lots of 3rd party applications that enabled animating/zooming/wobbling dialogs and windowsviews. was that 1998?
but are there really improvements? kernel stability, journaled filesystem, etc? what major rewrites of codes did they do? any new innovative techniques used? iam still hoping for that…
Whats so good about longhorn ?
Its just like my current XP Setup ( with Stardock theme )
One annoying thing about MS though is how they keep copying Apple and then tout it as if its a brand new invention…
I have OS X at home and frankly its beat the shit out of MS or Linux with KDE. ( KDE does come close those with lots of themeing )
Microsoft’s Longhorn doesn’t look nearly as different or impressive as i’ve expected and it comes too late. many have become frustrated with Windows for good reason and have already switched to Linux or Macs. i am new to Linux and very pleasantly surprised. installation was a breeze and you can choose whatever window manager you like and customize everything. tons of free and better software. its awesome.
I hadn’t a copy to look at if it does say beta 1 then please excuse my previous comment
Nothing new except a ‘better’ interface and a redesigned Explorer which looks pretty much like Finder in OSX?
Even the control panel seems to be copied from OSX.
WinFS delayed, they have just 18 months to do what they promised. Minus 6 months for beta-testing when nothing new is added, they have just a year to do their promises, and at their current pace they’re not gonna make it.
OSX however IMHO just makes minor upgrades a bit like the win95/98/me switch. On the other hand, they have a fairly modern kernel&stuff so they don’t need a rewrite as much as MS does.
What I like about any Linux distribution is that a install/remove cycle doesn’t change anything in a system. When you remove something, it’s gone for good, no traces left in the Registry. Even if something is left out, you can remove it by hand fairly easily without searching through the Registry. And if you don’t su, all the stuff under the hood simply works. Oh, andif you switch PCs you usually just need to copy your /home directory to save your files and preferences.
In its current state Windows becomes cluttered with junk left from deleted software, complex automatic system reconfiguring issues (like hardware which was deleted but stays in the Registry) and spyware. Installing more complex security will result in the viriimakers become more clever (so that kids like the LoveLetter author will have to learn not just Basic but the default security rules), the system become even more complex and buggy and more user annoyance like the Security Center complaining that your front door should be always chained and bolted with an army guarding it while your cousin could open it to any stranger.
Then why can’t they make it looks as good as either of these two Windows themes:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/4790902/ – Velvet Waves
http://www.deviantart.com/view/9240396/ – Codename Opus 3
Screenshot of my desktop: