An Interesting Article

[youbet]

I've worked with PC's for 20 years since DOS days, I have NEVER heard of your version of linux - sorry if that upsets you! I'm sure that 99% of the people here have never heard of or used it as well., which is kind of the point.

Personally I prefer to use a professionally developed O/S rather than something made by a bunch of people who don't know each other, making it for free, thats also why I don't drive a Kit Car, go on holiday in planes built by 'hobbyists' or let my next door neighbour do my dental work.

Your O/S works fine for you, great be happy about it - Why do you feel the need to 'sell it' to others.

I have worked with computing long before DOS reared its ugly head (DOS has always reminded me to this day of CPM remember the old ",," syntax), but this has nothing to do with it.

I had not heard of this Linux release either until very recently and it changed my mind completely on how far linux has progressed over the years.

There is no sell here, people use what people use, and being free Linux of all flavours is hard to sell when it costs nothing to start with and it is legal, and makes every work place legal to boot.

Edited September 28, 2007 by youbet

[cdnvic]

I am guessing Vista will be just as good as XP once SP 2 comes around. Hopefully they will see the errors of their ways and make the OS disappear from view like it should be, stay in the background where it belongs.

Fix the performance bugs, cut all the stupid dialogs / warnings and Vista would be OK. I don't need "extras".

Re "your machine is not fast enough" - that's BS. My machine is plenty fast, Vista is slow due to bugs. Something as simple as drivers that are not working properly or not properly optimized.

It takes about 20 seconds to shut off User Access Control and eliminate those popups.

I have Vista and XP running on identical hardware. Vista is much faster. Vista has never crashed. I haven't found any performance bugs. Yes, it does need a lot of RAM, but that's ok, I have it anyway and it uses it much better than XP did. Media Centre runs smoother, the search function kicks ass, it lets you dismiss alerts you don't want to see anymore, the dual cores are much better utilized.

Much of the criticism seems to come from either;

- Avowed Apple and Linux fans

- People who's hardware is too old so they bash what they can't have.

- People who can't afford it.

- People who don't use it but have read something somewhere.

- People who tried it and gave up without trying to learn how to use it properly.

- Bloggers who needs hits and intentionally try to stir things.

[youbet]

- People who can't afford it.

Well said that man, give him a medal. I for one think most of the above list revolves around this.

[mads]

Your points are nuts.

I have a desktop and a laptop.

My desktop is running xp and it has been running for months 24/7 without any breakdowns except when it comes to my electricity. I have a fairly quick laptop dual core with 2gb of 667 mhz ram, I had a pentium 4 1,8 ghz with 512mb ram before and it booted up 3 times faster with xp than my new fast one does with vista installed. Vista loves to use all the engine power which in my humble opionion is a totally wrong way to create an OS, an OS should make your computer function and do the basic things needed without using all your resources. I haven't yet tried a linux os but so far Ive only heard praise and I doubt that many of you who dislike linux never even used it. You will always be able to get some kind of free support with linux.....with vista its a whole other story. You should only express your opionions about something if you have firsthand experience.

Cheers and a happy weekend to all of you.

[cdnvic]

I haven't yet tried a linux os but so far Ive only heard praise and I doubt that many of you who dislike linux never even used it. You will always be able to get some kind of free support with linux.....with vista its a whole other story. You should only express your opionions about something if you have firsthand experience.

Cheers and a happy weekend to all of you.

[sjaak327]

The OP is indeed a trollish articile which I cannot take seriously. Therefore I'm not even going to try and comment any further...

[elkangorito]

For all those 'anti vista' people out there, I'm sure you'll find this link amusing.

http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=741891990

I'm using XP SP2...have been using XP for a couple of years with minimal problems. However, having said this, I was previously a Linux user & even then (some years ago) I found it to be more reliable & better performing than any MacroHard software at that time. When I buy a second HDD, I'll be using using Linux.

The opinions & problems mentioned on this thread will only be solved when computer hardware & software are designed & built to common standards, none of which exist at the moment.

MacroHard OS's are made with compatibility in mind, which of course costs performance. The only reason why Linux is not so popular is because of compatibility - if all games were Linux compatible, I guarantee that MacroHard would be out of business tomorrow.

[cdnvic]

So Microsoft has an 85% market share because of games? I think not.

Instead of making up lame taunts (microhard) why not back up your statements with some facts?

[RKASA]

I have used XP for years now. I had dos 3.1 and up. I have been used PClinuxOS 2007 for about a month.  Anything I did with XP I can do in linux, and 100 other things I can't do in XP are in PClinuxOS.  I now spend 80% of my time booted in linux. In another few months maybe even weeks, I see the XP distro in the bin.  Why waste good disk space.

[cdnvic]

I might give that a try on my linux box now that I've heard all these rave reviews.

[LivinLOS]

I have been waiting for KDE4 to try another linux version.. They do really need to improve the desktop tho, last time I installed a Kubuntu it reminded me of win98...

Currently typing on XP SP2. one of my media boxes is Vista.. I see a few improvements on the vista box if the machine is powerful (I will probably change the XP box after a hardware switcharound) but I also dont see earth shattering changes.. Some media improvements, mostly bits is slicker UI.. And this took how many years ?? And uses how much hardware ?? and costs how much ?? So I can see why people are underwhealmed..

I am totally OS agnostic.. I dont care.. Want it easy, simple, and to do what I need.. Vista will be the future until or unless linux gets a unified slick desktop (and at this point I dont think KDE4 will quite be there)..

[tjo o tjim]

Great entertainment! Fun watching people argue about it. Of course the article is a troll... Of course Linux gets better each go around (actually surprised at how far Webmin has come in a year!). And genuinely surprised at how much pain Apple continues to cause me (not with OSX though).

Personally, XP makes my blood boil. I pay someone to do the things that I used to have to go to Windows to do... and the stress level benefits are definitely worth the premium.

The real problem with XP and Vista is the Windows Genuine Advantage. Microsoft can decide at any point in time that your copy is not "genuine", and lock you out. I'll spare you the Nazi analogy, but there have been so many documented problems with this way of doing things that I can't understand why any business would use a product that works this way.

As for the comments in the OP about Office... he isn't that far off. IBM is throwing their might behind OpenOffice.org, and we might see a real viable competitor in a year or so.

For any businesses out there, the best strategy is to avoid monoculture. That is where you really get screwed. Sacrifice a little every day to avoid the cancer you will find yourself with a few years down the road.

[Crushdepth]

I am using XP, Vista (32 and 64) and Ubuntu on various machines at the moment, all very good hardware. In terms of boot speed, Ubuntu is the hands down winner, very fast. I am less clear on the XP vs Vista - but an engineer friend did some benchmarking tests (don't ask me what) and he said he found Vista 32 roughly equivalent to XP in terms of speed, and Vista 64 was about 15% faster.

I don't understand why people say Vista is worse than XP, it is much better in my experience. The only significant irritation I have with it is that it seems to have poor tolerance of ungraceful shutdowns, which are a fact of life here if you need to leave your machine running. But creating a disk image and putting user data on a separate partition solves that problem.

I like Ubuntu a lot, I was about to switch to it from XP until Vista came along. XP drives me nuts now, unfortunately I am stuck with it at work due to our complete and utter lack of an IT budget and medieval attitude to expenditure.

Edited September 29, 2007 by Crushdepth

[RKASA]

I have to be fair to XP, as much as I am loving my new linux.  After April this year when I dumped Norton AV, XP has been like a rock.  I don't hate it anymore, my anger was misplaced, but I am getting off the upgrade (before we cut off support) for this version train.  Been down that to many times.  As for OpenOffice I just did the upgrade to 2.3 and I had problems which all turned out to me, but they sorted and it vary nice.  Its pack full of everything. The money I save on software alone is gong to buy my next PC rather then buying a PC so I can run the next OS.  

Edited September 29, 2007 by RKASA

[nikster]

I am guessing Vista will be just as good as XP once SP 2 comes around. Hopefully they will see the errors of their ways and make the OS disappear from view like it should be, stay in the background where it belongs.

Fix the performance bugs, cut all the stupid dialogs / warnings and Vista would be OK. I don't need "extras".

Re "your machine is not fast enough" - that's BS. My machine is plenty fast, Vista is slow due to bugs. Something as simple as drivers that are not working properly or not properly optimized.

It takes about 20 seconds to shut off User Access Control and eliminate those popups.

I know. But what on earth where they thinking? In addition, it's a symptom of the design philosophy of Vista. In your face, knows better than you, disrupts work flow.

I have Vista and XP running on identical hardware. Vista is much faster. Vista has never crashed. I haven't found any performance bugs.

Good for you. And because of that, you assume that anyone who actually does have performance bugs are ... what? Lying?

I actually believe that your Vista is fast, hence I infer that the performance problems on my 2x2Ghz Core Duo laptop are bugs. Only logical conclusion, don't you think? Fast one one machine, slow on another. The laptop actually has a Windows Experience Index (WEI) of 4.5, with values > 5 in all categories except hard disk. Hard disk has 4.5 so total is 4.5. Microsoft states that a WEI of 5 ensures the best Vista performance. What's your WEI?

Let's go down your list:

- Avowed Apple and Linux fans.

No. While people always assume those who own any Apple product or are happy with an Apple product they own are "Apple fans" I am not one. I don't like something because it has the name Apple on it. I do like things that work. A lot of Apple products fall into that category. I would say somebody is a "fan" if they support "their cause" no matter what, sort of like a football fan. As such, I am not an Apple fan. If Apple brings out a bad product, I won't have it. And Apple has recently given me a lot of grief with their greedy and stupid iPhone locking policy. Nice product with very bad strings attached.

- People who's hardware is too old so they bash what they can't have.

No.

- People who can't afford it.

No. Don't you think it's a bit below the belt to assume that people who don't like what you like are poor?

FTR I have Vista Ultimate as well as all other Windows version through MSDN subscription. I can choose whichever glorious version of Windows I want to run.

- People who don't use it but have read something somewhere.

No.

- People who tried it and gave up without trying to learn how to use it properly.

How long do I have to suffer before giving up? Is one week enough? There's only so much time I spend with something I don't like.

- Bloggers who needs hits and intentionally try to stir things.

I am not.

I don't like Vista for the following reasons, in order of importance:

1 - In your face design philosophy. Starting from UAC down, all elements of the system seem to maximize interaction with the user - UAC can be turned off, the rest of the dialogitis cannot. Microsoft seems to have spent the last 5 years writing dialogs. My workflow was interrupted all the time. What I want is that the OS stays in the background and lets me do whatever I want to do. Before Vista, I had never seen a dialog window that fills the screen. A rather large screen at that. I found many of these screen-filling dialogs which have no cancel button but rather you have to select one of the paragraphs. Meaning you have to read all of it before getting on with your life. These seemed to be not isolated incidents but rather an intentional design. Perhaps aimed to "make it easier" for users though I doubt extra large dialogs full of prose will help.

2 - Performance bugs: Slow and bad battery life.

3 - Activation madness. I am not a criminal. Nor do I buy from businesses who treat me like one.

4 - Many functions are worse than in XP. Examples that I use all the time: Wireless connection dialog is more complicated now, with more dialogs in the way. Networking panel more complicated. Search doesn't really work or find what I expect it to find.

5 - Control panels were moved around and/or hidden for no reason at all. They are not more logical now. Hiding stuff has failed spectacularly with the "personalized" menus in XP, yet the concept carried forth into Vista.

I am sure #2 will be ironed out by SP1 or SP2, but I am not so sure about the others because those are "as designed". In addition to getting annoyed with these little things, I didn't see any real enhancements to XP - except prettier graphics and better sounds. And those were not enough to convince me to switch, given the other problems.

[sjaak327]

^

1 This is proabably due to incompatible software or wrong setup more then anything else. I hardly ever see the consent (UAC) dialog box. And when I see it, it is because I'm running a program which I specifically setup to run elevated. The reason mostly is that some software wasn't designed with Vista in mind, and need to be run elevated because the application needs more file system rights then Vista would allow. For me UAC isn't an annoying and is one of the most appreciated features of the new OS. As it greatly increases security. Not only the consent dialog box, but mostly the reduced file system rights that are enforced by the OS.

2 Tough one, on one laptop, Vista wouldn't run comfortably, on other computers, it flies. I have it running on a 5 year old Dell optiplex as media centre, the only upgrade I did was increased the memory to 1,5 Gb and added another graphical card for Aero. On my main, 2 year old desktop, it flies. Much quicker than XP on the same machine.

3 What activation maddness ? You install, you activate. end of story. If you are running an illegal copy, no problem either.

4 Many other functions were either lacking in XP or have been overhauled and are much better now. Setting up a wireless network, remains a piece of cake. Networking panel indeed requires one or two more mouseclicks but I do like the new layout and functionality. Search is way better than it has ever been.

5 No problem either, you can still switch to "classic view"

The fact is that Vista has more additional tools then XP, preforms better then XP (on most of the pc's I have tried or currently running it on) but most importantly, it's safer then XP. It's more secure by design, and I admit, this is probably the main reason for some of the application problems. But I applaud Microsoft for having taken this new approach and it's time most application developers follow the same path.

[Gary A]

I have played with Linux for several years, starting with Red Hat. I just wasn't patient or smart enough to find and install necessary drivers. The latest effort was Linspire. I bought it. It is friendly enough to use and has many drivers in the package. Getting my sound to work was the worst part. It seems like everything you want to improve or add costs either $29.95 or $39.95. The absolute worst thing is that Windows XP Pro just BLOWS it away as far as speed. It appears to me that the open source Linux is being tinkered with by everyone and their brother resulting in a terribly bloated, very slow operating system. I was going to download the free Suse but it is a 2 plus gigabyte download.

I'm not a big Microsoft fan either but until there is something better than service pack two XP, I'll continue to use my XP Pro. Maybe by the time I'm ready for a new computer Vista will have worked out their problems and I'll give it a try. BUT, not yet.

I don't ever remember having a blue screen of death with XP Pro except when I had a hardware problem. I have had several of those problems.

[mads]

Touche!!

What a comeback, I seemed to have completely missed you on this one.

Well I guess I can't win them all.

I haven't yet tried a linux os but so far Ive only heard praise and I doubt that many of you who dislike linux never even used it. You will always be able to get some kind of free support with linux.....with vista its a whole other story. You should only express your opionions about something if you have firsthand experience.

Cheers and a happy weekend to all of you.

[Gary A]

I also hear many things about Open Office. I have it on my XP Pro machine and it will definitely do everything I use MS Office to do. It is free and it is a good package. Why don't I use it? It's just TOO slow. Even the word processor takes forever to open. I was blaming its being slow because it was built for Linux. Well, I have it in my Linspire operating system also and guess what? It's just as slow there and I think even slower.

I could get along with Linspire and Open Office but why should I when I OWN Windows XP Pro and it does everything much faster besides being compatible with ALL the rest of my software. No doubt my next new computer will be quad core with about 5 gig of ram and will run Vista very well. My next computer may very well even feed my dog.

[RKASA]

I was messing with open Office on my Linux alot the past few days. It seems pretty fast to start for me 3 or 4 secounds to open. If ya need it open faster there is a program in the repos like synaptic called quickstart or something along that line that speeds the Office stuff up. I don't have it installed. It uses some ram, but if your using Office alot it would make sense.

[Guest Reimar]

Not Don Reisinger only but Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on September 28, 2007 wrote an other article which is defining Vista as an Zombi;

Read what he wrote:

Opinion: Vista has turned into the desktop operating system no one wants, and even Microsoft is beginning to get it.

Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it's alive, but close up it's the walking dead.

The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines. In February, Microsoft insisted it had already sold more than 20 million copies of Windows Vista. Oh yeah, like there were actually 20 million copies of Vista already out there and running. Pull the other leg, it's got bells on.

If Vista was doing great, then why did Dell break ranks with the other major OEMs to start offering XP again and become the first top-tier vendor to offer XP in replacement for Vista in April? Adding insult to injury, Dell actually had the effrontery to offer desktop Linux to its customers.

Click here to read more about Microsoft keeping Windows XP in play. Other OEMs followed Dell's lead, or to be more precise, its customers' demands. Lenovo, for example, when it rolled out its revamped high-end ThinkPad T61p workstation notebooks in July, made a point of offering not just Vista but XP Pro and, yes, several Linux distributions, including Novell's SUSE, Red Hat and Turbo Linux.

So it came as no surprise at all to me when Mike Nash, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows product management, announced that, due to OEM demand, Microsoft will keep selling XP until June 2008. Of course, he also claims there is little chance the June 30 date will be extended.

Want to bet?

Nash and Microsoft apologist Rob Enderle claim that it's no fault with Vista that's causing customers to stay away from it. Indeed, Nash insists that Vista is on track to become the fastest-selling operating system of all time. Really? Then why in the world is Microsoft continuing to offer in-house competition?

At the same time, Enderle, an analyst who counts Microsoft as a customer, said, "Vista adoption is well below where I thought it would be by now...Corporations aren't even close to being ready for Vista, and many of us have been expecting this move. The biggest issue is that most don't seem to see the value in the product. Right now the majority of the comments I'm getting would indicate the people [who] don't want Vista right now are in the majority."

Enderle, mind you, is about as pro-Microsoft an analyst there is in the business today. If he's saying that people don't want Vista, and the OEMs, which at the end of the day are all about selling units, don't want to sell it, the only conclusion you can come to is that Vista is failing to win the market.

There are many reasons why Vista is doing the zombie stumble. Microsoft has and continues to mislead customers about how much PC is really needed to run Vista. Even some of Windows' most loyal users are finding that its poor performance, lousy software support and pathetic driver support is too much to stomach. People who wouldn't touch any Microsoft product until the first service patch appears. And, last but never ever least, if XP isn't broke, why "fix" it with Vista?

Now you might think some of this is legacy backlash. People don't like change. They'd rather use Windows 2000 than XP, Windows 98 SE than 2000,and Windows ME more than...well, OK, no one liked ME. But I've been through these cycles many times before. This is different.

XP SP2, with XP SP3 finally due to show up soon, is not only the best Windows to date, I can't think of a single reason to switch from XP to Vista. I'm not talking a good reason, I really mean any reason.

If you want a better operating system than XP, may I recommend Xandros as the most painless way for an XP user to give Linux a try, or if the idea of installing Linux gives you hives, you can just buy an Ubuntu-powered Dell 1420 laptop, which is a very sweet machine. Or just bite the bullet and go ahead and buy, say, the new MacBook Pro 15-inch to give Mac OS a try.

Whatever you do, even if it's just sticking with XP, you'll be doing better than moving to Vista. Vista is the walking dead of the operating-system world.

Check out eWEEK.com's Windows Center for Microsoft and Windows news, views and analysis.

Edited September 30, 2007 by Reimar