This entry is not entirely an all out war on Windows.
It is a fairly even-handed approach to all operating system. However, where this all stemmed from was seeing post after post of how great Windows 7 is and how kiddies wanna have their babies. I feel absolutely no empathy for a flawed operating system - esepecially when a company as large as MS charge us excessively for such a product.
People have been bangin on about how Windows 7 will be the absolute greatest version of Windows to date. Then again, they said the exact same thing about Vista and look how THAT ended up? Even when you rip the guts out of Vista and get it down to the bare essentials and download 2gb of updates, it’s still a joke.
A lot of services you may not need (like Tablet PC, Secondary Logon, Remote Registry just to name a few), are not loaded by default in Windows 7. In fact, many of the services I would manually have to turn off with Vista to help with performance, are already off with Windows 7. This is almost backwards thinking for MS. How they have always packaged Windows in the past is give you absolutely everything and the user can either put up with it or learn how to learn to turn it off. Linux works the polar opposite - install the essentials and you can go and install what is required. Which is really how it should be. Why bother with all the extra shit I just don’t need?
One of the common things said about Windows 7 is, “From start to finish (the install) took just under 20 minutes. With all the applications I needed to install and approximately 300 megs of updates it still took only another hour and half. Never had that much speed doing a complete install before.”
1. 20 minutes might sound like a revolution to a Windows user. It might make them all hot in the trousers but again, every other OS has got installation down to a fine art in a shorter time on fewer resources.
2. If the XP takes any longer than 35 minutes during the install, I find something else to go to. If it takes 20 minutes to install, another 15 won’t kill me. Additionally, if you have Win XP with SP3, you only have to download 20-30mb of updates (this does not include any updates to Office 2007). Thus, making the install much shorter than under 2 hours.
3. You are bring out supposedly your greatest achievement in the world of OS’ and I STILL have to download 300mb of updates even before the retail version has come out?
4. You’re ok with waiting another 1.5 hours to download and install updates? Ok, downloading 300mb might take awhile (especially if you’re on slow broadband) but to get the machine from completely wiped to freshly installed takes a little under 2 hours? This is makes the install process a little less than groundbreaking.
It has been said that 7 will require little in the way of system resources. Well done, Microsoft. You’ve achieved something Linux has been doing for years. Don’t be rewarded for something you should have got right in the first place. In fact, any other operating system (including the somewhat chunky) Mac OSX has been doing it for years while you pass this off as if this is some new feature. MS has been pushing Vista for so long that we’ve all had some form of upgrade in the last couple of years to have it installed and running somewhat satisfactorily so running on fewer system resources doesn’t really make a great deal of difference. Plus, if you install a cut down version of XP like I do, I am almost willing to bet good money that if will perform (if not outperform) Windows 7. Of course this doesn’t add up to shit because XP’s life ends in 2010.
Others have been saying, “The operating system uses far less resources than Vista. For example, the memory Windows 7 used on a 32-bit computer was under 700 megs.” Wow…under 700mb you say? Ubuntu does it with 384MB and it even then it gives you some room as well. Even with KDE. That is like saying my obese cousin now only consumes 40 cheeseburgers a day instead of 70. Windows 7 comes with the ever-ugly Vista-looking skin. Great. Just fuckin great. I know I can change it. My care factor: 0. It’s still something else I have to do.
“The sidebar does not get installed by default. Since this is not necessary, why have it install as a default? Another change to the sidebar as that there really isn’t one like with Vista. With Vista, the sidebar often prevent you from access icons that were underneath it. With Windows 7, it is more like the individual Gadgets are on their own. There is no sidebar per se any longer. You simply add Gadgets and place them where you like.” Hardly a step in the right direction. Disable something I’ve never used before as default? Gee, thanks. Gadgets shit me, too - they’re gone. The most common gadget is the clock. Does the time in the bottom right hand corner not enough that you need to see what the time twice on your screen?
And the look of Explorer these days (by default) looks crap. I have too much stuff stored in too many different drives to have half of the left hand side taken up with shortcuts to commonly-used places which seems harder to disable than simply right clicking on the shortcut area and clicking on hide. Linux does this too (by default). I think in the time I’ve used Windows one of the last places I store something is in the my documents folder. Give me the look of Windows 98 with my drives on the left hand side and list the contents on the right. No fancy shit. And while you’re at it, make MSN look like it did in version 4.7. That was easily the best version of that piece of software (minus the huge security issues it had). What other options does it offer that would be substancial to the usability of Windows? Sure, there are some new features but essentially very little worth upgrading for.
This is the biggest new feature out of the 40-odd Windows 7 videos I have seen:
Watch this:
Essentially what you have is someone who is indeed trying to prove this is a Windows 7 build and not just someone using Vista and playing it off like it’s not. If this person who has installed Windows 7 has to prove that he is not using vista, it says to me there is little improvement on visual use from Vista. So no new look.
One of the other issues is with installing drivers. Would you wanna spend an hour trying to get drivers working? Or just install windows and have it working from the get go? Well, I installed Ubuntu recently and it picked up all my hardware and optimised it without making having to do shit. The only downside is the first time it boots, it takes a little longer and that it has had problems with Wireless shit. The driver for my Nvidia video card had to be installed manually. It worked upon installation which is really hardly a complaint and is miles ahead of Windows when you have to load drivers in Windows for anything which Windows doesn’t have native. And in the Vista environment, that was a lot. Additionally, any drivers you did have for Vista were either dodgy and unsafe or none at all.
Isn’t it shit when you log onto Windows for the first time and then the very first thing it asks you do is reboot because it has found new hardware? The best part about Ubuntu? No reboot required. TA-DA! That is the greatest part about Linux. It has two bars (one on the top and one on the bottom) which is a little annoying but when you find out what they’ve done it makes sense. Perhaps a little more functionality than I really need but I can live with it.
I can’t fully back Ubuntu, though. People are bangin on about how it will rival Windows and how great it is. Pfffffft. Hardly. Essentially it is still an OS for nerds and if anyone else tries to convince you otherwise, is probably because they’re the nerd. There are things about anything Linux that either require attention from Linux developers or will always be behind the 8 ball. If I have been a computer user for a long time and I have to constantly seek out Linux forums to do something even within a GUI environment (modify, add, remove…etc), it means they do things a little differently and that perhaps it is not as straight forward as everyone makes it out to be.
It’s like playing poker, never having a good hand and always folding. The problem you have with this is the blinds have gone up and even though you’ve only lost the blinds each round, you would have to win at least one big hand to stay in the game to afford the blinds. The only way in poker you could get ahead is by winning some big hands at the start when the blinds were small because you had less to lose. The more you gain at the start, the greater upper hand you have throughout the entire game.
Same applies to Linux. It has been an operating system for nerds, the underground and the initiated essentially. While the underground has been making head way in leaps in bounds that only Windows could ever dream of, Microsoft have spent billions on marketing their operating system as if it is your only option on a PC. What this does, in turn, is make just about every novice who has touched a computer use a Windows machine. So the only thing the majority of the population will identify with a computer is what they see with Windows (and in few cases, OS9/OSX). So? Well, if you are ever going to rival an operating system as big as Windows, you’re gunna need to do things where users would be able to identify from previous experiences what to do. Giving Linux a usable GUI that is quite simple to use, is a huge jump but there are things that within Linux that would annoy a Windows user.
Such as:
* During the install making 2 partitions is a nightmare. In Windows the hardest thing I have to worry about is how many bits in a byte. During the Linux install, I have to know shit like boot mount or another option was to make one partition and then install a program from synaptic and modify the partitions. Argh.
* What’s synaptic and why do I have that AND add/remove programs?
* Going through Synaptic (the package installer) offers plenty of options. But if I am looking for one bit of software and the quick search does not help. If I am looking for a torrent program to install…not a problem. If I don’t know the name of the package but I know what I want this piece of software to do a certain action it is harder to find. Not only within Synaptic but also on the web.
* Can’t run just about any PC game in its native environment
* Some applications require WINE (a Windows emulator) to run because Linux does not have an equivelant. (Please keep in mind that this is not a common problem but it does happen). WINE will also not always play every PC game.
* Some applications require to be compiled before running (again, this is not a common problem but it might happen)
* With all the hassel of having to learn something new and all the querks it comes with (for computer nerds this is a good thing but if it is ever gunna rival Windows, users like familiarity which Ubuntu is close but still not quite there).
What Linux has over Windows:
* Virus? What virus?
* Spyware? What’s that?
* Malware? Nope. No idea what that is, either.
* Better overall security - Instead of logging in as an administrator like you do in Windows (by default), you log in as a regular user and are prompted for an admin password when you need to make a system change (which almost never).
* No God-aweful IE (although this advantage is subjective)
* Free to download and use (everyone likes free, right?)
* Large amounts of online communities for help
There is only one reason why you would have anything to do with Vista: DirectX 10. Essentially it is a gamers thing so if you’re not, there would not be one single function you could find elsewhere that you wouldn’t find anywhere else or simply outperforms Vista.
If you are not much a gamer and are able to find Linux equivelants for every application you have, I would have gone to Linux many years ago. I have noticed a lot of devlopers would use nothing else than Linux or some form of BSD. This is largely to do with not only the ability to develop open-source software but command line-orientated tasks. With Linux, one of the problems in the past was lack of software options. This is no longer a problem with common tasks such as cd burning, torrent clients or even finding a chat client. What I have found interesting in my research is a lot of the programs I use now (audacity and DOSbox to name a few) were originally Linux applications later developed for Windows. So I would have better support for those selected applications.
At the end of the day with either camp, you are going to have shortfalls. I have this mental image of two actual camps; one right next door to the other. And on one side you have the Linux camp. The other camp is Windows. I imagined if I went to the Linux camp I would be stuck having to learn command lines to do things Windows had a simple GUI wizard for. Looking at the Windows camp through the window and seeing them finger paint with midgets, inhaling helium to make funny sounds with their voice and every type of fun imaginable. And if I was in the Windows camp, I would be treated like some moron who has to be shown what an icon is or what the cursor can do and look through the window to the Linux window and watch and they grow smarter and I feel by joining the Windows camp, my IQ just went down 30-50 points.
I would love to be in a situation where you do not have to take a side. You would have the one operating system that does it all. One day Windows will make an operating system that doesn’t consume as many resources (700mb is still way too much even when the heaviest GUI-orientated Linux equivelant only uses half that amount) or to have Linix play PC games and have more familiarity and not needing to know the ins and outs of more technical-orientated usability.
