Thursday, July 24, 2008

News Jay doesn't want to hear


Windows 7 is looking at a release in 2010. Microsoft is also going back on the offensive with Vista with its latest marketing campaign, where hostile users were blind tested with an existing copy of Vista, and a new OS offering codenamed "Mojave." Users reportedly described the new offering as pleasant; MS then proceeded to shatter their innocence by revealing that Mojave was none other than Vista repainted with a different theme. Moar here.

5 comments:

Jay Buchanan said...

It doesn't matter that an OS is "pleasant." Vista is pleasant to look at. I like the sharp fonts (ClearType is actually built into XP, and I don't know why more people don't use it), the blurry window decorations and the pretty colors. For me, however, Vista is unpleasant to use. Explorer is a pretty clumsy and buggy file manager, and the configuration of everything (especially the look and behavior of the desktop environment) is so limiting to somebody used to KDE that it's frustrating. I can't believe that these "hostile users" know much about operating systems at all.

But my biggest beef with Vista is that every now and then, what I assume is a bug in the NVidia graphics driver randomly shuts down the computer in the blink of an eye, without even a friendly BSOD to identify the problem. Nor does the computer consistently wake up from standby. For comparison, on the rare occasion when the X (graphical) server crashes in Unix, it doesn't bring down the whole OS: You still have a command prompt to resolve the problem, and your hard drives don't suffer. Whereas an incredible amount of hardware support is built directly into the Linux kernel, Windows is sorely lacking good drivers.

It's great if some people don't have problems with Vista—my experience just has not been that pleasant. I wish Microsoft the best of luck with Windows 7: Good competition makes everyone's software stronger, and I don't want the open-source community to rest on its laurels now that its OSes are head and shoulders above Microsoft's latest.

Brian Thompson said...

Competition will force Microsoft to make a better OS. I am pleased to welcome it.

Can't wait to use Windows 7 in 2013, not 2010. Microsoft is yet to hit a release date for an overhauled OS.

Vista still has a lot of annoying bugs that boggle my mind. Blackbox desktop manager for Linux is like 8,000 lines of code. Why don't they start with somethign like that and have different programming teams each adding a feature and testing as they go along. I just don't get how you write and ship an OS with broken WINDOWS EXPLORER in the viewing of videos provoking crashes and the copy/paste function not good for more than 63GB of transfer or whatever that issue was.

That being said, Vista runs really well on my quad-core, much better than it ever did on my old box.

Epi said...

actually, the "hostile users" were picked from people such as yourself, and worse: mac users.

Matt DeSalvo said...

I'm pretty sure you could convince 95% of computer users out there that you've switched OS's by using different themes or desktop environments. As for Vista, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to not stick with XP especially since Windows has already stated that XP will be supported 2 years beyond Vista. Vista's bugginess and lack of support/compatibility just seem like a headache. Yale ITS still doesn't officially support using it.

Jay Buchanan said...

The problem with XP is that Microsoft no longer licenses it to the general public, nor does it allow OEMs to include copies on new computers. Yale ITS will have to start supporting Vista when every freshman who doesn't use a decent OS shows up on campus with Vista on his new laptop.