14 day Vista trial; your bias is showing
Posted by J.A.S.O.N. on 22 Jun 2007 at 10:25 am | Tagged as: Babble, Software, Tech
Areview of Windows Vista, as told by a Linux user. A warning, though, while much of what he says is true, it smacks of biasness and he takes every opportunity to take digs at Microsoft.
What I find funny is the difference in expectations. For example, the author diggs on Microsoft for not including more bundled applications:
In all, I had to download about 200 meg of software just to make Vista usable - and a word processor wasn’t among the lot. No, you need to get in AdAware, Spybot, WinZip (or WinRar), Adobe Reader, a Torrent client, an SCP client (I could only find a trial version), QuickTime player, VLC media player and a few browsers. Vista had no drivers for my monitor (a 22-inch flat screen) or my printer (a Samsung SCX-4200).
This is exactly the kind of thing Microsoft tried to do and got belted by the velvet gloves of an anti-trust committee. Granted, the way Microsoft tried to do it was very evil, but these people who gloat about how much software is available for Linux right out of the box are the very same that lynch Microsoft when they try to expand the baseline software offerings in the OS. In this type of situation, there’s not hope for Microsoft to ever come out on top. They lose either way. A bit on the hypocritical side, I think.
He also digs on Microsoft for not improving on IE7. A very valid point, however, he targets their implementation of tabs as the source of his gripe:
IE7 has tabs - about three years and more after Firefox made them popular - but the furniture has been moved around in a meaningless way. In both IE7 and the entire layout of Vista I was reminded of one thing - the way my wife often re-arranges our old furniture to provide the illusion that something has changed.
So, should they not have included tabs simply because Firefox already has them? Here’s a hint, Opera had them first. I’m not sure what he means with his furniture analogy. The very few times I’ve used IE7, I’ve not had any problems with it or with finding anything. IE7 is vastly underwhelming in terms of what Microsoft could have done with it and when compared to the flexibility of Firefox, but it’s by no means confusing. Rigid, yes, but not confusing.
And what would a review be without taking a swipe at 64-bit processing?
It is really difficult to find genuine 64-bit drivers and applications; Vista has the necessary libraries for 32-bit apps and I noticed that most of what I installed were the x86 versions. So much for 64-bit computing. BTW, I’ve been running the 64-bit port of Debian for the AMD since March 2006.
Let’s ignore for a second that the home desktop and most of the corporate market isn’t ready for 64-bit processing just yet for just a moment. If he’s trying to imitate the average user’s computing experience, this point is irrelevant. Average home users bother themselves not with what bit size their OS is, but instead with whether the OS works for them. There’s plenty to dig on Vista about without tossing something as irrelevant as 64-bit processing. If his review were based around an audio, video or graphic designer’s experience, he would have a point, but not in this case.
Also, I’ve tried 64-bit processing with Ubuntu. It’s not all there unless you feel like hamstringing your online experience (no 64-bit flash). In many cases you still have to load the 32-bit libraries in tandem with the 64-bit ones to get all your apps working. I will say that it’s much, much closer than Apple’s or Microsoft’s endeavors into the 64-bit realm, though. It’s just not important to most people and not at all to the average home user.
It’s hard to find fault with the review, though, since he’s mostly spot on. However, there’s plenty to rip on Vista about without taking the biased and predictive swipes and Microsoft that seem to have become oh so popular.
Too often an review from a Linux type is just thinly veiled M$-bashing. As if Bill Gates came over and personally killed your dog or something. Pity.
i had a vista laptop from work for about a month, just to play around with it so when we roll it out to the users we’re all familiar with it. if the reviewer had used the “furniture” analogy about the whole OS, he’d be spot on.
while vista has a few notable improvements, overall it will feel like pretty much the same OS people have been using since XP rolled out. i thought the aero interface was neat about once or twice, then stuck to the alt+tab switcher.
my only problem with vista (business premium edition on a dell latitude 420) that i had was that dell installs google desktop. well, google desktop does NOT work with the vista sidebar. it was giving me all sorts of errors on startup. i uninstalled google desktop (which honestly has always given me problems on just about any machine i install it on) and was running fine. it found the wireless fine. any other driver i needed for standard stuff worked fine too. and, as one would expect, it played with microsoft tools just fine (office, visual studio, etc).
all in all, it was windows. i’m not chomping at the bit to get it into the production environment, but i’m not cowering away from a new laptop with it installed either.