Who's using Windows Vista? -- The Catch-All Vista / Microsoft Thread

Yeah. You heard me.

I'd get a Mac if I was content to wait 8 years for them to catch up to PC Games, though I am excited one can finally get Leisure Suit Larry 3 for MAC!

In all seriousness, Macs are subpar as gaming platforms and frankly that's what I want my machine for.

E_S

 

I like Macs for graphical work, but they're crap for any thing beyond that.

 

I'd like to point out that all Intel Macs (i.e. all macs made from early 2006 onward) can use either Boot Camp or Parallels to run Windows XP (the former in partition style, the latter with both Windows and OS X running at once). Therefore, you can run your games in Windows with a mac.

KK, I kindly request that you seek out GrandAdmiralJello and educate him on Windows history, and on Vista. He needs it. A more rabid defender of Windows you shall not find.

I like Macs for graphical work, but they're crap for any thing beyond that.


works great for me (and I have but a G4 iBook) . Familiarization helps a great deal when using a mac.

 

I am very familiar with Macs. The problem is that running anything Microsoft on a Mac is guaranteed to run badly. And the whole upgrading of a Mac is a joke. From what I've been told (my brother used to do tech support on Macs) you have to take them to a service station for upgrades. I don't like Windows any better. Just that I don't like Macs for anything else but graphical work.

 

The problem is that running anything Microsoft on a Mac is guaranteed to run badly.

So why does Microsoft office run smoothly on my ibook?

You can upgrade mac desktops to a point, but it's true that they aren't as upgradable as PC laptops. Still, because Apple controls both the software and the hardware, they are better integrated and generally more reliable. Fewer cooks in the kitchen.

 

Allow me to re-phrase: They change everything around for a Mac's version.

 

That's because the Mac versions of Microsoft software are written from a different code base by a different team of programmers within Microsoft.

Office for Mac has repeatedly been threatened by Microsoft as leverage over Apple. Currently, Microsoft has promised to continue producing versions of Office for Mac until 2011, but they also require significant concessions from Apple every time they renew that agreement. The Mac version of Office usually lags at least 1-2 years behind the Windows version in features, and often has some compatibility issues with the Windows version.

And Ender, there are quite a few games that you can run on a Mac, especially the new Intel-based ones. After the shift to Intel chips, WINE was ported to OSX, and it works quite well to run a whole host of Windows programs under either Linux or OSX. You can even get your WoW fix under Linux thanks to WINE. (I've even got both IE6 and Office running under Linux with very little trouble.)

Kimball Kinnison

 

I dont do . My pc has a mere 128 MB of ram.

 

That's why I bought my Alienware....



However, I do agree that Windows has far too may problems.

 

Every OS has their own problems. That's why animosity towards a particular one is kind of amusing. You're never going to get a perfect operating system.

 

This is true, but there are some OSes that are just so poor that they deserve their criticism.

Linux isn't perfect (and I've never claimed that it is), however, it is by far the most flexible and secure OS I have used. I have also been involved in its development some (although I'm trying to become more involved), to improve it. That's something you can't do with most other OSes out there.

Kimball Kinnison

 

Also, in keeping with my comments about DirectX 10 earlier and how you need a DirectX 10-capable card to get the most out of Vista, consider this article. It's causing a lot of problems for gamers who have upgraded to Vista and don't have DirectX 10-capable cards.

Kimball Kinnison

 

Aren't horror stories common with any new piece of software? I've had several horror stories I could tell about my Wii and when buying a new MMO.

 

I got two XPs installed at the same time. cause one day my windows refused to acknowledge any network-card so my connection to the internet were broken. But I didn't want to install all my programs on a new windows so I just installed another one. It works perfect.

 

The problem with Linux and Mac, I think is that it comes off as elitist software. People like Kimball_Kinnison always seem to be a Computer Engineer or some other "expert" (especially if they support Linux).

Most people are not computer experts. They want something that most people use, most applications will work with, most sites on the web work with, and hopefully not to hard to use. I think most people think that is still Windows, most people have heard the complaints about windows by now. But they don't want to take the chance on something that will not go any where (Betamax?). Windows probably seems like the safer choice. Also like I said, at least for me, Linux users always seem to be some programmer or people who are even helping to develop the software.

Most people are no where near that level of competence with computers and if the person saying Windows sux, use Linux, I helped develop it, doesn?t that sound biased?

Macs seem ok; they are pretty too and supposedly easy to use also. But again they have no where near the user base that Windows has so I think people see it as "riskier" to buy a Mac. They also tend to be a bit more expensive. You can get a new PC for under $500 with windows, may not be that great but hey you now own a PC.

Edited for clearity...hopefully

 

Operating systems should be like governments, small and only do what is needed. Yes it should do it well, but it should do it without tying everything up. The huge system requirements for Vista would be like the government taxing 90% of our wages, spreading Washington DC to a quarter of the nation and slowing state governments down to a crawl.

Just something kind of amusing; a couple of times I had to take a completely brand new system with freshly formated hard drives and installed both Windows XP and Linux on the computer. I chose Ubuntu for the Linux distro. Windows took ~45 minutes to install, then 3 hours of downloading updates, restarting, installing drivers and vital software, and finally done. Linux took ~30 minutes to install, another half hour to download and install updates, vital programs (Automatix speed that up a lot) all with only one restart.

I assume that Vista would do better than XP since my 2001 copy of XP needs to go through 6 years of updates.

FID

Actually I have found Linux to overall be much faster and smoother than windows... when I get the drivers and hardware all working. It does really depend on the distribution; Knoppix with the Berry (similar to Vista's 3D effects) desktop will bring many systems to a crawl, but Damn Small Linux will run on something powered by an old starving hamster. But in general I have found that Linux runs a lot smoother than Windows does.

KK

Although I agree that Windows has problems with security I do feel that a large part of it is because Windows has such a huge chunk of the market that people are looking for problems with Windows more than they are for *nix and Mac's. If some 1337 haXor SOB wants to screw up a lot of computers with a virus is he going to do it in Windows or in another system? Although that is a large part of it, Windows still is an insecure system.

Also Linux is not for everyone; too much trouble with hardware and drivers for many casual users. It is a crap shoot for me if I get a GUI with a new live CD on the first try. But that is changing.

I call them games

 

That's another reason why I'd never use Linux. There's just too many versions of it out there.

 

A big part of why I use Linux is because I don't trust Microsoft. I don't trust Microsoft because they don't trust me. They don't trust me because of the elaborate and restrictive CD Key validation/registration schemes they use for their newer products.

FID

Wuss.

KK

Actually I realized this as I fell asleep last night; the company I work for makes a software package called Satellite Tool Kit which is overall a windows only product, so it is not just games that need windows.

But this goes to the first thing I said; should an operating system be a system hog, especially at the expense of running those other programs. Yeah they start up as fast as anything; but what about actual use?

But actually what you are saying does make sense. What doesn't make sense is combining what you said with the fact that they sell Vista upgrades. And I am not sure if this next part is true, but I heard somewhere that you need a copy of XP installed on your computer to even use the upgrade?

What you are saying makes sense, but I just don't see it as Microsoft's position.

 

Am not. I prefer to know that an OS is going to work with my computer as opposed to taking a wild guess.

 

For me, probably the biggest reason why I use Linux is that it lets me get my job done. My other options would be to use a product called "Hummingbird" (an X server/SSH client for Windows) or install cygwin (which I actually have done for my home windows machine for those times when I might need it in working from home, although I carry a Linux laptop as my first resort).

There will always be applications that only run on one or two OSes. I never claimed that it was only games.

For most applications, designing them to compile on multiple platforms is not that difficult. It just requires a little extra planning.

Actually, GAJ's point only really holds for Windows. Most Linux distributions are designed so that you can update them (in whole or in part) without significant additional overhead. Similarly, OSX is designed such that you can update it up to a certain point as well.*

As an example, I originally installed Ubuntu 5.10 on this machine (Ubuntu releases every 6 months, the version number is the year-2000 and the number of the month). I was able to update to 6.06 (they delayed the release for 6 weeks because of some major Gnome and Firefox releases) and later to 6.10 using a grand total of two commands from the command line, and one reboot:

sudo apt-get update (updates the list of available packages)
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade (downloads and applies the upgraded packages)

They even have a graphical interface to make it easier to run those updates.

Strangely enough, my machine runs faster with 6.10 than it did with either 5.10 or 6.06. I eagerly anticipate upgrading to 7.04 in another two months, because initial looks say that it will be even faster.

This is one area where you should look at a LiveCD. You can actually test the entire system with your hardware to see if it will work or not, before you install anything. (Just look at the hardware problems with Vista, in the last article I linked to. I still have equipment that XP doesn't support, but will work under Linux. There were also problems between 9x and 2000.)

Kimball Kinnison

* I will add one major caveat to that statement. You will usually get better performance with better hardware, and you may not be able to access all of the new features, but that holds for any OS.

And, I know that someone will point out that I complained about Vista's new features requiring more advanced hardware. This is not inconsistent, because my argument there is that Vista does not offer any compelling reasons to upgrade from XP, except for eye candy that does require additional hardware. Microsoft is essentially charging people for a lot of "gee whiz" features that 1) don't belong in an OS in the first place, and 2) most people can't use right now on their computers, and 3) most businesses

 

Perhaps I should be clearer on some of my criticisms of Microsoft and Windows. Even with everything else I've said, I will admit that they are at least functional and adequate for many tasks. However, there are some fundamental design flaws in Windows (many of which come from marketing requirements as opposed to technical requirements).

For example, there is the age-old question, "What constitutes an OS?" Related to that is the question, "What should an OS do?"

On the most basic level, an OS consists of two things. 1) Code to interact with the hardware, and 2) an interface (API) for programs to use that hardware. These are what constitute a fully functional OS. In the modern "OS", these are handled by the kernel.

On this level, Windows is actually a very impressive OS. It has a very functional and impressive kernel, as do both Linux (currently at version 2.6.17, I believe) and OSX (the kernel is named Darwin, and I'm not sure of the exact version). There are differences (the OS scheduler algorithms, for example), but all three are fairly impressive kernels.

The problems come in with the things built on top of the kernel.

For example, when you think of an Operating System, what do you think of? The graphical interface? A command line? A web browser? A media player?

You could easily argue that an OS is useless without some sort of shell (although there are embedded systems that don't have shells), and so at least a command line is needed, if not a GUI. However, does it have to be part of the OS? I would say no.

Consider, for example, Linux. Linux has its kernel, and then offers a wide variety of functional shells that you can use (bash, sh, csh, ksh, etc - I'm a bash user myself, with a little ksh in there to support my Oracle users). There are also a large number of GUIs (X86, X Windows, X.org, etc) and window managers (GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment, CDE, etc). Some people might think that this creates confusion, but it really doesn't. Properly written applications will run on any of the different shells, GUIs, or window managers. For example, my copy of Firefox should work whether I am running it in KDE or GNOME (or any other window manager). Similarly, my command line utilities work in bash, ksh, csh, and so forth.

This diversity is a good thing. It means that if there is a security problem with using bash, I don't have to necessarily wait for it to be fixed before I am safe from such attacks. I can instead shift to using ksh or another shell, and continue to do my work.

One of my biggest problems with Windows is that it doesn't provide this level of diversity. If it were limited to just the shell and the GUI/window manager, I could accept that. Unfortunately, Microsoft has (for business, not technological) reasons chosen to take that lack of diversity even farther.

For example, Microsoft claims that a web browser is an integral part of the OS. Why? Well, there are two explanations I could give. They claim that it is so that developers can count on HTML rendering being available. However, during the DOJ v. Microsoft case, it was established as fact that the primary reason was to be able to increase the market share of Internet Explorer and damage Netscape. Similarly, now Microsoft is claiming that a media player is a necessary part of the OS (even for machines without a sound or video card, such as many servers). Again, the reasoning they give is for developers.

The big problem with that is that it creates a monoculture, which is incredibly dangerous from a security perspective. One of the most basic principles in securing a system is that you first uninstall any unnecessary programs. Why should I leave a web browser installed if I will never browse the web from that machine? Why does my database server need a media player? Leaving those programs installed, even if you don't plan to use them, means that if a security vulnerability is discovered in one of them, a malicious user could use those programs to compromise your machine.

According to Microsoft, th

 

Kimball

Licensing is not the biggest reason why I use Linux, it is just a big one. The biggest off the top of my head is that I find it much easier to do the things I want to do on Ubuntu than I do Windows. I want to write some code? No problem just apt-get install kdevelope. I want to play some music; Amarok is the best player I have ever used! No credit card, no endless searching for a shareware program, no hassle. Yeah I sound a little selfish with all of the 'I want's but it is true. There is just a whole bunch of software and ability out there at my fingertips with really no strings attached.

I know, that is why I gave a little wink when I said it was.

One thing that I meant to say and I didn't was that in general an OS should be able to run on current and future computers. As I was typing the rest of my reply to GAJ I started to see his point a little bit. Didn't agree with it but it did make a little sense. Especially for Microsoft that releases OS's so occasionally.

This may sound odd, but I don't have a problem with anything that Microsoft is doing. If they want to bundle their media player and IE with the OS I say let them. I will either tolerate it or I will move to something else. It is not like they are exploiting workers or doing hit jobs on CEO's of opposing companies. They are a business, and like any business they want to make money. If they want to tweak and modify their products to compete then I don't really have a problem with them doing that (as long as they are being ethical about it). It is not what I want in an OS but I don't really have a problem with them doing it. But when (if?) they do things like steal code; that would be when I have a problem with Microsoft.

 

And those thumbnail and preview capabilities have been in Linux for as long as I can recall (in Ubuntu since 4.10, its first release 2.5 years ago).

Actually most of the eye candy will be in there, according to Microsoft. Most of the things that will be missing from those editions are things like the Media Center capabilities.

Actually, for home users they are just as critical.

Look over the past year of patches that Microsoft has released for XP. The majority of them are for IE, WMP, or Outlook Express. By forcing all Windows installations to include these applications, and providing no way to remove them, every one of those vulnerabilities puts every home user at risk. The Blaster worm was able to infect computers through the RPC service, something that should only have to be run or installed on a server, and yet it was installed on every Windows installation. Blaster alone caused massive problems for home and business users alike.

My problems with them come mostly because of security. Their business-driven design decisions (which result in crappy security) only exacerbate that.

But then, I'm the guy that people go to when security problems develop. Guess where 95% of my security headaches come from.

Kimball Kinnison