..::B:R:A:D::..

A while ago I registered to download the RC versions of Windows Vista. Recently Microsoft released RC1 of Vista and I received an email with a product-key and a link to download the ISO. So why would a Linux/UNIX/Mac guy want to bother with such a thing? I believe it is good to see what new things are coming, what the competition is doing, and what all the hype is about. I also wanted to compare Microsoft’s latest to some of the more recent stuff from Linux.

:: Try 1 - The Tower ::

My first attempt at installing Vista was on my test PC. 1.7 Ghz P4 processor with 1GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 video card and 2 NIC’s (1 netgear, 1 d-link). Vista gives this PC a performance rating of 2. Neither of the NIC’s worked on Vista so I had no access to the net, which was extremely disappointing. Aero Glass (the flashy GUI) worked but was really sluggish, which was a little surprising.

Aero Glass itself is a little disappointing. It pretty much consists of the following: Transparent traskbar, start menu and window borders, Thumbnails of minimized applications when you hover your mouse over them, and scrolling through your open applications in a rolodex fashion. There are probably other features but those were the most noticeable. So, really nothing too exciting or new. MS fanboys like to criticize Xgl/Compiz as being all eye-candy and nothing real in terms of usability, which really isn’t the case at all.

So to these usability experts I ask, what is the usability of having a transparent window border? Oh, what…it’s just eye-candy…there to keep up with MacOSX in terms of flash. Lets talk about the ridiculous usability nightmare of scrolling through your applications in a rolodex fashion. Since they couldn’t just come out and copy Apple’s expose feature they came up with this brilliant idea instead. It’s a little tricky to use, especially when using the scroll wheel. You don’t get a good overview of all your open windows and it’s sometimes hard to pick the one you want. So, let’s say that the window you actually want to have focus is in the back of the rolodex? You have to scroll through all of them to get to it (and that’s if you don’t scroll past it or accidentally select the wrong window). Unlike expose which nicely lays out your open windows as convenient thumbnails across your entire screen making it easy to see ALL open windows at once and select the one you want.

:: Try 2 - The Laptop ::

Given that neither of my two NIC’s worked in the tower on Vista I decided (for some stupid reason) to install it on my laptop. The laptop is a Dell 700m 1.8 Ghz Pentium M processor with 1GB of RAM integrated Intel Pro Wireless, and Intel integrated graphics card. This laptop was running Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED10) which I installed on it after I found out that the Xgl/Compiz shipped with SLED10 “just works” even on the Intel integreated graphics card! The graphics weren’t as fast as when used on the Nvidia card on my tower but it was faster than I expected and worked really well (a pleasant surprise).

I download the latest GParted LiveCD (version 0.3) which was extremely slick! I used it to resize my SLED10 partition and basically split the 40GB drive in the laptop. It worked like a charm. Before I started my Vista install I was able to still boot into SLED10 without any problems.

Unfortunately Vista (like all other MS operating systems before it) do not play nice with other operating systems on the same drive…so I ended up just trashing the entire partitioning scheme and starting from scratch installing Vista on the front of the drive and leaving an empty partition at the end of the drive to reinstall Linux into. I had a feeling this was going to be the case but I really wanted to try out the GParted LiveCD to see how well it worked.

Given the spec’s on the laptop above, Vista blesses it a performance rating of 1. Aero Glass does not work, making a rather dull system even more boring. This was disappointing considering that Xgl/Compiz run on it just fine and reasonably well. Fortunately though the wireless on the latop worked out of the box (though to be fair it also worked out of the box on SLED10 and also the last two releases of Ubuntu so in itself not a big deal).

Vista, like all Windows releases before it, comes with basically no applications. This even though it was installed from a DVD and requires a “40GB hard disk with at least 15GB free” to install! Why so much space? During my initial try at installing it on the laptop Vista would not continue the install because apparently the 15 GB I had allocated for it were not enough (hence the deleting all partitions and starting from scratch). This, to me, is yet another reason why open systems are way better than proprietary closed systems. I mean really…I can strip down either Linux or Solaris 10 and install them on just a few gigs.

IE7 sucks…The layout of the interface is terrible and in terms of features it has nothing on Firefox (especially the beta’s for version 2) or Opera. It is also interesting to note that without Aero Glass IE7 does not display thumbnails of the pages when you hover over the tabs (something Opera does already anyway). After playing with IE7 for a while…giving it the benefit of the doubt…I promptly headed over to mozilla.org and downloaded the latest beta for Firefox 2. There were articles a while ago about MS apparently offering to assist Mozilla in getting Firefox ready for Vista (???) so I wanted to see what they really needed to do to get Firefox to work on Vista…I was almost expecting it to not work at all. Fortunately for me it worked famously. I also proceeded to install OpenOffice.org 2 Novell Edition to see how well it worked on Vista, and of course it worked just fine.

:: Back to Ubuntu ::

So after my little adventure with Vista I installed Ubuntu Edgy Knot 3 in that extra partition I created at the end of the drive during the Vista install. Surprisingly Ubuntu automatically mounted my Vista partition even though it is NTFS and added an entry in the bootloader (Grub) for Vista (and even labeled it as Vista). Now if only MS would be that kind when there are other operating systems on the same computer. I continue to be impressed with Ubuntu and I believe we are continuing to see the fruits of all the optimization work being done to GNOME because on both my systems running Edgy right now GNOME is just really fast.

:: Vista Conclusion ::

Vista’s Sidebar? It’s okay I guess, I mean…they are just widgets nothing earth shattering (OS X widgets, gDesklets, etc.). The new start menu I like…much better than the default on XP. The default theme is much better than XP too, at least I don’t feel like I am using a computer purchased from Fisher Price. The integrated search is okay, not nearly as cool or flexible as Gnome’s Deskbar applet (which rocks I must say, and I use all the time), especially when used with Beagle Live searching. The first user is still by default the administrator…but you have to click a dialog box that pops up anytime you want to change any settings. A step in the right direction I guess (???), though I have heard this can be disabled so what’s the point.

Overall it’s okay and probably a good step in the right direction for MS but I don’t think OS X has anything to worry about (not even comparing it to the upcoming OS X release early next year) and Linux has proven to me that it can contend with much of Vista already (again, not comparing it to who knows what advances will be made in Linux by early next year).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Solaris, Other OS, Linux. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.