[Beowulf] Sidebar: Vista Rant

[Joe Landman]

Robert G. Brown wrote:

> Wrongo.  Win2K was never REALLY pushed as a consumer product.  But now

W2k wasn't terrible.

> try getting a new system over the counter with anything but Vista on it.
> Sure, if you special order or buy online you can get XP -- probably at

Dude, I bought a Dell.  No kidding.  Should be getting it next week. 
Gonna load it up with ram.  Has XP, will be putting Ubuntu 7.04 on it.

> full retail.  But seriously, the market is being saturated with Vista
> systems.

Yeah... try to buy an HP or IBM/Lenovo or anything else at Costco, 
BestBuy,... with anything other than Vista.

Cygwin didn't work with Vista.  Grrrrrr...  (note that Cygwin is one of 
the methods I see pushed by Microsoft to "port" codes to Windows).

> Vista is seriously more broken than W2K (which really wasn't bad -- just
> expensive and not that much better than NT).  The interesting thing is

It was a little smoother than NT (W2k was).  Vista has almost completely 
underwhelmed me.  XP x64 I found exciting.

> that it is such a RADICAL departure from XP -- and so easy to mock.  I
> mean, it really, really sucks.  Even by MS, W3.2, W95 standards.
> 
> It would be very interesting to see how many consumers chose Vista over
> XP given a free choice.  But Microsoft isn't about freedom, it is about

Lets ask Dell/IBM/Lenovo.  Turns out all had to start offering XP again, 
due to customer demand.

> control, and a high level corporate decision has been made to push a
> seriously broken system onto the MAINSTREAM user.  This could have some
> fairly serious long term repercussions.  As did Slow-aris for Sun.
> 
> Consumers will forgive a lot, but not poor interactive performance.
> That's why Linus has made excellent interactive performance a design
> mandate from the very earliest days of the kernel (and why linux plus X
> on 486's was peppier -- much peppier -- than Vista on multi GHz multi
> cores).

Ubuntu with Beryl on a powerful enough laptop (e.g. one with a graphics 
card that is reasonable at OpenGL) is something to behold.




-- 

Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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