Stan Beer
Wednesday, 21 November 2007 20:04
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Today I've finished installations of two very different operating systems, Vista and Kubuntu. Both are essentially trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to provide desktop users a satisfying and relatively seemless desktop computing experience. Both succeed to a certain degree and both fail in some important areas. The question is why?
You would think that after nearly a quarter of
century of mouse driven GUIs and billions of dollars of research,
desktop OS developers would have got it right by now. Apple pretty much
has achieved this by tightly integrating and controlling both the
hardware and software. However, the story is very different with
Microsoft and the various Linux camps.
Starting with Microsoft and Vista, my early impression is that this
operating system has to a certain degree been unfairly maligned. If I
was writing this in February after trying out Vista on a 1GB box with a
Pentium 4 processor, I would be talking about throwing my review copy
of Vista Ultimate in the garbage.
However, nine months later on a 4GB box with a 256MB GPU and a 2.4GHz
Core 2 DUo processor, and after improved driver support and numerous
bug fixes, Vista doesn't look all that bad. In fact, unlike numerous
naysayers my first impression is that Vista seems to be a considerable
improvement on XP - I was never a fan of XP anyway
The Vista user interface seems pretty spiffy - don't give a damn about
Aero transparency but love the windows in a row, love the gadgets on
side toolbar and love the responsiveness of the system. Yes, believe it
or not on a hefty box like mine the performance of Vista is quite nippy
- better than XP and Windows Home Serrver. And hasn't that always been
the name of the game for Microsoft and Intel? You keep Moore's law
chugging along and we'll provide the software to use up the bandwidth.
What's more, I had no trouble at all transferring all of my Windows
files and applications from XP to Vista. They all worked fine.
So what don't I like about Vista? It's still Windows, which means it's
full of bugs and prone to infection from just about every piece of
malicious code written in the history of computing. I'm actually
running a very good anti-virus package at the moment called AVG. It
consumes far less system resources than most of the others but it's
still a system overhead I have to run (one that costs money) just to
keep my computer realtively safe from unwelcome intruders.
CONTINUED
