Stan Beer
Wednesday, 21 November 2007 20:04
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
As far as bugs are concerned, within hours of using Vista, I had
already run into a couple. One, which hasn't been fixed since my XP
days, involves the database I use to update our daily mailing list and
how it interacts with Excel. To cut a long story short, each day the
system hangs and refuses to log me out of the database when the task is
completed. I can live with that because the system eventually catches
up and logs out of the database after about 15 minutes.
I can also live with Microsoft arbitrarily making
name changes to folders and control panel items. I hardly ever use
Internet Explorer so I can live without the menu and with its stupid
difficult to fathom navigation system.
What I found perplexing, however, is why when I inserted a DVD, Windows
Media Player couldn't play it. Why did I have to go to Home Media
Center to play it? Why did I have to configure sound settings to hear
anything at all? All my hardware is stock standard Intel chipset,
Nvidia GPU, Gigabyte motherboard - why isn't it all plug and play for
Vista. Why couldn't I simply install Vista over XP and have all the
applications simply transfer over like they do with the Mac?
Critcisms aside, at least Vista ran my DVD without any major dramas.
And, provided I used Firefox (especially the new version 3.0 beta),
surfing the web was lightning fast.
Unfortunately, the same things could not be said for Kubuntu. In some
ways, I wish that in this comparison today I was using Ubuntu instead
of Kubuntu because, from my limited experience, believe it's a much
better implementation of the Ubuntu distro family. I don't mind KDE on
some other distros but I think the Gnome GUI suits Ubuntu better.
Regardless of the interface, however, Kubuntu and Ubuntu (as much as I
like it) need to pull up their socks in certain areas if they want to
gain more desktop market share.
CONTINUED
