So, I finally took the plunge on Monday and backed everything up so I could reformat and reinstall dual-boot again. I've been using Linux solely since my 2nd year of university, but was starting to miss some of the games that don't work in Wine (or that don't perform as well). Also from my student days, I have a valid copy and licence key for Windows Vista Business Edition. Using DirectX10 as an excuse to validate this possibly terrible decision, I decided to take the plunge...
The first experience I had with it was installation process. It's certainly a lot better than Windows XP's, as you'd expect given its been a number of years since then. I didn't like that the partition editor seems to be instant-apply and has a straight 'Delete' button - press that and bam, you better hope you hadn't selected the wrong partition! Certainly this didn't feel as solid as gparted, but it was undeniably simple to use. After sorting that out and picking my language and keyboard layout, that was it, it then installed and booted into Vista unattended (no need to eject CD (and no ejecting the CD without warning), no more questions) - I don't know how long this took, because it really didn't matter, I went and did something else and came back when it was done.
On first log-in, you create a new user, choose a password, a little picture for your user and a wallpaper - the interface to do this is very pretty (first impressions count!) After logging in, I was displayed with some sort of first-time welcome dialogue and asked a few security questions. Nothing too much. This lead on to updating, where I had about ~150 megs of updates/drivers to download - not bad, given I got this DVD image some time last year; Gutsy certainly can't compete with this... Vista did a great job of detecting all my hardware and after another while of leaving it to do its thing, I came back, restarted and had a nicely configured system.
This leaves software impressions; and I must say, Microsoft have done *very* well. Windows Media Player 11 is excellent and really something we need to have in Gnome (no, Nautilus/Tracker/Rhythmbox/Totem/whatever do not cover it). The media indexing is fast and robust, the integration of both audio and video functions is very nicely done and it all Just Works. Of course, I had to download ffdshow to play back some of my videos, but then I have to download gstreamer-plugins-* and w32codecs, or libxine1extracodecs, mplayer, vlc, whatever, in every Linux distro.
Also, surprisingly, IE7 isn't bad either. Ignoring the evil of its bad rendering (which, y'know, is quite a debatable subject), the interface is nice and feels very 'Vista' - I don't have huge useless toolbars taking up my browsing space and it's very nippy (I have a gig of RAM, it's enough that I don't care that it may use twice the memory of Firefox - it also feels twice as fast, even compared to FF3). Windows Mail is also worth noting - The interface for settings is a bit daunting, but once setup, it works extremely fast and doesn't seem to block on anything (take note, Evolution!) - I probably wouldn't trust it with my work mail account, but it does very nicely with the Gmail IMAP server.
So yeah, I'm quite impressed. I wouldn't want to do any coding in this environment I don't think, but then I'm not a Windows coder (well, not anymore), so I'm bound to be biased. All the talk of Vista's UAC being out of control or it being horribly slow or whatever seem to be massively exaggerated from my experience. It's certainly a LOT faster than the Gnome desktop I removed. I think instead of just ignoring this, it's a great opportunity to learn a lesson (by analysis of what makes it feel 'good', not by just flat-out imitation. KDE4).
A trend I'm seeing in Gnome is to have lots of small applications for a particular function... But you can go too far with this. If I want to listen to a song or watch a video, my first thought isn't 'search for video/song in nautilus/tracker/beagle', it's 'open media player'. Desktop search is really not that useful (and, note, turned off by default in Vista Business edition). I'd much rather have particular applications create their own indexes, if necessary, and have far more useful and focused searching, than have an almost-useless, desktop-wide search. Rhythmbox's behaviour in this regard is nice, although I only have the option of monitoring one music directory. Why can I not add multiple directories?
Another thing that annoys me in some Gnome applications is the amount of wasted space. By default, we have toolbars with text underneath icons (which can look very pretty, but uses an awful lot of space), but even worse, a lot of applications stack multiple toolbars when it really isn't necessary. Rhythmbox is *easily* the worst offender here - which is funny, as it used to have a reasonable interface. Try using rhythmbox on a screen height less than 768. It's basically unusable and even when you have a higher resolution screen, I'd much rather it display useful information than a giant toolbar, a giant slider and a giant song display.
Crowded interfaces are also a problem in Gnome and XP that have been dealt with quite handily in Vista. Taking explorer as a good example, the top tool bar has back, forwards, a breadcrumb folder list and a search bar. There is then a very distinctly separate toolbar underneath that contains context-sensitive options, and underneath that, your files. Nautilus's toolbar in comparison is incredibly crowded and spread out across two lines, there's no real distinction or separation of functions and it forces you to have the almost useless 'Zoom' option visible (seriously, how many times do you click that? Not enough for it to be on a toolbar, that's how many times). Why is there a 'Folder up' button when the folder breadcrumbs provide that exact function too? Also, the search performs in-folder search, as you'd expect - Nautilus used to do this, and it was great... Then tracker (and beagle?) come along and the function then turns into an absolutely useless desktop-wide search - why would I want a search I initiate from a particular folder to return results from all over the desktop?
Context sensitivity is something that I've not seen done particularly well in any free desktop, although the KDE folks are managing a lot better than us on this front. Vista does this quite nicely and there are bits here and there in Gnome, but on the whole, applications seem to be very determined to always display the exact same interface. You can go too far with these things... I don't have any specific examples in mind, but I notice Windows Explorer doing a very good job of automatically selecting particular views for different folders, and the information bar at the bottom is very handy. Rather than focusing on always providing the exact same options in the same place, I think it would be more important to provide the same *layout*. Nautilus's icon layout is pretty bad and depends entirely on filename lengths, size of images, etc. - it can make scrolling through a list of files quite troublesome. Vista on the other hand (and Dolphin in KDE4, last I checked) pack icons in a tight grid (not in every view, but in the ones you'd expect it to) and this makes selecting files a subtly, but noticeably easier task.
Finally, there's the speed - but I think there's people doing great work on this, so maybe it doesn't need to be said. But I'll say it anyway - Vista boots and gets to the desktop *fast*. It doesn't seem to shutdown so fast, oddly, but then, I don't care, as long as it does (my Gnome desktop often hangs on logging out and I have to kill X before my machine shuts down). It's probably unfair to compare, as KDE4 doesn't really do much of anything, but one thing it does do is load *very* fast - after logging in from GDM, the KDE4 desktop is there in what must be under a second. My Gnome desktop, on the other hand, takes an age. I don't have anything particularly taxing on my panels or desktop, and even if I did, this shouldn't cause things to block as they do. As I said above, first impressions count - and Gnome can be as fast as you like, it'll always feel slow if it makes you feel like you're waiting every time you log in.
I could probably go on all day about this, but I think this'll do for now. In summary, Windows Vista ain't that bad. I'm not going to suddenly become a Windows user; there are a lot of features that I really appreciate in the Linux/Gnome environment that I can't replicate under Windows, and on the whole, it's a better fit for me. But Windows has really come along and anyone that's comparing Gnome to Windows XP needs to think a bit more progressively - They've moved on since then.
josh says:
I look forward to your followup after using it for more than a few hours. the first couple of weeks I was lulled into thinking it wasn't as bad as all the hype. The Ui is much, much nicer than XP afterall.
But soon enough you will realize Vista is truely terrible. My brand new high end Dell laptop runs slower than my 4 year old dell laptop running XP. SP1 simply refuses to install on it after bluescreening several times during the application.
MS should seriously consider pulling vista.
iain says:
You think wmp is good?
I couldn't get any of it to work at all.
It played mp3s on the hard drive and that was about it
Trying to import from a usb key was hopelessly complicated, and you couldn't play them off the key.
And just wait til you've installed a few applications, the UAC will start getting very annoying very quickly, and it just keeps getting slower and slower.
That was my impression after using it on a not newly installed laptop for a weekend.
The laptop user is constantly complaining about how bad it is.
Alex says:
I use both Vista and Gnome regularly and i disagreed about several points.
I never use WMP 11, at the end of the day it just seems like it neither plays video or audio well. For my music jukebox player I expect AAC to just work out of the box and WMP most certainly doesn't support that. Yes I'm used to codec fishing on GNU/Linux but on windows most competing players support it just fine (Songbird, foobar, WinAmp, iTunes, etc. (3 of these 4 also support Ogg Vorbis and FLAC out of the box too.)) As far as video goes It simply doesn't have the troubleshooting features that MPC or VideoLan has out of the box. And considering that Microsoft wrote a reference implementation of MPEG-4 (there were two) there is no reason for MPEG-4 support to be missing (as far as patents go, my best guess is that most of the MPEG-4 part 2 patents also apply to WMV/VC1).
As far as IE7 goes, I actually miss the extra toolbar stuff. If I don't use a button I remove it from my Firefox toolbar and put stuff I actually use there. My firefox toolbar is one of the densest areas of useful buttons anywhere on my computer with the exception of the start menu.
As far as "Windows Explorer doing a very good job of automatically selecting particular views for different folders" WMP almost always false positives to the Music view, sometimes it seems like one solitary music file in a large folder will trigger it. And I can't for the life of me figure out how to stop it from autodetecting. on new folders. And even when it is correct it forces fields I don't use on me (like Rating) and hides fields I like (like Size and MTime), I can only seem to change these on a per folder basis. And on some files it doesn't detect the tags even though my audio player does.
tm says:
Nice entry - great work, and with constructive suggestions!
It also looks that most of stuff in nautilus could be easily enhanced (say, adjusting defaults for starters)
As for the rhythmbox - although i do have "text beside icons" for toolbars, it seems to work quite well till about 500 pixels in height
just a GNOME user :)
jpobst says:
Thanks very much for the nice writeup. All too often the OSS community dismisses something for political/egotistical reasons (M$ $UCK$!), when instead we need to look at the alternatives, find out what they do better than us, and work to fix our shortcomings.
Vista is far from perfect, but there are plenty of things that is does right, and we need to learn from what works to make our desktop better.
tf says:
Comparing vista and gnome on a laptop, I find that I always have more room and the desktop does not feel claustrophobic, whereas gnome has a lot of huge buttons wasted blank space and no matter how much I try, I cannot make these things smaller.
The folder views in vista get annoying "very" fast. They always seem to default to image type columns, where I have a folder full of documents and I have columns of assorted exif data. Not only that, it seems to forget folder settings after a while as vista only caches the settings of a certain number of folders so after a while you have to change the settings all over again grrr.
In terms of functionality and consistency I MUCH prefer gnome, but in terms of desktop usage and interface design I prefer Vista
Mike says:
The review is so glowing (and filled with impressions that are 180 degrees from my experience) that I was waiting for some sort of ironic twist at the end that would turn the post on its head. Is that twist left as an exercise for the reader?
zelo says:
After reviewing the OS, try to review office suits (office 2k7 vs. openoffice, abiword), PIM (outlook 2k7 vs Evolution)
and development tools (visual studio 2k8 vs eclipse, VIM, Emacs, Anjuta).
Media center solution, etc.
You'll be surprised how incredibly high are the odds stacked against gnome and the free software stack
markrian says:
I'd have to agree with zelo. I'd say, controversially, almost all desktop OSS software is less usable than proprietary stuff. The trade-off, of course, being between freedom and usability.
Such distinctions on things such as security, code quality and the like aren't so obvious.
This blog post should be titled "Software with thorough usability research and testing in "actually pretty usable" shocker!".
jku says:
> It's certainly a LOT faster than the Gnome desktop I removed.
The reason many people think Windows is slow as hell is the antivirus crap (not to mention the preinstalled annoyances)... A week ago I disabled always-on AV on my moms machine (as she understands the implications and has safe habits) and suddenly the excruciatingly slow machine turned into a fairly fast computer.
Oh, about Windows Mail: the Import/Export functionality is still the same shit as it has always been with the free offerings: don't even think about e.g. importing stuff from Outlook on one computer to Mail on another... because that, apparently, is such an outlandish idea that it's not supported.
fraggle says:
I think you should check your calendar. April Fool's is next monday.
nice says:
Very nice article Chris. From my point of view it is important to have a look on other platforms, get an idea what they do better and try to evaluate what could be usefull for the linux world.
I have to agree with two things regarding to your posting:
1: Speed:
Gnome ist damn slow. I've installed Gnome and Windows XP on an old Toshiba (1.4 Ghz) notebook and compared the performance. It is amazing Windows is much more responsive than Gnome. Youtube (flash) works in fullscreen mode with no problem, while Gnome+Youtube suckst to hell getting only stuttering video.
2: Space:
Gnome wastes so much space on smaller resolutions. You have big buttons, wasted free space between the buttons, you can't resize it to your needs. The space where you really work on is very very limited. With Windows everything seems to be thiny and not so bloated. Best example on gnome side ist Brasero. You have free space over and over the whole application. It seems like it is made for tapping on the buttons with your fingers.
mallum says:
FAIL FAIL FAIL
Sander says:
Nice post! I've been using Vista for some time too now. Did a similar post some months ago:
http://sanderqd.blogspot.com/2007/12/ubuntu-fan-inside-lions-den.html
Still feel more at home and stable in Ubuntu.
There are some very nice apps for Windows, like iTunes, Safari and Enso from Humanized.
It isn't even that bad as a development environment, except for the lack of good package management. All tools you're used to in Linux are available for Windows too (using Emacs, the JDK, Cygwin and Mingw32 here), and some people even prefer Microsoft's IDE. I miss some GNOME apps though, it would be great to have them here.
I've read that Microsoft wants to make Windows the best OS for free software development. Would be nice if they succeed -- as far as I know Apple did a nice job.
z_pod says:
I tried to install Vista UE in my vaio. I ended up with 0 network, nice 640x480x16 graphics and 0 sound. Fortunately I had a mandriva 2008 one cd at hand so I could get to the vaio site and download a solid 80 Mb driver package for Vista (while I was waiting I could enjoy myself listening to some good music from my collection and check some nice pics at 1280x800x24, I also watched a good divx trailer). Tried drivers installation, which for some reason ended up in pain. I am strill trying to get my wireless to work....
I'd say Vista is not ready for the desktop, yet. Going to nuke it quickly.
Just my 2 cents..
Jack
Maxo says:
My school went Vista in the Computer building, and that was a nightmare. Even some nice and powerful machines took a long time to boot and interacting with the OS was a real chore. That was my first impression of Vista.
Then I needed Windows to do some school work, and my school offered Vsita for free, so I installed it in a small partition on my home machine. My experience on my home machine is similar to yours. Install was fast and easy. Using the desktop is quick and sleek. It also feels very professional. The only install of Vista I've enjoyed is the one on my home machine. The installs here at work have left a lot to be desired.
On the other hand, my experience with Gnome on my home machine is also very pleasing, and I much prefer it to Windows XP & Vista, though all OSes have their pluses and minuses.
jeff says:
I think I agree with you as far as desktop-wide search.
But yea, generally if I want to lookup an email from someone, I just start Evolution and search. If I want to search for an mp3/ogg, I launch Banshee and search.
I think that it is more important for desktop applications to have their own search functionality than to have desktop-wide search. And lets face it, generic indexers will never be able to replace tailored search support in applications.
Henry says:
Co-sign on rhythmbox's UI. I use a 12" notebook with a 1024x768 res, and rhythmbox is unusable on it. It doesn't even fit widthwise, and so much space is used by the toolbars that you can see about 5 lines of the db and another 5 lines of the playlist. I sure hope it doesn't become an official Gnome DE component in its current state.
troll says:
Yeah WMP is awesome. Some 5+ years ahead development if you compare to the open source crap that has no libraries, does not integrate video AND media playing properly, and most of the UIs are like shuttle cockpits (amarok cough cough)
remm says:
This didn't make any sense to me, starting with the most glaring nonsense about WMP. I use Windows (XP) a lot, but I am not using this piece of junk (instead relying on vlc, like on Linux, which supports everything without hassles and drm). Everything else in the post is similar, and doesn't make any sense to me either. I have seen Vista in action, and it is a totally useless OS besides the fancy toyish look which gets old two days later. BTW, are you working at Novell ?
sdf says:
if ie7 renders FASTER than ff3b4 for you, there's something wrong with your ff install. seriously, dude. i have tried both on over twenty systems (at work) and ff reliably left ie7 in the dust.
Chris says:
I see both positive and negative things in Vista. It seems quite stable and fast on Core 2 Duo machines, however it uses too much memory.
Fast user switching on Vista is fast and simple while in Gnome it is very clumsy.
Unfortunately there is no UI consistency in Vista while Gnome rocks here. Gnome also is much unintrusive than Vista: it seems the Gnome developers really has done a good job here.
Regarding desktop-wide search: it is better implemented in Vista while Gnome offers a half-baked solution.
Shutting down while having apps open shows an overview of the open apps so you have a chance to save your work before closing. Such a thing would be nice for Gnome to have.
Overall, the Gnome environment is more pleasant to work in - for me.
João Rocha says:
Vista doesn't detect the hardware. The hardware makes sure it is detected by Vista.
read-the-HIG says:
Dude! The text under the icons in the toolbar are there for a reason! When using Windows, I'm always asking myself: "What's this little icon?"... and then I have to place my mouse cursor on top of it, and wait a whole second for the tooltip to appear...
Besides, you can hide the text in the gnome settings.
z_pod says:
@sdf: According to rendering figures that have been posted in many tech sites it seems FF3 renders page faster than IE7 and IE8 - for that matters. Also acid2 and 3 tests show FF scores way ahead IE7 and 8 meaning FF engine renders also better.
@João Rocha: I've quit calling Windows an operating system. I call it a "Container for Manifacturers and Vendors Drivers". I'd like some of you guys to explain me in which sense Windows is a usable operating system where I cannot, even with a legally purchased copy of Vista, have it properly running in my computers (both vaio and presario)... and yes I know the "buy a Vista preinstalled PC" argument... and the answer is Why should I ? I want to by a computer and run whatever OS i want on it (even Vista.): according to my experience I'd say Linux is way ahead of Vista, not XP, at the moment
jack
z_pod says:
@sdf: According to rendering figures that have been posted in many tech sites it seems FF3 renders page faster than IE7 and IE8 - for that matters. Also acid2 and 3 tests show FF scores way ahead IE7 and 8 meaning FF engine renders also better.
@João Rocha: I've quit calling Windows an operating system. I call it a "Container for Manifacturers and Vendors Drivers". I'd like some of you guys to explain me in which sense Windows is a usable operating system where I cannot, even with a legally purchased copy of Vista, have it properly running in my computers (both vaio and presario)... and yes I know the "buy a Vista preinstalled PC" argument... and the answer is Why should I ? I want to by a computer and run whatever OS i want on it (even Vista.): according to my experience I'd say Linux is way ahead of Vista, not XP, at the moment
jack
Any comments?
