[Discuss] Vista vs LINUX

[Adam Parkin]

Murray Strome wrote:
> In case you have not seen it, I thought that some of you might be 
> interested.
> 
> http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT9727687530.html
> 
> Murray

Well, this posting might spark some discussion on here, but what the 
hell, here goes.

For the record: I don't run Linux at home, but have XP on one of my 
desktop machines and on my wife's laptop (her choice).  I just this past 
weekend installed Vista on my 2nd (more powerful) desktop machine which 
was previously also running XP.  I don't like it (Vista), but much of 
the reason for this is due to hardware compatibility issues, which in 
MS's defence has more to do with the hardware manufacturers in question 
(ATI and Creative Labs) than with MS themselves.

Some oddball comments about the article and Vista:

- the article jumps on the popular bandwagon and talks about how you'll 
need a high end gaming rig to enjoy Vista.  This just isn't true, it's 
really nothing more than FUD (although the requirements are 
significantly higher than XP).  Really more than anything it's just 
hungry for a decent video card and lots of RAM.  I have no issues with 
performance on my P4 3Ghz with 1GB of RAM which is pretty moderate by 
todays standards (granted, I'm not running Aero -- more on this in a bit).

- The criticism about how Vista makes dual-booting harder seems a bit 
artificial.  It's hardly uncommon to have to edit GRUB menu.lst files to 
get dual booting to work with various OS's, so I don't really see this 
as a knock against Vista, but more a knock against GRUB.

- it is a bit ironic for an article to hold up driver support as a 
positive of a Linux distro over a Windows based system given how 
difficult it commonly is to get the most out of many hardware devices in 
Linux (wireless cards, OpenGL working with 3D cards, etc)

- Of course the whole DRM and Vista thing is a topic unto itself, so 
I'll leave it alone (for those interested: check out the recent Security 
Now podcasts on this subject, as they're *really* interesting.  They can 
be found at: http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm)

- I have some difficulty with the argument of "you have a better chance 
of things working under Linux than Vista" argument as it seems 
predicated on the premise that a brand-new, intentionally graphically 
sophisticated OS should work perfectly with sub-par (ie - not modern) 
hardware.  I sympathize as I'm in the same boat (my Radeon 8500 doesn't 
do pixel shader 2.0, so Aero is out of the question for me), but it 
seems a bit of an overly harsh criticism given that everything except 
Aero and anything 3D accelerated works perfectly fine (and again, much 
of the compatibily issues with 3d acceleration is due to lack of support 
from ATI at this point than due to Vista per-se).

All in all though I find that Vista feels rather underwhelming, and 
loaded with small artificial changes for the sake of change.  As per 
usual MS style many of the new "features" are just things that were done 
in XP with 3rd party software and is now bundled with the OS (ex - the 
sidebar is just a rip-off of Konfabulator, now known as Yahoo Widget 
Engine, and of course is very similar to what is seen on the Mac OS).

There's nothing particularly wrong with Vista from a technical point of 
view per-se, there's just no real compelling reason to "upgrade" if you 
are already happy with your current OS (whether it be XP, Linux or Mac OS).

One thing I think is telling is that I got my copy for free through 
school (MSDN academic alliance), and I still will be going back to XP as 
I find XP to be a much more enjoyable experience (although I'm not 
experiencing Vista in its "full glory").

Just my 2c.
-- 
--
Adam Parkin
E-mail: pzelnip at gmail.com
----------------------
Any clod can have the facts, but having an opinion is an art.
	-- Charles McCabe