XP is dying- it's ancient technology, Vista is far superior. Of course, Ubuntu and OSX are both worthy competitors to MS, but Vista is rock solid in both terms of stability and security.
The only reason why Microsoft would rather sell Vista than XP on new computers is because the longer they sell XP, the longer they will have to support it. The more updates, service packs, and the longer they have to make software that is backwards compatible with it, rather than focusing on new technologies in Vista/Windows 7. They make as much money off a sale of XP as they do Vista, but XP costs more to maintain.
If Windows developers aren't writing code for Vista, it won't magically work on Windows 7, so if your software is XP only, its time to find a new supplier!
In short, Windows Vista is the future of the Windows platform, and it is a very bright future! As far as most people that I talk to that claim they don't like Vista, most of them can't seem to articulate why, or they just say "That's what I've heard". The MS bashers have done a great job spreading anti-Vista propaganda, but few can articulate any real problems with the OS.
1. Its most annoying feature in my opinion (and its activated by default) is that it caches all your most recently most programs into memory every time your computer starts. Not only do I think this is a stupid feature, it takes ages to complete, hordes the memory, makes your hdd go nuts, and most of all I had no idea wtf was happening with my new computer.
2. file-indexing is activated by default - Microsoft didn't seem to realize this in conjunction with feature #1 makes your computer go crazy every time you start Vista. And it took me a while to figure out what was going on. My new computer which i bought 2 month ago was thus brought to a crawl every time I started up.
3. Interface is pretty but not intuitive, a lot of stuff is moved around for no apparent reason, eg you now have to wade through 3 or 4 links just go get to your network connection properties, which is something that should be more readily accessible to the average user.
I know these are all options which can be modified, but hell it took me a good few hours to figure out, and it annoyed me like crazy. Windows XP in comparison just seems faster, simpler and gets the job done quicker.
I figured Hacker News readers could articulate their Vista qualms much better than average :)
1 and 2 are easily fixed, if you don't like the features. I am curious, though- I don't have a newer MAC- doesn't OSX have a desktop search feature that indexes files automatically, too? Perhaps it is better implemented? I haven't had any problems with it on my Vista install, but obviously some people have.
Agreed, but there's one feature that more than overcomes that -- you can just open up the Start menu and actually type the name of the program/utility/file you want. So just type "Network" and it'll autocomplete. Personally, I almost never do any clicking in the Start Menu.
I've tried Launchy on my XP installation, but find it doesn't work as fast, or as intuitively, as Vista (on the same machine). Of course, that was just my experience on one machine.
> The MS bashers have done a great job spreading anti-Vista propaganda, but few can articulate any real problems with the OS.
That's not entirely fair to some people. In Vista's early days, things WERE problematic because of how new the platform was and how not-used to it people were. In fact, it's the same kind of criticism people had for Windows XP before SP2 or so. If you give it time, most of them will go away. Probably sometime around the release of Windows 7 :) Then we can await the "Microsoft Gives Windows Vista its 10000th New Lease on Life" article.
Personally, I sort of skipped Vista for Server 2008. O:) (and Mac OS X, etc.)
Now, that is a legitimate complaint against Microsoft. I warned customers that lower end machines could not run vista well- especially with 512MB of RAM. But you can't expect the average retail employee at Best Buy to know any better!
The problem with Vista is largely that it's just not a compelling upgrade to businesses, and only moderately compelling to consumers. XP does everything they want an OS to do. I like Vista better myself, but I can see how the casual user could be largely indifferent to it.
Combine that with their rollout problems and Apple's hundreds of millions of marketing dollars proclaiming how sucky it is, and it's not hard to see why they've got an image problem.
The video card used to power my dual monitor setup at work uses an ATI catalyst video driver and it crashes on a semi-weekly basis, meaning both screens flicker and then go out and the only recourse is a restart. It's incredible to me that a two year old OS can still not have some basic video card support while XP has always worked flawlessly for me.
Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista...
Even before Vista was released, this guy predicted that third-party hardware would exhibit persistent stability problems with Vista. And, lo, the reports from the field just keep coming in, even years later. (Though presumably the bugs have gradually been worked out by this point.)
(Note that I can't report any bad Vista experiences myself; I have not used it.)
I hope you're kidding. Reports from the field about bugs in every operating system come in for years. I've heard nothing about systemic graphics card driver problems.
I don't think it's fair to take a report from someone with a clear anti-drm agenda and assume from it that Vista is what's causing some else's ATI Catalyst driver to malfunction.
ATI catalyst's software caused problems for me, even on Windows XP. I uninstalled CCC and I just use the driver. My computer runs much better since I did that.
There's something seriously wrong when so much engineering effort is put into monitoring and crippling rather than enhancing your users' hardware capabilities. It goes against the very ethos of engineering.
Add to that onerous licensing terms specifying that you don't own your copy of Windows, Microsoft does, allowing Microsoft to remotely disable the OS and install or delete software without asking you. Add to that onerous DRM requirements on third-party hardware manufacturers that drive up prices and reduce overall driver support and availability.
Vista was Microsoft's bid to become gatekeeper and tolltaker of an OS-level iTunes-like digital content distribution channel. But that's not something Microsoft's customers wanted, a fact that has resulted in arguably the biggest software release failure in Microsoft's long history.
I don't use it much, but today I needed it. And it crashed twice on me. Once when I was away from my desk--I came back and was rebooted into fedora (my default). wtf??
That could be a problem with third party applications or drivers- but an OS should never allow a third party application to crash the OS- unfortunately, no OS is perfect in this regard.
> The MS bashers have done a great job spreading anti-Vista propaganda, but few can articulate any real problems with the OS.
What benefits does Vista offer the typical user? (Other than the need to figure out how to turn off indexing so their new computer is usable.)
The 64 bit support is nice for some applications, but it's hard to believe that it couldn't have happened within the XP framework.
In short, Vista broke lots of things and didn't offer any significant benefits in return for the still ongoing problems. (No, DRM support isn't a benefit.)
The only reason why Microsoft would rather sell Vista than XP on new computers is because the longer they sell XP, the longer they will have to support it. The more updates, service packs, and the longer they have to make software that is backwards compatible with it, rather than focusing on new technologies in Vista/Windows 7. They make as much money off a sale of XP as they do Vista, but XP costs more to maintain.
If Windows developers aren't writing code for Vista, it won't magically work on Windows 7, so if your software is XP only, its time to find a new supplier!
In short, Windows Vista is the future of the Windows platform, and it is a very bright future! As far as most people that I talk to that claim they don't like Vista, most of them can't seem to articulate why, or they just say "That's what I've heard". The MS bashers have done a great job spreading anti-Vista propaganda, but few can articulate any real problems with the OS.
Long Live Microsoft! (And Linux, and Apple)