“Wolde you bothe eate your operating system, and have your operating system?” I’m sure that’s what John Heywood would have said if he were in my shoes, anyway (and if he weren’t busy talking about cakes—the glutton!). I like to use what I have on my computer (Ubuntu), but there are times when I must use other peoples’ computers, and they don’t always use what I like. In fact, I’ve never met another person (in person) who does! So, it’s inevitable that I run into those little once-in-a-while differences. Here’s an incomplete list of things that noticeably change my computing experience.

Quick copying and pasting. The X Window System has a mechanism whereby any selected text is stored (separate from the <ctrl>c “clipboard”). The aforementioned text can be pasted with the middle mouse button. I make frequent use of this feature when my hand is on the mouse because it’s just so quick to use.

Interacting with inactive windows. Another X feature that I frequently use is the ability to keep interacting with “inactive” windows when the active window is in the way. Let’s say I’m talking to someone and reading an article at the same time. I want to keep my conversation window focused and on top, but I also need to scroll down on the article’s window to read the next paragraph.

In Windows, I have to click on the inactive window (with the article), which brings it in front and obscures the conversation window, scroll down, and then rummage through the taskbar to get to my conversation again. In X, I don’t need to lose focus of the conversation window at all because I can still send mouse events (like scroll) to inactive windows. I only need to move the mouse over the article window and use my mouse’s scroll wheel—the conversation never becomes the inactive window.

Always on top always available. A nifty feature of the Gnome desktop environment (and I’m sure KDE) is that each window’s “window menu” (accessible from the icon in the title bar, by right-clicking the title bar, or by right-clicking the entry in the panel) has an “always on top” setting. Some programs in Windows do have this feature, but it’s not applicable everywhere. I realized that a few months ago when I was using my brother’s laptop.

I miss the terminal. It makes me feel special.

Compiz. At first, I thought Compiz was only for the eye candy. It does have a lot of silly things that don’t actually help you accomplish any tasks besides impressing your friends (or—in my case at least—nephew). But there sure is something to be said for how fluid and alive some modest settings for “wobbly windows” can make your desktop feel.

Nice font rendering. This gripe really only extends to Windows XP, which sports no smoothing whatsoever unless it is turned on. Unfortunately I don’t know many people who have turned it on. Luckily, I don’t come across Windows XP very much anymore! (And thankfully no one turns it off in Vista.)

Software repositories and package managers. Every once in a while I’ll have to install some software on someone’s computer. This is a real chore in Windows, because I have to search online for what I need, then (unless I already know of some trustworthy software) I usually research what I’ve found to make sure it doesn’t come with any nasty surprises. For an accurate depiction of the problem, check out “software installation in linux is difficult.”

The Gnome applications menu. I love the Applications menu in Gnome. Why? Well, because the only things it lists are applications. The Windows “start menu” has quite a bit more than that—most software gets its own submenu in the menu with the program itself, documentation, maybe some links to websites, etc. Some program submenus even have submenus of their own! They’re all thrown in there willy-nilly as well. The other thing I love about the Gnome Applications menu is that software is categorized (accessories, games, graphics, internet, sound & video, et cetera). I always know where to find what I’m looking for.

At the end of February, I went to the Dell website to order a brand new laptop with which to surprise my brother. I navigated to the “open ource” section first to check the availability of a laptop with Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the one I had seen previously was no longer listed. I knew that ordering Windows XP would add another $150 to the price of the laptop, so I opted for “the-worst-case-scenario-as-far-as-I’d-been-told,” Vista. Everyone’s familiar by now with the multitude of criticism and backlash the two year old has suffered, so I won’t spend any time preaching its condemnation here. Instead, I’ll summarize my experience with it over the past few days. It’s not a complete rundown of every feature in Vista—just a few things I wanted to comment on.

First impressions

After primarily using free and open source software for so long, setting up an OEM installation of Windows is a little bit shocking. Now, you should understand that to us die-hard, liberated-from-shackles, grab-your-1740-replica-Katana-and-rebel open source guys, an EULA is sort of like an affront to our personal freedom (yeah, deep down we know it’s kinda silly, but have some sympathy for us—we’re delicate). But true to form, I looked on in horror as several EULAs had to be accepted to use both Vista and the software that came with the computer.

When Vista was fully installed and usable, it was the familiar routine of plucking out the things we didn’t want or need. The control panel is a lot nicer in Vista. For some reason, I couldn’t ever find anything in the XP control panel unless I switched to the class view. (It might’ve been all the blue disorienting me.)

Not long after, our first order of important business was to use Microsoft’s Glorified Firefox Download Software™ (ie., IE) for obtaining a web browser.

Style

Certainly, one of the most publicized features of Vista is its updated look and feel. I’ve never really talked to anyone who feels neutral on this subject. They either love it or hate it. I like it, but I’m not satisfied with the handling of themes and theming in Windows. I’ve been spoiled by the wealth of customizations that are available  in GNOME, KDE, and other free desktop managers for Unix-like systems (Linux, BSD, …). In comparison Windows has always been extremely limited here. Theming is possible, of course, as a myriad of websites will show you; but it is not easily doable and usually requires third party software.

Instead of being built into Windows, theming is the responsibility of the individual applications that wish to implement it. (Safari has its own look, Advanced WindowsCare has its own look, et cetera.) I would rather have all the applications look the same. Some of my friends have said that I’m just boring, but a level of uniformity in the look and feel of each application allows me to know what to expect: It helps straighten the learning curve when I’m using new software.

Explorer

One of the features that I liked in Explorer was that the music directory showed album covers as if they were pages in an open folder. Unfortunately, it’s not an equal opportunity feature—even though I had installed the Ogg/Vorbis codec, it would only fetch information and art for the few mp3s in my collection (this one-sided behavior continued in Windows Media Player). About 85 to 95 percent of my music collection is Ogg/Vorbis. In the end, this feature is more of a novelty than a necessity, but it would have been nice to see it play well with the geeky kids across the street.[1]

I like how the breadcrumb trail has been separated into segments as well, although it doesn’t realize its full potential. For example, in Nautilus (the GNOME file manager), files can be dragged to different segments to move or copy them to that location. This is a useful feature when you want to move files or directories up a few levels. Other useful features it’s missing are tabs or split views, and a quick directory search (like Firefox’s quick find).

Still lacking a lot

A lot of things are still lacking or impossible in Windows that are easy to do in other operating systems. For example, I wanted to mount an ISO image. This is a two click operation in many Linux distributions, or a single line in the terminal, but a search for how to mount an ISO image in Vista revealed that I would need to download third party software.

There are many glaring issues with software management as well. Installing and uninstalling software often requires a restart, and is still a series of unintuitive “click next” screens. There is no package management available; to obtain any software I have to go find it “in the wild.” I’m not really comfortable doing this, especially when it comes to closed source software (I found three programs for mounting ISOs, and only one was not reported to have malicious software of some kind).

I feel naked without a comprehensive set of command line utilities. Sometimes it’s just a whole lot easier to tell the computer what you want to do with words, not clicks and motions.

Conclusion

If I were still a Windows user, I would definitely upgrade from XP to Vista. Microsoft has taken a step in the right direction, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Windows 7 puts on the table. But I’m a Linux guy at heart. I have a different mindset when it comes to operating systems, from a design perspective and a usage perspective. Vista feels cumbersome because “the Windows way” doesn’t facilitate my workflow.

Ironically, almost none of my criticisms here are aimed at Vista in particular. I experienced the majority of these problems in XP as well. The core issues like look and feel, software management, and the “one true way” approach to design are true for all Microsoft operating systems to this date. However, I do understand that not everyone feels the same way I do. To them I’ll say that Dane is right: Give it a fair go before you throw it in the trashcan. You might even like it!

…

But if your heart is still set against it, try one of the free alternatives.

[1] My brother finally got the album information to display in WMP. Unfortunately, we only know how to do it one album at a time.

Hey, I just realised something. Why do people hate Vista so much? I think I’ve figured out why.

It has had a bad image from the start. I mean sure, there were some problems related to performance which were pretty much fixed through updates, hotfixes and SP1, but from what opinions I’ve heard from numerous people, it doesn’t seem to have swayed the general view on Vista. Most of these opinions are extremely critical. I have to double check to make sure they really are talking about Windows Vista. (Okay, I had issues with it too at first, but I’m now over getting a PC game made in 2001 to work on Vista. I have two desktops at hand with XP Pro, SP3 installed.) Apart from a little software incompatibility – which is easily remedied thanks to the Internet, and issues about the performance requirements of the new O/S, (I like a very small memory footprint) I’ve had no problems whatsoever with Vista.

I’ve come to accept the fact that the hardware nowadays is well able to handle a measly thing like Vista. It’s just where I’m used to seeing a page file of 100 to 140 megabytes on start-up, I now see it climb over 1000 megabytes with little prodding. This is not affecting the performance on my laptop – hooray for RAM – just my mental state. You should read my previous entry to get an idea how much I care about memory footprints. With the aforementioned software incompatibility – again, this is to be expected. We must remember that Vista is not Windows XP, where XP is basically a beefed up Windows 2000. It’s a completely new system.

Aside from those hiccups – where I again feel the need to mention that they are entirely normal and to be expected – I have had absolutely no problems with Windows Vista. Everything I’ve done to it, whether it be installing it, networking it to another PC, a slice of gaming (MAME yay!) and just general computery stuff, etcetera – works like a charm. It really does. And in some cases, it works where XP doesn’t. So there!

After looking back on all this, why do people seem to hate it so much? The answer is simple. It has become the operating system which people love to hate. You know those self proclaimed power users who consider themselves a bit of a dab hand at computing – I reckon they just jump on the bandwagon and abuse Vista on online forums (while using Vista of course). Not to mention everyone else who has gotten swept up in all this. I honestly haven’t seen this much crap hurled at an operating system since Windows ME – and you gotta admit, that ‘un was at least justified in its reviews.

Up until Windows XP, we had a plethora of regular releases of operating systems and people were used to that. Now there’s a break of five years where people used XP the whole time. Then Vista popped up. I think people had far too high expectations of Vista (yes, Microsoft loved to talk about it) and were waiting for something to sweep everything else away. That’s never ever going to happen by the way!

Also when it was being developed, you’d get the occasional announcement that special features that were promised in the release were dropped. People weren’t happy about it. This went on for quite a while and by the time Vista was released… whoops. People were already ready to hate it. They wanted blood. And like all new operating systems, it had a few niggles, performance issues and wasn’t fully supported by hardware vendors and wasn’t a better experience than Windows XP in every way imaginable… yeah, it wasn’t a pretty spectacle once reviewers ripped it apart.

But hey, it seems to have stabilised quite a bit. People are buying it. Sales are good. Positive reviews from people who know what they’re talking about. Yeah, I reckon things are turning around. C’mon, give Vista a fair go. Don’t believe in all the negative hype. It’s a fact – some people will always hate Microsoft, no matter what you say.

I’m currently sitting at my desk at work (in my lunch break of course), using a PC that even a homeless shelter would throw away. I’m sure I’ve mentioned something of this nature before, however I really felt this needed to be written in stone.

I dislike corporate PC’s. They are literally riddled with numerous startup items we’re not going to ever use. Around six months ago, basic users like myself were to be able to cut down any running process which enabled us to reduce the page file size by more than 150 MB! Considering the maximum size is 1248 MB with 512 MB of RAM (on this PC anyway) this allowed me to regain some semblance of sanity.

Once you’re logged in, past the Windows screen, we’re presented with a cursor in the form of an hourglass which will remain in place for a period of about two to three minutes while it all starts up. To me this was an unacceptable waste of my time. While most users, when first coming into work will immediately switch their PC on, wait about thirty seconds, login and then spend a few minutes passing the time by engaging in casual chat, re-arranging papers on their desk or making themselves a coffee, I would replace that last step in the form of barreling straight into the task manager and cancel unneccessary processes with a vengeance. This enabled me to have my work-related applications open (i.e. Firefox complete with Ganadu’r V4 bookmark and Outlook) in a period of thirty seconds. I was happy enough with this solution. Surely I can spend a few seconds coaxing a computer to perform better – it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside – and all is fine and dandy.

Until about six months ago. I breezed in to work one morning, probably nodded a greeting to my colleagues or maybe even a bright ‘Morning!”, switched on the PC, made myself comfortable and logged in when the relevant window popped up. I immediately CTRL+ALT+DEL-ed to the task manager (right clicking on the taskbar and accessing it from there is no good as your cursor will immediately turn into an hourglass). I sort processes all in order of size. Moving down the list from the essential processes hogging the top shelf of the page file, the selection rests on an application called SmartBoardTools (a software app which is only ever used on the company notebooks) running at 45,000-odd K. Yikes. I immediately click on ‘end process’. A little box asks me if I really wanted to terminate this process. I click on ‘Yes’ with perhaps more force than was strictly necessary and a second box pops up. To my horror, it tells me that I do not have the permissions to terminate this process. What new evil is this?

Moving on, I find QuickTime is using up 20,000k – it seems this computer has the Pro version. The free version is bad enough. I’m able to terminate that app with no problems. After experimenting with the task manager, I quickly deduce that I can only terminate processes under my own username. This is a very small selection of software, some of which is essential, the majority of processes I used to terminate previously are all located under SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE and NETWORK SERVICE, which of course I’m not able to terminate. My warm and fuzzy feeling each morning is gone forever.

I now make myself a coffee each morning immediately after I login, with the rest of the office.