

Vista Kicks Ass - drm237
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=275
Matt's take on Vista.
======
pg
_I haven't had to reinstall once, and with XP I typically would have 3 times
by now._

I had no idea MS OSes were so bad. Reinstalling the OS is actually a routine
thing?

~~~
rms
The MS OSes are terrible. Reinstalling the OS is actually a routine thing.
More typical computer users just buy new systems when they become unusably
slow after a couple years, which is good for Dell and the like.

What gets me to stay is tablet PC support and font rendering. Linux doesn't
have an application that comes close to Microsoft OneNote for note taking. I
wish that Apple made a touch screen Mac and I will probably switch when they
launch one.

The font rendering on Windows blows away Linux and Mac, in my opinion. There
is nothing so crisp as Windows standard font smoothing (not ClearType). Linux
and Mac look incredibly ugly without subpixel font smoothing or other heavy
anti-aliasing. I spent a while trying to figure out how to get Linux to render
fonts better and gave up when it required a kernel recompile.

Has anyone here gotten Linux to render fonts well without subpixel anti-
aliasing?

~~~
mattmaroon
I'm definitely not a fan of Mac fonts, but that might just be what I'm used
to.

~~~
rms
With Windows, you can turn font smoothing off completely and the fonts look
like pixel fonts. With Linux and Mac, things look terrible without font
smoothing.

See this post for an explanation of the fundamental difference between Mac and
Windows font smoothing: Mac tries to render as closely to the printed typeface
as possible and Windows tries to look good onscreen.
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000885.html>

~~~
axod
Odd... Personally I see Mac as gorgeous on screen fonts, and whenever I have
to check things in IE on Windows XP the fonts look like some kid knocked them
up in paint shop pro on a lazy sunday.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've not seen nice fonts on windows yet.

------
paulgb
I think the point of the anti-Vista stuff is not that Vista is significantly
worse than other MS OS, but that it is not enough of an improvement over XP
for people to put up with the speed hit. It seems the people who hate Vista
the most are people who use Mac OS or Linux anyway.

------
drm237
I'm still divided on Vista. I've been using it for well over 2 years starting
before the beta stage via an MSDN account. Lately, I use Vista, Ubuntu, and XP
evenly throughout the day and XP is my least favorite. Vista has been more
annoying then XP, but the added features (yes there are actually features
worth using) make it worth it still. That said, Ubuntu is great, but I have
had more issues with it on an old laptop than either XP or Vista which have
both been on the machine. I think I am more willing to accept Ubuntu's short
comings because I know it's open source, and it's what I expect.

That said, my next laptop will probably be a mac, although which OS I use most
(OSX, Vista, or Ubuntu) has yet to be determined.

~~~
mattmaroon
I always want to try OSX, but the ridiculous price and sub par hardware/build
quality keep turning me away. All of my friends have Macbook Pros, had it not
been for that I probably would have gotten one by now.

------
dfranke
Matt, here's the secret to buying from Dell: shop in their small business
section, not their home section. I'm quite pleased with my Inspiron 9400.

~~~
rms
There used to be a real build quality difference between the Latitude and
Inspiron lines but now some of the Latitudes are just black-painted Inspirons
with marginally better support.

Lenovo is the way to go.

~~~
dfranke
I'm not talking about Inspiron vs. Lattitude, I'm talking about the home line
of Inspirons versus the SB line (9300 vs. 9400, when I bought mine). I find
Lenovo's displays intolerably bad.

~~~
rms
Oh, ok. What was the difference between the 9300/9400 Inspiron when you bought
it?

~~~
dfranke
I don't recall exactly, but there were at least two components -- the video
card and wireless card IIRC -- that worked well with Linux on the 9400 but not
the 9300.

------
catfish
Vista Kicks Your Ass...

1\. Self-limiting software

2\. Vanishing functionality through invalidation

3\. Removal of media capabilities

4\. Problem-solving prohibited

5\. Limited mobility

6\. One transfer only

7\. Stealth Installs with Windows Update turned OFF...

8\. Restrictions on your rights to use MPEG-4 video 9\. Windows Update file
deletions of 3rd party software

Reference:

[http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding...](http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding_vistas_windows_licensing_disserves_the_user.html)

And thats just the EULA. Once you actually install this piece of malware you
find that if you watch it with a net snffer, even while completely idle, after
several days with no interaction, it is constantly sending stuff across the
net. Try it for your self with Snort. Its spooky.

If you value your privacy, the security of your company, and give a damn about
protecting your investments, you will read the EULA for yourself before you
rush down to the beach with the rest of the lemmings.

------
jsnx
The author hints at a major issue with corporate deployments -- old machines.
It's all fine, well and good that Vista runs on machines it shipped with; but
many large shops have to turn down an upgrade to Vista just because the
performance is egregiously bad on older machines. By extension, it is unwise
for developers to assume that Vista will be there when they need it, making it
unsuitable as a platform for the near future.

