Vista - too frustrating for everyday use
Although I run Mac OS X as a primary platform I still have to keep up to date with Windows and so that meant I had to buy Vista when it first came out.
My initial thoughts were that Vista was better than Windows XP but still not worth the upgrade price unless you needed it for testing. Now after using Vista as my primary Windows OS for the past few months I have to say that it actually seems to get more irritating with day to day use. Despite being delayed in development it just seems so rushed with a number of rough edges and features that don’t work quite how you’d expect.
The lack of overall quality control of this product makes it obvious that each component of the product has been designed by different committees, each one having little communication with the other. This is actually the same complaint that I had of early Linux desktops, as the apps were written by different people with different ideas of what made a good interface you’d get an inconsistent experience. Now Linux distributions are actually getting better in this regard, the main barrier to entry is application support now. Linux is a more than capable OS for those who don’t need any specialised commercial applications or games. I’d like to see in particular Internet cafes moving to a distribution like Ubuntu, they’d be able to offer a safe browsing experience for their users without any licensing issues.
For many the Microsoft habit is hard to break. But now there’s the possibility that Microsoft has made Windows Vista so frustrating it’s going to either make more people hold onto XP for longer or maybe even try alternatives.
Ultimately, this is not going to stop Windows being the number one installed OS, and eventually through more new sales Vista will be the number one Windows release. Most people will take what looks like the ‘latest and greatest’ rather than taking the tried and tested XP. Microsoft did need a modern replacement to XP, I’ve been annoyed for years about how it lacked features that Linux or Mac OS X can offer but somehow Microsoft made an OS that annoyed me even more than XP.
Let’s hope that MS is working hard on addressing the irritations for Service Pack 1, I’ve got a legal licence to run this product and so I’d rather run it as my primary OS for Windows applications rather than just running it on VMware for testing purposes only.
Now on my PC I’m running the latest Ubuntu as the primary OS and XP/Vista are accessible via VMware. As my laptop is a Mac I do use Mac OS X most of the time though. It’s just so much easier to work on a laptop.
BadVista.org is in the top ten search results for Vista on Google. They’re trying to discourage people to buy Vista for its support of DRM. However, I’ve not had much luck explaining to non technical people why they should not support DRM media. I think the general shoddiness of Vista will do a lot more to encourage people to avoid it.