OneAndOneIs2

I said a while ago I was going to do a review on Vista, comparing it to Ubuntu.

Since there'll be a new version of Ubuntu out by the time Vista is released, and Vista was so crap at the beta stage that it'll be changed beyond recognition by the time it finally makes it out the door anyway, I ran out of inclination to actually finish the review. So here, in case anybody is interested, is the half-finished draft, since it's a pity to throw away so much writing.

Vista vs. Ubuntu

In the not-too-distant future, users will have the option of upgrading to the Vista release of MS Windows. They also, of course, have the option of switching to Linux. The question is, which should they choose?

Obviously, this review is hampered by Vista only being available as a beta - there are feature changes and bug fixes underway that will doubtless make some of the comparisons in this review moot. But that's a risk we just have to take.

So: In the red corner, Vista public Beta. And in the Blue corner, Ubuntu 6.06, the "Dapper Drake" release.

Round 1: Installation.

The computer I used for this review is based around an ASUS motherboard with an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU and 512MB of RAM. It has a GeForce 6 graphics card in an 8x AGP slot. Internet access is via Ethernet connection to a broadband router. In other words, absolutely nothing tricky or uncommon.

The IDE hard drive had one Linux partition occupying all the space. We begin with the Vista DVD. I was asked a few normal installation questions - my language & region - and then asked for the product key. I tapped in the 25 characters, and then had to accept the EULA.

At this point, I was offered a strange choice: "Custom" or "Upgrade", only "Upgrade" was greyed out, making it a moot choice. I went with Custom. Vista now looked at my hard disks and complained that there was nowhere to install: No NTFS partitions.

I told it to format the Linux partition. To my surprise, this failed with an error. But I've always 'cleared' a drive for Windows by formatting it?

So I tried it the Linux way: Delete the partition, create a new one, and then format that. This worked fine. No real problem, but it might surprise Windows users who think that formatting is the be-all and end-all (i.e. the typical Windows user)

Seven minutes had passed by this point. Installation proper began now, but it took until 30 minutes into the install before it had finished copying files and begun to extract them - why it couldn't extract them right off the DVD, I don't know.

Another 10 minutes, and the first reboot occurred: The installation dialogue warns you to accept them. Trouble is, it locked up instead of rebooting, and I had to go in via Safe Mode to continue. I was asked for an account name then, and received my first disappointment.

A lot of noise has been made about Vista's improved user accounts and the way you can get by as a non-admin user. I was thus expecting a Linux-like "Create an admin user with a strong password, and then create a normal user" process.

Instead, I got more of a "Create a user. Oh, it'll be an admin account, so you might want to give it a password. You know. Or not. Whichever, I'm not fussed."

So a typical Windows user is still going to give themselves an admin account, just like always. What a let-down.

I created a user named "root" and gave it a good password. Then my PC rebooted itself, and the install process began again. They really need to put a "Remove disk" warning in there. I took out the disk, and booted again. This time, I got Vista. The total installation time? One minute under an hour.

However, many devices were still unsupported. Fortunately, I had all the driver disks, so I put them in & installed the necessary software for the SMBus, multimedia device, an unknown-but-MIDI device, and RAID support. The Ethernet drivers didn't install, and neither did a device that is reported only as "Unknown" - I have absolutely no idea what this may be.

I ran the Ethernet installation manually, and this time it succeded. The driver for my USB UPS failed to install, as did my USB webcam's driver. But those peripherals aside, I had a fully-supported PC by this point, and I guess that's what counts. Having completed the bare-bones installation, I checked resources. 6.6GB of the hard drive was in use, along with around four hundred megs of RAM. Quite what it's doing to justify this level of consumption, I don't really know. But hey, we always knew Vista was going to be a resource hog!

So let's compare with Ubuntu now:

Put the CD into the drive, and boot it. Within a few minutes, you get a LiveCD environment that's essentially a fully-working, tho somewhat slow, version of the OS you're about to install. I assume that Windows doesn't bother with a preview because you've already parted with cash by the time you've got a disk in your drive, but it's a pity. Installation from a LiveCD is the ultimate in GUI installs ;o)

The desktop has an "Install" icon, so I clicked it, and up pops a map of the world. I use it to say I live near London. Partition the drive, reboot, and I'm into Ubuntu in under half an hour.

Everything is supported out of the box, including the webcam & UPS that Vista wouldn't run. The downside is that there's no software available the webcam: That needs to be downloaded separately. At this point, Ubuntu's resource consumption is

So, Ubuntu offered a far quicker installation process, with better hardware support, and is using far fewer resources than Windows. Let's see how much they can both do out of the box, shall we?

Round 2: Functionality

Multimedia's important these days. The formats I tested are: MP3, Ogg, WMV, AVI, and DVD movies.

Out of the box, Ubuntu supported only Ogg and Avi. Vista appears to support everything other than Ogg. However, DVD support was too buggy to test properly in this Beta release, and Avi support was very poor, mostly giving me audio but no video.

Both OSes offer downloadable support for the formats they don't support. EasyUbuntu automated the installation of all the required codecs in Linux, and Ogg support for Vista was downloaded from Vorbis.com

Disappointingly, though, even when the Ogg plugin had been installed and Ogg linked to Vista's Media Player, it wouldn't add Oggs to its Library, so I couldn't put them into a playlist. If anybody knows a workaround, I'd like to hear it.

Media Player's interface, I must also say, was about the most horrible member of its kind I've ever encountered: Not at all what I expected from such a media-centric OS. Something as simple as scanning a directory for music and adding it to a playlist took me quite a few minutes to figure out.

Moving on, let's check file formats. I tested the OpenDocument format, MS Word .doc files, MS Excel .xls files, MS Powerpoint .ppt files, PDF files, text files, and rich text files; along with GIF, JPEG, BMP, and PNG.

Vista looses hands-down on this one: Unlike Ubuntu, it has no support for PDF, ODF, nor for MS's proprietary Office formats. Ironic, really. Vista also seems to have lost good old "MS Paint" - unless it got so badly lost in the Start menu that I just couldn't find it. This is a real nuisance: Just taking screenshots is impossible without installing something. Luckily, I had Portable Gimp on a USB drive, but it's a pretty poor show IMHO.

Let's have a go at installing some software.

I tried some old games for Windows 95 first: Doom and Leisure Suit Larry - we all know how much MS stresses backwards-compatibility, after all. Vista appeared to successfully install both, but neither would actually run. No error messages gave any clues as to the specific problem(s). Pity.

So I tried two more modern games: Doom3, and Darwinia.

Vista installed both without argument. However, it ran them very, very slowly: Doom3 on the lowest resolution and picture quality gave a FPS of around 3, dropping to 1 on occasion.

The hardware should support far more than this. Perhaps we should upgrade the graphics driver? I downloaded the latest NVIDIA driver and tried again. Much better: FPS standing still at the start was 19, soaring to 50 when I stood still and looked at an unmoving door. Darwinia, at a res. of 1024x768, gave me 60FPS.

So, recent games are playable on Vista, no problems.

Round 3: The internet

This is the information age, and we're all online. So, we want to browse the web, read email, and IM people conveniently. How do our two OSes hold up?

Vista comes with IE7 - the long-awaited new browser that MS finally brought out after years of stagnation because Firefox was eating up their market share. As a result, IE7 has many new features, which it has unabashedly copied from FF. We have tabbed browsing, RSS aggregation, a built-in Search box, and so on.

The new features are a bit hit & miss. Opening a new tab gives you a genuinely helpful screen, explaining what the tabs are and what shortcut keys you can use. Full marks here - I'd like to see the same of FF, to be honest.

RSS aggregation is, IMHO, nowhere near as good as FF's Live Bookmarks: You only get the option of downloading & viewing the whole feed at once. With FF, clicking on the feed gives you the article headers, and then you decide which of the articles, if any, to go and look at. IE7 also, rather than using a site favicon where available, just uses the same RSS icon for everything - losing a simple but effective way of visually distinguishing feeds.

IE7 is also still not particularly good at standards for a modern browser, tho I believe it's better than it was. My own blog still doesn't quite render properly, and I know for a fact it's standards-compliant. . .

I couldn't find anything that really made IE7 better than FF, but it's a reasonably successful FF catch-up job. Ubuntu, of course, comes with Firefox itself, which is in my (and many others') opinion the best browser available today. So I won't bother to add anything more, other than to mention that Firefox is available for Vista as well, and works perfectly on it, extensions and all.

Neither OS's browser has built-in adblocking or mouse-gesture functionality. FF users can download both from the mozilla website, whereas IE appears only to have these as unofficial plugins published in random sites that I'm too paranoid to install: They could easily be malware. Sadly, a check of IEaddons.com didn't find me anything useful.

Both OSes have email packages that downloaded my email perfectly well, I really can't say anything else about the email clients: Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

IM: Microsoft, of course, has its own IM network, MSN, for which they have their own IM software. Oddly, they haven't actually supplied it with Vista: There is no available IM software that I can find. I can only assume they're still smarting from the various monopoly-abuse lawsuits that have popped up around the world. Clients are downloadable for MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and just about everything else, of course, but out-of-the box functionality is non-existent for IM.

Ubuntu comes with Gaim, which has support for all the main IM's listed above, along with Jabber and ICQ as well. However, there is no support for webcam and voice: Gaim does IM only. For voice conversations, you can download Skype, and for webcam you can download such packages as GnomeMeeting (Ekiga?). But you can't use MSN, Yahoo, or AIM for anything more than text and file transfers.

Round 4: The interface

This is a tricky area to evaluate, because obviously it's highly subjective. But I'll do my best.

Surprisingly, I have to say that people who are used to Windows already would probably be happier with Ubuntu. Vista makes quite a few changes that will confuse the average Windows user.

If you're used to this:

Will you be more comfortable with this:

Or with this:
[Firefox screenshot]

For starters, the Vista toolbars. Ignoring the unpleasant blurry glass appearance, the toolbars have been fused together into a rather confusing mishmash. There's no visible menu toolbar with the familar "File, Edit, View, Help" type menu options: These are hidden until you press the "Alt" key. Thus you have nothing but a list of anonymous buttons. This gives the toolbars a crowded feel that's unusually unfriendly for a MS product.

It's also a symptom of the design confusion that runs through Vista. Hopefully, this will improve before Vista makes it public, but right now, the impression one gets from using Vista is that a whole bunch of people worked independantly on different bits, then glued it all together at the last moments: It's inconsistent.

For example, the Start menu is a nightmare to navigate via the keyboard: It has a scrolling built-in sub-menu and a text-entry field for desktop searching. This makes it appear that MS wants Vista to be more mouse-oriented. However, the menu toolbars are far easier to access via the keyboard, by tapping "Alt", than they are with the mouse, which calls for right-clicking in the right place and getting at the menus via a submenu.

And the hiding of the menus would have been understandable, had they made some new & interesting design changes to compensate. But they really don't seem to have done anything of the sort: They've just hidden them and hoped people can get by without. Strange.

Explorer has been mutilated badly: The folder sidebar is tiny and awkward to navigate, making it very hard to move a file: The huge, opaque icon obliterates any view of the tiny folders beneath it; I found it impossible to get the three-letter file extensions to actually show up in the filenames; the Search function is tediously slow to run and even slower to update. . . it's a real pain to use for even the most basic chores.

Vista has a 3D interface, but I don't know why: It adds very little value and slows too many things down. Using Alt-Tab to switch windows should be near-instantaneous, I've no desire to be delayed while Vista generates miniature views of each window.

By contrast, Ubuntu has a very standard selection of toolbars, which any Windows user will find perfectly straightforward to navigate. The two taskbars are a difference, but not really a particularly tricky one to master. Also unlike Windows, Ubuntu has more than one menu available from the taskbar. This negates the need for MS's overly-complex double-column Start menu with built-in scrolling sub-menu, and the single click of a mouse or the shortcut key gets you instant access to your applications menu. If MS could get away from their determination to have one menu for everything, they could improve the interface noticeably.

I was disappointed to find that Vista had no virtual-screen capability, something that other OSes have had for years - even the alpha-release of the open-source Windows clone, ReactOS, has managed to incorporate virtual screens, I'm baffled by why Windows still doesn't have it. Ubuntu has four by default.

Vista has a rather odd replacement for the ShutDown button that used to pop up a new window asking what you really wanted: It now has a Hibernate button, a Lock Screen button, and everything else hidden in yet another submenu. I can't evaluate the Suspend or Hibernate funtionality, because neither actually worked - they simply restarted the PC. Ubuntu had an odd hiccup after hibernating occasionally, with a long delay in starting some apps.

The biggest problem I had with Vista's interface, however, was how hard it was to actually find out about some of the new functionality.

• It has a sidebar, with gadgets like RSS aggregators and CPU monitors. And yet this is not enabled by default, and unless you know it's there, only pure chance will result in you finding it in the Control Panel and turning it on.
• An improvement over the standard Alt-Tab window switcher is the new 3D-flip, accessed via holding down the Windows key instead of Alt. How a new user is supposed to know about this, I don't know: It's not mentioned in the little introduction to Vista that you get upon logging in.

And so on. They've gone to all this trouble to add new stuff, why are they making it so unlikely it'll get used?

The other big issue was the slowness of Vista. There's a noticeable lag even for such simple tasks as Alt-Tab. Surely the whole point of offloading tasks onto the graphics card is that if frees up the CPU and makes everything faster rather than slower? For something as simple as Alt-Tab, a noticeable delay is simply not acceptable.

To say Vista is bloated to unacceptable levels is no over-statement. There's no excuse for its hardware requirements: Both OS X and modern Linux distros use less of everything for at least as much functionality. XGL, a 3D-desktop for Linux, ran perfectly acceptably with my old MX440 graphics card. Why does Windows need so much more for its 3D desktop? It's not like it does more than XGL - quite the opposite, XGL actually has some useful features and more eye-candy.

I've never yet encountered a Linux OS that used even 100MB of RAM just to start up, what is Vista doing consuming >300MB? Six gigs of disk space? You could fit even XP into two! What's the justification for tripling the amount of storage needed? There's really not that much been added to Vista.

That's about it, really. In summary:

Out-of-the-box support

Feature	Vista	Ubuntu
MP3	Yes	No
Ogg	No	Yes
WMV	Yes	No
AVI	Yes	No
DVD	Yes	No
ODF	No	Yes
.doc	No	Yes
.xls	No	Yes
.ppt	No	Yes
PDF	No	Yes
.txt	Yes	Yes
.rtf	Yes	Yes
MSN	No	Yes
Yahoo	No	Yes
AIM	No	Yes

However, both OSes get a "Yes" in every box if downloadable support is included.

Vista, being a beta, has many niggles that I seriously hope will get sorted out - such as its habit of constantly asking for admin permission to run a piece of software. It has others that I don't hold out much hope for some of them: A persistent bugbear with XP is that it refuses to unmount my USB hard drive regularly, and Vista does exactly the same thing, for example.

Ubuntu would be nicer if it had a prettier desktop, and it's a pity XGL isn't incorporated in it yet: It would have been nice if I could have given a comparison of MS and Linux 3D desktops. At current showing, though, the next version of Ubuntu will be out before Vista, so I may yet get the chance. (It would be cheating to use Kororaa.)

In conclusion:

Odd though it may sound, the average Windows user would probably be more comfortable switching to Ubuntu than they would with upgrading to Vista. The hardware support is better out-of-the-box, it will fulfill their web-browsing and email-reading needs at least as well, it's a less-painful installation process, and it's far more responsive on non-cutting-edge hardware. It also requires less downloads to get support for all the tasks a typical user will want.

However, there's really not any killer argument for using either. A typical Windows user, faced with either OS, will need a short period of adjustment and then be able to do just about everything they need to with it. They'll have to pay more for Vista, of course, and be prepared for a rather slow desktop. But it'll work OK.

Overall, then, we have two perfectly good, workable, modern operating systems, either of which are ideally suited for most home users.

Given the years of development and billions of dollars MS has invested in Vista, however, one can't help but wonder why the best they could do was produce a bloat-heavy OS whose only clear superiority over its competition was eye candy.