OneAndOneIs2

There's an idea, on Ars Technica via Slashdot, that reckons the NEXT version of Windows will be the big success that Vista never was.

The main logic is that Vista was unpopular in the media and people believed what they read. I don't really agree. It kinda begs the question "WHY was Vista unpopular with the media?"

Possibly, it was unpopular because it was crap?

Well, maybe not. How about we go over my experiences.

The fonts are better out of the box with Vista than with Ubuntu or XP. One reason I didn't switch to Ubuntu as the main OS was that Firefox was simply better rendered on Vista. Also, although my mobile broadband dongle now works on Ubuntu as well, it was complicated to set up and I still can't check signal strength. Vista scores better here too.

Vista has a lot of crap turned on by default, but ANY desktop needs tinkering with to get it the way you like it. It's pretty speedy at booting once you turn off all the unwanted startups. Its suspend and hibernate works flawlessly on my laptop, unlike Ubuntu on which it doesn't work at all.

Once you turn off all the bloat and unwanted generic stuff, install the software you like using, and generally get settled in with Vista, it doesn't work too badly, most of the time.

Where it lacks something that Linux has, you can often find an equivalent, or at least run it via Cygwin or virtualization.

Where does it fall down?

Well, as reported a few months ago, it crashed horribly for no reason and had to be reinstalled. That's a deal-breaker IMHO. Reported even more recently, UAC, which was always annoying, also resulted in a broken OS and had to be turned off. Another black mark.

The DRM stuff. I use the VLC movie player, and the DVD image output is always grainy and poor. Windows Media Player plays the same file perfectly, VLC on Linux plays perfectly. I can only assume (after extensive research eliminated all other contenders) that Vista's built-in DRM crud is preventing VLC from working at decent res.

The 3D-desktop stuff is largely eye-candy and has very little practical value except that it frees up some CPU cycles.

It also annoys me in little ways like grouping windows in the taskbar far too readily.

Overall, then, what is my impression of Vista?

Well, it's basically a resource-hungry, prettied-up, unreliable and partially-crippled version of XP. Most of the time it's usable so long as you turn off most of the new features and install better applications.

It came free with a laptop designed to run it, and it isn't quite bad enough that I'm willing to throw it away completely or obtain & install XP instead. But under no circumstances would I have upgraded to Vista if the laptop had come with XP.

And that's why Vista failed. XP worked well, it didn't need major new hardware, it was reliable and it was familiar.

Vista was new, different, buggy, had annoying features like UAC and the fact that "Vista-capable" machines weren't, and was slated for it.

Vista was billed as being a huge leap forward from XP, and would have been had they not dropped vast numbers of features from it in order to be able to ship it at all. By the time it came out the door, it was little more than a glorified and bloated service pack for XP marketed as something more.

Based on what I've read so far, Windows 7 is basically following this trend: It's a glorified service pack for Vista that fixes all the bugs and problems that should never have been in Vista in the first place.

It's more reliable. It's got a less-annoying UAC. It's less-bloated so performs better. The hardware drivers actually work.

Am I going to pay for an upgrade that is quite literally just a bug fix? No chance. Vista's not good enough to pay money for, but it's not bad enough to pay to replace either.

There's been very little noise made about new and useful features that W7 has. As far as I can tell, like Vista, it has very few. Those it does have, you can expect to be copied or beaten by OS X and Linux in short order, probably long before MS manages to get W7 out of beta.

So, what will be the reaction to W7 at current showing?

The Windows fans who refused to upgrade to Vista may well finally decide it's worth taking the plunge. The Windows fans who bought Vista will feel ripped off that they have to pay for a new OS to get rid of the buggy mess they bought already. The Windows fans who switched to other OSes but didn't like them may well switch back. The Windows fans who switched to other OSes and DID like them will stay away. The people who don't like Windows will stick to non-Windows OSes and be happy that they have new features inspired by MS.

MS might win back some goodwill if W7 runs better on older hardware than XP. Making upgrades need less resources than previous versions is so far from being MS's forte that it can't be seen with a big telescope on a clear day, but having been shown repeatedly by the FOSS world that it *is* possible, particularly by Qt recently, they may have finally grasped it.

Other than that.. it'll probably average out to make Windows less of a joke, but it sure as hell won't be the thing that wipes out the competition for Windows all over again.