Linux will rise to the challenge. Microsoft is facing tough times.

My bet is their next big OS is going to be Linux-based.

What’s going to happen is Linux distros will pop up with some pretty cool features in response to Vista. In fact something I am wondering - if Vista took 3-6 billion dollars for MS to develop - can they even afford to write another new OS? Vista may be their last big fling.

Windows 95 was probably in the low tens of millions of dollars to develop. Then W98 in the same ball park. Then XP - a major step up. Vista - can they even begin to think abt another new OS in less than ten years?

Vista may be Microsofts last hurrah - their next big move - a Linux - based OS!!!!

Derf

These days even buying a simple printer you need to install a 100mb driver and 2/3 spyware apps to ‘monitor’ your printer

Used to be easy to find the inf and dll’s necessary to make something work but thats rare now.

Thankfully Ubuntu is a breath of fresh air with things work minus junk. Though as Ubuntu and other *nix based platforms gain popularity I have a nasty feeling that manufacturers might look to these OS’s as their next target.

All these apps just leech resources and leave your brand new computer wheezing like a two year old geriatric. The absolute first thing I do whenever I get a new computer is to uninstall everything. If you look very closely at all this bloat you’ll find that the only reason that they are included is because the marketing department wanted to expand the feature list of the product. The actual benefit of all this software is as close to or equal to zero that you shouldn’t bother with it.

you know, the thing is, i bought an acer tm6460 notebook, which came with winxp pro and lots of preinstalled stuff, but after i installed all the apps i wanted to use, it started to behave like my 5 yrs old pc - running xp for that time, to be honest even worse! it took cc 5 minutes to completely boot all apps!!! amazing, isnt it?

of course i tried to restore my sytsem to factory state - no results.

so vista rtm seemed perfect, and to my greatest surprise vista is capable of recognizing almost all of my hardware and works perefectly - even battery time (wo original acer epower software) as acc. to factory spec. 3-3.5 hrs!

so i am quite satisfied with vista so far, its extremely fast, beautiful and definitely more stable than xp.

but, the downside is is sometimes quite annoying, vista is not bothered by the fact that i am logged on as admin, every time an app would need admin credentials the whole screen turns grey and waits for my command - that drives me mad, for gods sake i am the admin, i know what i want to do and i hate when a software thinks that i am not qualified enough (remember logged on as admin!)

properties of user accounts and accessing user folders neither so easy to do - it resembles like the way linux handles user accounts, but nothing that sophisticated - ms tried to hide other files other than that of users, but in reality, they only made the way of accessing them harder, but not impossible (i mean other users wo admin cred. are able to access not only user files on the hard drives (by default, with lot of work it can be solved, but anyways) - annoying, very annoying!

other os features, such as settings are also harder to access, as ms tried to make it easier for everyday user - so the result is that those who know exactly what they want to do, cant, because they have to go through endless procedures to get to advanced sytem settings.

for dummies and for people who only use some apps and internet regularly, the os is perfect, but for admins, its very easy to get extremely mad

still i dont seem to get the idea behind extreme system req, other than ms wanting more and more money…

Good points. I suppose I’m just bemoaning all that advancement in hardware being used to prop up an over-bloated Operating System.

If I remember right Vista’s DRM capability is supposed to go hand-in-hand with hardware based encryption which should be phasing in about now. Basically, what this means is that non-DRM OSs will simply not be able to access DRM content. I suppose it could be done, but it would mean a brute force approach which would be beyond the capabilities of most individuals.

I suppose I would find Vista easier to accept if there was a comparable commercial alternative. And the fact that I’ll be forced to upgrade at some point in the near future if I want access to the latest software.

I guess they need something to Wow a new generation (and generate sales).

Vista is the way forward, whether people like it or not, millions of machines will have it so it’s existence affects PC users (whether or not we use Vista) in terms of future hardware trends, application compatibility, malware, and most importantly, cost.

The whole DRM thing will have legacy effects in terms of added hardware cost and processor overhead. Somewhere along the line we may see a split where companies make separate hardware for Vista (with DRM, etc) and normal hardware for ordinary PC’s for the rest of humanity. Or the companies may release drivers that disable all these (DRM) features for people using other OS’s.

I think Linux (and Windows XP itself) present Vista’s greatest challenge. Ordinary people who use Linux or XP will be hard pressed to find a reason to upgrade to Vista (except cosmetic reasons like Aero). However, hardcore XP users will find benefits in some applications running faster, so they are sure to make the switch.

I also think the hardware requirements, while not entirely necessary, will help push the sale of new hardware. I guess it’s a win-win situation - new hardware means money for vendors, and that hardware includes OEM Vista which means money for Microsoft.

Subtle hint of the moment: Vista show’s memory in gigabytes. So 1GB is described as 0.99GB. I guess that’s a gentle way to remind us how times are changing. 

Something tells me windows 2009 will report my hard disk space in TB.

Still don’t see what Vista has that can’t already be had for much less, in terms of cost and hardware requirements. Yes, it’s pretty… but so’s a linux box running Xgl. And you can run that on a computer from three years ago.

And I still don’t see any need to move away from XP. A properly configured SP2 install is very stable and you can easily match the functionality of Vista with third-party software. Plus there’s established driver support and proper support for OpenGL apps. If I recall, Vista only supports OpenGL in a DirectX wrapper.

In a nutshell, the only reason I see for Vista to exist is that Microsoft needs something new to sell, added to all the opportunities that a DRM enabled OS opens up for them.