Life, Code & Idiocy

Well, over the last few nights I’ve been (slowly) chopping away at that huge Windows Vista Beta 2 ISO. And last night, it finished. Your eyes do not deceive you. But I think mine deceive me.

What the heck, Microsoft? Why in the world do we need all these protect-you-from-yourself security features, big, beautiful graphics, and a screen that pops up just to say, “Dan, welcome to your computer.” Oh my goodness, that’s about the lamest line I’ve ever heard. And guess what? I know what I’m doing when I pop open Microsoft Management Console or try to manually set the IP for my ethernet card.

And where in the world are the “Vista Ultimate Extras?” Oh yeah, “Uh, we’ll release some extras once the final retail version hits the shelves.” Uh-huh. They’re supposedly integrated into Windows Update. I sure didn’t see any “Vista Ultimate Extras” in there.

My worst experience, though, was the installation. M$ devs, come on, who taught you how to update a boot record? Your grandmas? Here’s the deal. Linux is better than Windows (don’t ask me why, you pea-brains wouldn’t understand). Therefore, Linux gets the first primary hard disk partition (obviously formatted with a filesystem that you’ve never heard of – ReiserFS in this case) and your wimpy, poorly-written little beta gets the second primary partition. Anyway, I had to boot into SuSE and create a Vista VM using VMware and set it up completely just so I could format a floppy and copy 3 files to it while making sure the boot record is correct. Maybe you guys should learn that if you’re installing on a primary partition, and the partition is not the first one on the drive, then you should install the bootloader to the partition and mark the partition as active. But my major beef with Windows is the fact that it completely ignores all the non-Microsoft filesystems out there. I had to create a 25GB FAT32 partition to use for exchanging files between Linux and Windows. The folks over at Linux are all trying really hard to support your filesystems, shouldn’t you do the same for them? Good. You can start with adding LVM support, and adding the ability to read ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, and JFS filesystems, since that’s what the vast majority of Linux distros use anyway.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah. The “Flip 3D” is hideous. I’ve seen better stuff in DOS pinball sims (running on the DOSBox emulator, which contains no M$ code btw). The stupid “curtain” or whatever animation during Setup slowed my fairly competent system down to a crawl and a stage that should have taken a couple of seconds took at least 2 minutes.

Here’s the problem: I would call all those visual FX awesome if it hadn’t been for the fact that Compiz (www.compiz.net) does a much better job of making the workspace actually more productive instead of just more pretty. Compiz has this cube thingy that you can drag and rotate, and essentially you can have anywhere from 4 to 32 virtual screens on that cube. And yes, I mean different windows on each cube face. Plus it actually runs at a usable speed (about 60FPS on my box) while consuming minimal system resources.

So for those of you who like it when a writer sums up his article, and for those of you who just skip the article and read the conclusion, here it is: I am not going to buy Windows Vista unless all three of those problems up there (bootsector problem, filesystem support, and more Ultimate Extras) get fixed and soon. If I buy it, I’ll buy Ultimate, but if I don’t buy it I’ll just crack the beta (shouldn’t be too hard) and use that until Blackcomb comes out and M$ tries once again to secure the IT world while (probably) just making computers even harder to use (as if that’s even possible at this point).