Time for a Vista Do-Over? 746
DigitalDame2 writes "'There's nothing wrong with Vista,' PC Mag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff tells a Microsoft rep at this year's CES. 'But you guys have a big problem on your hands. Perception is reality, and the perception is that Vista is a dud.' He goes on to confess that the operating system is too complex and burdened by things people don't need. Plus, Vista sometimes seems so slow. Ulanoff gives four suggestions for a complete Vista makeover, like starting with new code and creating a universal interface table. But will Microsoft really listen?"
Re:New Code? (Score:3, Informative)
To be more exact, it's not the kernel itself that's so bloated, but the multiple layers around it to provide a 'basic' operating system, API's for userland apps to run, DRM management in sound and video subsystems, probably lots of code to make truly important software to run (like they did various other times [joelonsoftware.com]),
Re:Perception = Reality? (Score:1, Informative)
It's odd. I went from Win98 to Win2000 to WinXP. And since WinXP was built off the NT kernal there was plenty of driver support on release than Vista has ever enjoyed. Security problems? Sure, but nothing out of the ordinary at the time (for Microsoft at least). Annoyances? Yup. that "windows messenger" thing was just incredibly stupid, but also an easy fix. Performance? It ran as fast as Win2000 and actually performed better on games. Crashes? I use to have a BSOD every day or two while playing video games on 2000, I never had a BSOD with XP for months. Though, I've experienced a lot lately due to beta testing games.
Compared to the complaints about Vista? Yeah, XP's launch was brilliant in comparison, even pre-SP1.
Re:Is UAC really bad? (Not trolling, just asking) (Score:3, Informative)
UAC will pop whenever you install anything through Windows Installer (regardless of what it installs), access anything admin-only (like changing any system-wide settings), and any files that your user isn't given access to (and thus require admin priviledge).
If you're an idiot who work on the C drive at all time, instead of in C:\User\(YourUserName), its unbearable: it will popup constantly.
Otherwise, it will pop whenever there's a windows update to install, whenever you install software through Windows Installer, or in Program Files, and whenever you ctrl+alt+delete and choose to see "process by all users", or any equivalent system-wide task.
Thats it. So when I develop with IIS, I make sure the web site isn't in C:\wwwroot, but is in my user's directory. I put all my files there. And I don't use software made by idiots (read: games that put save files in the root directory instead of in your user folder...COME ON developers
That final point is really what pushes things to "either extreme". If you use software that constantly write to their executing directory, it gets very troublesome. Imagine in Linux if a software did that. You'd have to run it as root or give yourself special priviledge all over the place. Microsoft has been trying to tell those morons to stop doing that since the dawn of times, and they still do... fact remain, its where UAC succeeds or break: you have a lot of poorly written software, UAC will pop constantly. You don't have such software, you'll only see it once or twice a week.
In the end, you can just turn it off though.
Re:Soooo. (Score:2, Informative)
Granted, there seems to be more in common with the two lines than between OS X and Mac OS, but it's not like they haven't already made a switch to a modern stable OS.
Everything a service or a driver (Score:1, Informative)
I can get XP down to a bare 12 processes (in task manager) without using removal programs like nLite, bu using vLite in Vista it still stays the same, some 30+ services running, some persistent WMP services that run when not needed or when WMP isn't even open, plus many things that they made into device drivers that weren't in XP.
Add that to every Tom, Dick and Harry software developers who think that a privileged service or device driver is the holy grail to making their program Vista compatible.
Re:New Code? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They can't, they don't want to, it would kill t (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't that XP? The last OS to use the 9x kernel was windows ME, 8 years ago.
Re:Is UAC really bad? (Not trolling, just asking) (Score:3, Informative)
Applications that you use directly though? They write to your home directory. Your personal KDE/Gnome/whatever user settings aren't in the same directory as the libs, are they? Well, a lot of stupid windows software written by wannabes do that, and it will make you see UAC.
Re:Nothing wrong (Score:2, Informative)
MS will have to buy a new kernel from somewhere (I've got something they could use, and it's much, much better than the Mach kernel!)
Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Informative)
1) Nothing works the same as previous operating systems. Finding the "dumb" default so I could disable them took hours (such as "hide files so you can't fix problems" and "don't show extension to give spyware a chance"). I don't want to have to relearn everything just to add one computer.
2) The new "alert" dialogs seem spiffy, until you realize that it make VNC stop working (it pauses all services) - while adding no real benefit, since the entire filesystem is writeable anyway. It doesn't help to disable the Microsoft way of doing things when the trojans can bypass it but the users can't. And don't tell me there's a way to disable it - I DON'T WANT TO LEARN A NEW SYSTEM FOR ONE NEW LAPTOP!
3) Then I installed Office 2007. Wow. That is bad. This is really bad. They did not improve a single part of it - instead they just moved everything around. Not only does it not provide any benefits, it requires 100% retraining! The file formats are, of course, not compatible - so moving one person to 2007 would require moving everyone. In addition, the one reason to use it for us was the ability to integrate with our intranet - but of course they broke compatibility with the file format. There isn't even an option to use the old format we needed, it is simply not there anymore.
So I wiped the machine. We will be using Linux running wine (and office 2000) for a short time, until we get all of our systems compatible with Open Office.
I run my companies IT departments, but I am the decision maker for three other companies in IT - and my friends that run other midsized companies are doing the same thing. Microsoft is simply to annoying to use in the modern business (at last mid-sized businesses).
Re:They can't, they don't want to, it would kill t (Score:3, Informative)
OS X uses the Mach kernel, a project which didn't start until 1985. NeXT was founded in 1985, so NeXTstep is about the same age. The imaging layer in OS X is entirely new and based on PDF, because they didn't want to reuse the licensed NeXTstep Display PostScript from Adobe. Also entirely new are Core Image, Core Data, Core Image, Bonjour, and so on. So other than the core BSD tools, most of OS X dates from the late 80s at the earliest.
Sure, it implements APIs that date back to v7 Unix. But then, Windows Vista implements APIs that date back to 86-DOS aka QDOS in 1981.
Re:Nothing wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing wrong (Score:3, Informative)
If UAC bothers you that much, just turn it off. I did. It's a good feature for the unwashed masses, though.
I say this as someone who's been using GNU/Linux since Yggdrasil. I'm just as happy with my Debian server as I am with Vista, and although I'm not much of a coder I have released what I've written. So I ain't just another leech.
Starting over (Score:2, Informative)
Starting over is sometimes a good thing. When I made the break from the MSDOS-based Windows to NT oh-so-many years ago, it was pretty much a clean break. I had a lot of old software that no longer worked, but NT was stable and allowed me to do so much more. It was a significant change in platform, a lot of drivers just didn't exist (so I had to be choosy about hardware), and there was a learning curve involved-- but once I figured out the basics, I found the losses to be far outweighed by the gains, and after the first week or two (during which I started wondering what I'd gotten myself into and if I should just forget about it and reinstall Win95), I never looked back.
Fast forward a few years, I repeated that process with Linux after suffering through one XP-reactivation call too many (I change & upgrade hardware frequently, so sue me! Oh, wait...please don't!). I've been on Kubuntu for going on two years now, and haven't looked back. The bad taste from the reactivations caused me not to even look back during the first week off Windows. That, and Wine runs many Windows applications better than *real* Windows did, so there really wasn't any problem there.
So what does this have to do with Vista? I think Microsoft made a huge mistake in their approach. They failed at everything in regards to this project. If they wanted a revolution, they should've basically started over from scratch, and left the end users with choices or options to bridge the chasm. By clinging to some legacy functionality, they hobbled the developers, and I think we've all heard how poorly-implemented the backwards compatibility is despite their efforts. Vista wasn't a matter of having one's cake and eating it too, as they tried to hawk it, it was more of a case of dropping your cake on the ground and having a filthy cake you wouldn't want to eat anyway. I've used Vista, I've supported end users who use it, and I've experienced firsthand how unremarkable, bloated, and annoying it is, despite the gimmicks. Microsoft may have gotten somewhere if only they'd revisited the NT development model, reinvented their flagship OS technology, and put a team of developers on making a compatibility layer like Wine to allow users to run older applications. Vista really just seems like XP with some new gimmicks and security measures cobbled-on, and a whole lot of marketing hype. It's apropos to draw parallels between Vista and ME, because ME had basically all of the same attributes and was a failure for the same reasons.
Re:Nothing wrong (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is the end result. To many apps/developers think its OK to modify the system. It isn't.
Add to the problem that far too many apps assume the user on a Windows machine has administrative rights and put things where they don't belong. Apps that have no business putting crap in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or the windows directory because its EASY, not because thats where those things belong.
It takes more effort to seperate your machine specific settings and user specific settings into the right places, not a lot of effort, but effort none the less. For instance, Windows will gladly use DLLs in the applications directory if they exist, and if not, it checks the other locations in your path, and the system directory. Rather than deploying DLLs into the application install directory, developers historically have had a tendancy to throw them into the system directory and forget about it, ignoring the fact that they may conflict with other applications expectations or the OS itself. Assuming the installers even CHECK version numbers before overwriting files.
COM registration is another nightmare. Microsofts own helper implementations (MFC and ATL) for COM objects blindly attempt to write to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, which is global. These implementations should write to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes, and only write the global location if told to specifically. Of course stupid Windows developers would always set the flag/option to write to the global store anyway, but when the reference implementation doesn't even give you a way around it you can't blame the developers if they don't even have the option. Okay, so they do HAVE the option, they could manually write out the registry keys to register COM objects. If you know anything about COM you're probably deathly afraid of trying to figure out the mess thats required to register them by writing the registry keys yourself. I'm sure there are plenty of people that have the ability, and I'm sure I could figure it out with some regmon goodness, but when you make something like COM that you try to get EVERYONE to use (and in some cases like VB where they don't even KNOW they are using it), its generally a good idea to make the system understandable. COM is just
So
The end result though, is that people just ignore UAC and blindly click yes. After seeing it 30 times with a new machine in the first hour, its a learned response. Now, we're back to where we started from, AND we're pissed off that we have to click 'Allow' all the time like a damn popup ad.
My thought is that MS should have kept UAC disabled, and flat out deny things that required administrative privs. That would require more applications to be updated and properly fixed now rather than maybe eventually. Possibly in the next release of Windows (7), more likely in the following major release (7.1? 8? who knows) they could enable UAC and since apps wouldn't expect to have admin rights, it would be more meaning full. And possibly by then, Microsoft could have fixed all of their own crap that causes it to pop up for no useful reason, like when you're viewing certain settings. It should popup when you go to change them, not viewing them. Of course it shouldn't let you view certain things without admin rights, but for fucks sake don't be like XP where I can't view the date/time applet at all without admin rights, let alone change my timezone!
Re:Nothing wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the problem, anyway? (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, but my USERS (remember them) sometimes log in locally (for very particular and good reasons). That buggers them up. Even the "./" syntax is enough to blow people's minds when they've worked a certain way for years and some git at Microsoft decides to remove classic logon procedures without consultation and, most importantly, WITHOUT A DAMN OPTION TO TURN THEM BACK. Thanks for misunderstanding.
"Are you trying to say browsing doesn't work with Vista hosts?"
Nope. Thanks for misunderstanding.
"You're not supposed to be using images anymore anyway."
Whoops, I'm sorry, I'll just throw away those things that mean I can rebuild a full PC in five minutes (absolute maximum) from scratch, from a single keypress then. Instead of that bloody management/deployment nightmare that is RIS etc. Sorry for throwing away ten years of playing with both types of deployment and picking the one that saves me and my tech's hours of time.
"You're supposed to slipstream Vista installs. MS helpfully provided lots of tools to do this."
Probably and yep. But that's no good to me at all. It doesn't work for my situation. When you have large blocks of identical PC's, which need perfectly identical software and settings, and quick deployments in the cases of failure (or even just "because"), it's MUCH quicker (on the order of days and weeks) to create a standardised image and re-deploy it than it is to faff about with crap like RIS. Especially if you want to do esoteric stuff like dual-boot, with more partitions than just Windows. Granted, you end up doing a bit of RIS-like things in making net-boot menus to run some installation scripts but in the end it's quicker to use established, backwards-compatible software (Ghost) and some batch files/shell scripts (that, incidentally, have worked for several years) to do the job for you. They may be helpful for the "Word runs, it'll do" crowd but how many of them actually use RIS?
"And how is it you have large pre-built images for Vista SERVERS, which don't exist?"
Who mentioned Vista servers? Servers holding pre-built images OF Vista. Thanks for misunderstanding.
"Ever heard of "testing"? If a critical app didn't work under Vista you shouldn't have widely deployed it. That's common fucking sense."
Correct. Critical app didn't work (more than several, actually). Didn't widely deploy it. In fact, didn't even get far enough to LOOK at some of the apps, because we'd given up on it by then as it clearly wasn't viable. For all that is mentioned above and a million other reasons. My point proved, but thanks for misunderstanding anyway.
"Except for the mountain of new manageability features that come with Vista. Just because you don't know about WinRE, WinPE, ImageX, RDP 6, WinRM, robocopy, etc. doesn't mean they aren't there."
Don't use them. Any of them (that might be a lie, given the "mountains" of them, but all of those that you mentioned are useless to me). Too little, too late and any decent shop has had their equivalents since NT4 or before. This is the problem - the MS way isn't the only way. WinRE = obsoleted, useless waste of time when it's outperformed by simple imaging techniques - why bother to "repair" when you can just "rebuild" - repairing ANYTHING on Windows has always been a waste of time. Rebuilding is quicker, smarter, cleaner, more efficient and the only reason against using it is if you spot a certain, reproducible problem - then you need to fix that problem for EVERYTHING rather than just rebuilding over it each time it appears. These problems are few and far between.
WinPE = see previous, although it's got many more uses, none of which I personally use. ImageX = Windows only, proprietry MS format + see previous. RDP 6 = not running terminal services, or even RDP for remote admin (various reasons, most importantly the fact that I have software to already
Re:Nothing wrong (Score:3, Informative)
On my Vista box, booting to login is faster than XP, and doesnt sit and churn after login for as long as XP did.
Opening MS word is nearly instant, with substantially less than a second between launching it, and when I can start typing.
The biggest difference I've noticed between XP and Vista is that Vista seems much more stable/reliable over the long run. My XP box would only go about 2 weeks of normal behavior (3-5 docks/undocks, standby & resume per day, and many many switching networks and in and out of VPNs) before starting to get flaky.
My new box with Vista (I am the guinea pig for testing our company apps on Vista, and working out the incompatibilities with it) has been just rock solid. I believe since I set it up in November, that I've only rebooted it 3 times, 2 of which were due to December & January's super-tuesday patching.
The shell/UI seems to be much more robust, and nearly impervious to hanging or slowing down due to disk activity, or flaky network issues. XP was terrible about this, and coming out of a VPN that you had open connections to could often lock the shell for a minute or so. None of that stuff happens at all on Vista, which is a nice improvement.