Hostile ta Vista, Baby

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton adds his experience to the litany of woes with Microsoft Vista. Unlike most commentators who have a beef with the operating system, Bennett does a bit of surveying to bolster his points. Read his account by clicking on the magic link.

My brand-new-out-of-the-box Windows Vista machine could not access www.facebook.com. A nearby XP machine could, but the Vista machine couldn't. I went back to Circuit City to try out the other Vista demo machines, and they could access other sites but not Facebook, either. And that honeymoon feeling that you get when you buy a new computer and expect it to solve all your problems, was over for me. Having built my latest career on helping people access Facebook where they were blocked from it, by some cosmic joke was Vista now blocking me from getting to Facebook on my own machine?

I know, another article bashing Vista, what could be more banal. (Kids! That word, meaning "trite" or "unoriginal", is pronounced "ba-NAHL". If you say it the wrong way like I did in an interview, it sounds naughty and you sound stupid.) But in my own random survey of 30 Vista users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (a handy way to check these things), three quarters (23) said the only reason they were using Vista was that the PC store they went to didn't sell XP machines any more, and about half of all respondents (14) said that they would go back to Windows XP if they could. So I don't want to get a bunch of e-mails with Ron Paul links in the signature saying "Nobody has to use Vista if they don't want to!" (I'm aware that a survey of 30 people is too small to be scientific, but it's enough to get a ballpark figure for about $5 on Mechanical Turk.) Besides, the more people write testimonials to what they found frustrating about Vista, the more likely it is that some future version will keep what is good about the new OS, while providing a less frustrating interface (suggested name: "Vista 98").

It turns out the Facebook issue was not really Microsoft's fault -- www.facebook.com had a broken IPv6 record, and Vista defaults to using IPv6 where XP used IPv4, so that's why the host wasn't working. (In case you run into this with any other Web sites on Vista, I fixed the problem by disabling IPv6 in network settings and rebooting.) But it was one more example of something that used to work pre-Vista and then stopped working, and every case like that adds up to the overall frustration of switching to a new system, regardless of whose fault it is.

I hasten to add that I am not some partisan Microsoft basher. I like XP just fine, never more than when I went back to it after a few days on Vista, and I still think for that matter that Vista would be easier to switch to than Linux. Having been involved for years with free speech activism, I run into a lot of people in the same circles who are strong Linux advocates, apparently because the concept of "freedom of speech" is closely aligned with "making every file search as simple and stress-free as a Hamas hostage negotiation". So every year or two I'll try out the latest version of some Linux distro to see how long it would take to get used to it. In 2005, full of optimism, I cheerfully booted up the latest version of Shrike, then tried to find a directory and discovered I could not right-click on the hard drive root dir and specify the name of a directory I wanted to search for (that only worked for files, not directories). I posted a query to a Linux newsgroup, and a respondent told me that the solution was to open a command prompt and type "man find", which I am aware is a polite way of saying "screw you, newbie", but which I dutifully followed anyway and got an output screen of which the first paragraph was:

find searches the directory tree rooted at each given file name by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence (see section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for or), at which point find moves on to the next file name.

and that was all my Linux for that year. Maybe I'm overdue to try it again. (Microsoft gives away their Virtual PC program that makes it easy to try other operating systems; I think it's a ploy to make us appreciate Windows more.) Now, I love the concept of a freely-distributable, freely-modifiable operating system, and I've recommended Linux to people when you need it to do something cool that Windows can't do, like bypassing Windows security by booting a PC from a CD. And it's done a lot of good for organizations like the One Laptop Per Child program, which can keep their costs down by using a free operating system. But to this day I've never heard an answer to one question: Since even Linux advocates admit that it's harder to use, what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows, to make it worth switching over to? If I was nervous about Vista because some of the interface had changed and some of my old programs no longer worked, it wasn't helpful to tell me to switch to a system where all of the interface would change and none of my old programs would work.

So, I wanted to like Vista. I knew that eventually everyone would have to upgrade anyway, so, not wanting to be left behind, I wanted to switch to Vista because of the same factor that spammers use to get your attention: "Other guys are improving themselves, why aren't you?" But there were some things I ran into almost immediately:

• Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer no longer have the "File / Edit / View" menu bars across the top of the window. Was this a big problem under XP? When the menus gave quick, two-click access to most actions that you could take within the application, was there a grassroots movement to have them removed? I did eventually find that you can hit the "Alt" key to bring the menus back, but why put people through that frustration? The most annoying feeling while using a computer is being yanked out of thinking about what you're doing with the computer to having to concentrate on how to use it.

  Perhaps the idea was to steer users towards using the buttons on the toolbar, but there aren't enough buttons to cover all the options located under the menus. If the UI designers wanted to steer users gently towards using the buttons, my suggestion would have been: Whenever the user picks something under a menu that corresponds to something accessible from the toolbar, display a dialog box which says for example, "In the future, you can print faster by clicking the printer button on the toolbar", along with a picture (and a "Do not show this message again" checkbox -- important!).

• Windows Explorer also did away with the "Up" button that lets you browse from the current directory to the higher-level directory. Again, probably not in response to a groundswell of users demanding for that button to be removed, when it took up about one square centimeter of screen space. Supposedly Windows Explorer makes up for this by displaying the entire path to the current directory in the address bar, so that if the path is "C:\Financial Records\Chris Pirillo\ Pectoral Real Estate\", you can click on "Chris Pirillo" to go one directory higher. The trouble is that I frequently give my directories extremely long and descriptive names like (this is a real example) "Flash-Player-8.5.0.246-beta2.downloaded-2006-03-20-from-labs.macromedia.com" so that I can keep track of where and when I got each piece of downloaded software, in case I ever need to go back to a previous version that the software maker no longer makes available because they're trying to steer me away from it (ironically, "Vista syndrome"). With a directory that has a long name like that, the higher-level directories aren't visible in the address bar, so I had to locate it manually in the left-hand tree view panel. OK, knock off the violins, the point is that I didn't have to do that in XP.
• I have an older monitor, so I wanted to turn ClearType off. The IE7 help file describes how to do this in IE, but that didn't work for me no matter how many times I tried, and my eyes were aching by the time I found out that in Vista it's a default system-wide setting that overrides IE's setting until you change the system-wide one. I would have suggested putting one line in the IE7 help file: "Note: if your operating system such as Windows Vista is set to use ClearType system-wide, you must disable this as well to disable ClearType in IE."
• Virtual PC, which worked on all versions of Windows XP, is not supported on Vista Home Premium. I need Virtual PC (for reasons other than Linux-bashing), so this was a deal-breaker.
• Telnet no longer installed by default. Even though I use a different telnet program for regular use, telnet.exe was handy to test whether a remote machine was reachable on a given port. (For example, in a command prompt, type "telnet www.yahoo.com 80" and when the command prompt screen goes blank, that means the machine www.yahoo.com is accepting responses on port 80, the standard port for Web traffic. Try connecting to port 81 instead, and you get no response on that port. This can be useful when diagnosing problems with Web servers and other programs.) Even though it's not hard to get telnet back, why would they go to the trouble of removing it?
• The aforementioned Facebook problem. This seemed so startling at the time that I almost stopped everything to write an article just about that, musing on Microsoft having so much power that all PC stores were now exclusively stocking computers running an OS that, at the time anyway, couldn't access Facebook. But then I asked another bunch of users on Mechanical Turk, and all respondents using Vista said they could access Facebook after all. Of course, this wasn't a random sample, since users who bought Vista and couldn't access Facebook, probably would have returned their machines a long time ago, but I'm still not sure what caused it to work on some machines and not others -- all I know is that Facebook was inaccessible until I disabled IPv6.
  
  I know Facebook is reading these articles, since in November I wrote about how you could circumvent Facebook's system of verifying that users were real high school students, by doing the following: "(1) create a profile of a non-overweight girl and sign up as a member of a high school network, pending confirmation; (2) search for several boys in that network and send them friend requests; and (3) wait for at least one of them to confirm you back". Shortly afterwards, Facebook changed the verification system, so that now, if you're confirming someone who is a pending member of a high school network but no one else has confirmed them yet, Facebook warns you, "Only check this box if you're absolutely sure that you know this person." So, whichever of Mark Zuckerberg's friends is reading my articles: Clever idea, and, keep the IPv6 records working.

That was as far as I got before I stopped trying to get used to Vista and started taking notes for this article (working title: "Vist Vucked"). From the Mechanical Turk users who responded to my survey, the other most common reported problems were: software compatibility, hardware compatibility, difficulty with the UI, and running too slowly. Presumably the first two problems will improve over time, but the UI will always be hard to switch to as long as users can't find functions that were easy locatable in the old interface, and if it runs slower than XP, that will always be a factor no matter how fast your computer is. (However fast it runs Vista, you'd always be able to make it run even faster with XP instead!)

The best things I've heard about Vista have been that (a) it is the most secure Windows ever (which Dave Barry says is like calling asparagus the "most articulate vegetable ever"), and (b) it features better multimedia integration. To which my responses were: (a) the number of incomprehensible warnings that Vista flashes at a user whenever they look at the computer funny, does not make it more secure, because users will condition themselves to just ignore those warnings, and (b) I hate watching TV on my computer anyway.

Since TV/PC integration is a major selling point for Vista, I thought this last issue was worth looking harder at: Do people really want to use their computers to watch TV? My computer monitor is in an office where I sit up close when I'm working; but TV feels more comfortable to watch from several feet away, and in my office I can't even scoot my chair back that far. (And if I lived with family, I doubt they'd want to crowd into my office to watch a movie.) In fact, I like the psychological separation of the TV set in the living room from the distractions of the computer in the office: I go in there when I'm done with everything in here. The only way I'd regularly download and watch movies would be if I had a way to send them wirelessly to my TV, but a wireless PC-to-TV converter and the corresponding receiver together cost about $200.

Seeking more validation of my opinions from strangers, I did another survey of 30 Mechanical Turk users, asking if they would rather drive to a movie rental store or download a movie online for the same price. Almost half (14) said they'd rather drive to the movie store, citing the comfort of watching the movie on their TV as opposed to on the computer. Another fourth of the respondents (8) said they'd download the movie but only if they could send the content to their TV to watch, and only the last fourth (8) said they'd actually watch it on their computer monitor. So the future of convergence between PC and TV will probably be not in all-in-one systems but in devices that link the PC in your study with the TV in your living room, and since there's no household name yet for PC-to-TV linkage, the field is wide open for some lucky company to make a product that becomes synonymous with the concept, the way "TiVo" is easier to say than "Digital Video Recorder". Maybe that will be a boost for systems like Vista. If that happens at about the same time that a Vista successor is released that makes the interface easier to switch to from XP, I'll bet that will be the tipping point that gets people switching voluntarily. (Of course many people will switch by then just because they need a new computer and they couldn't find one with anything but Vista on it.)

Anyway, I was only trying a new Vista machine because the hard drive on my old computer died, but after all the data had been recovered, I just installed a new drive in the old machine and went back to XP, while my Vista machine was returned to its perch, gargoyle-like, on the shelves at Circuit City, waiting to pounce on the next unsuspecting wretch with dreams of self-improvement through newer computer purchases. The only remnant of Vista that I have left is IE7, which was installed by my Windows XP restore disk and can't be removed, and which is incompatible with some sites and programs that I need, so I've been using Firefox more and getting to like it. That's lucky, since I've already offended the loyal software-logo-wearing constituencies of Vista and Linux, and wouldn't want to deal with the Firefox crowd too. As my friend Anne Mitchell says, "Admitting you hate Firefox is almost as bad as admitting to being Republican." (Except that when Firefox screws with a page, the chat logs don't end up on national television. Ba-dump-bump!)

Most puzzling

[Stanistani]

>My brand-new-out-of-the-box Windows Vista machine could not access www.facebook.com.

"Where do you want to go today?"

Re:tl,dr

[sakdoctor]

Facebook worked with XP but not with Vista.
It wasn't a fault with Vista but facebook.com had a broken IPv6 record

Then a list of stuff vista doesn't have or do, or is otherwise deficient.

In summary, he uninstalled Vista excluding ie7 because that wouldn't uninstall and proclaimed that Vista sucks.

Canal with a B

[Kimos]

It's French.
I've never heard this word used in English before, but he's correct that in French it's pronounced like canal with a B.

Answers to Some of the Complaints

[Dr Kool, PhD]

1) If you press "ALT" the File / Edit / View menus show up in IE and Windows Explorer. It actually works well, hiding the bars when they aren't used gives you more screen space.

2) Up button is gone, but if you have a side button on your mouse that will take you up one level in Windows Explorer.

3) Telnet is dead, long live SSH. Like he said, it's easy to install telnet if you need it.

I run Vista Business x64 and it's far more stable than XP. The biggest improvements for me are the new Windows Update, the new wireless networking connection tool and indexed searching. I have no complaints about speed but I have 2GB of memory. I think those with 1GB or less probably have legitimate complaints.

Re:tl,dr

[rucs_hack]

forget that, boot linux to bash and use links

Re:banal

[Just Some Guy]

According to one source [reference.com]:

Usage Note: The pronunciation of banal is not settled among educated speakers of American English. Sixty years ago, H.W. Fowler recommended the pronunciation (bn'l, rhyming with panel), but this pronunciation is now regarded as recondite by most Americans: no member of the Usage Panel prefers this pronunciation. In our 2001 survey, (bnl') is preferred by 58 percent of the Usage Panel, (b'nl) by 28 percent, and (b-näl') by 13 percent (this pronunciation is more common in British English). Some Panelists admit to being so vexed by the problem that they tend to avoid the word in conversation. Speakers can perhaps take comfort in knowing that these three pronunciations each have the support of at least some of the Usage Panel and that none of them is incorrect. When several pronunciations of a word are widely used, there is really no right or wrong one.

There are few things more satisfying than demonstrating that a pedant is wrong.

shrike...

[number6x]

'Shrike' is the development name for Red Hat 9 [distrowatch.com]. Scroll down the distrowatch page to see the columns with release names.

Kind of like calling a Windows release 'Joliet', 'Chicago' or 'Cairo'.

Why all the cities in Illinois?

Re:tl,dr

[Daniel_Staal]

Actually, the complaint is about how IE renders HTML that does conform to standards. It renders it in a way that does not conform to the standards of how it is supposed to be rendered.

Therefore, a page in valid HTML who's layout works well in IE is likely to not work well in any browser that actually does what it is supposed to, and vice-versa.

Why carafe is kuh-RAF

[tepples]

There are a lot of French words in the English language, and they usually sound better when they're pronounced correctly. For instance, carafe. Hint: It's a three-syllable word. The first time I heard the Americanized pronunciation, it took me a few seconds to figure out what the waitress was talking about.

I don't see how "carafe" would be a three-syllable word. My French teacher told me that an unaccented "e" at the end of a French word is silent. In general, French final "e" is unaccented (and silent) when it corresponds to final "a" in Italian and Spanish, and it is accented (and pronounced much like English long A) when it corresponds to final "ado" in Spanish or "ato" in Italian. Merriam-Webster lists two syllables [merriam-webster.com], and so do Dictionary.com Unabridged, American Heritage Dictionary, and Kernerman [reference.com]. Some of these references also list Italian "caraffa" as a related word.

Re:My favorite Vista rant...

[Nebu]

If you just keeping hitting letters, it just merrily keeps adding threads. I creamed his machine by typing "zoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo".

So where does Microsoft even go to find programmers this stupid? Elbonia? How do you screw up an operating system this badly and still make money with it?

I just tried to duplicate the above bug (I typed "zooooooooooooooooooooo" into the Start menu search box), and it ran just fine for me. Did you try duplicating the bug yourself? Are you sure your friend wasn't just making stuff up for comedic effect?

Shrike?!?

[MonsterTrimble]

Maybe I'm new here (and my number proves it) but Shrike? First, I had to metacrawler it (yeah, I know) and Shrike is the name for Red Hat 9. This was released in 2003! For the love of everything good and holy, he couldn't pick something in 2005 that was, ya know, current?!?

And as for the author's question "But to this day I've never heard an answer to one question: Since even Linux advocates admit that it's harder to use, what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows, to make it worth switching over to?" The answer: Keep money in my pocket (Don't have to pay for Windows) and get free updates forever.

Frankly, I think Kubuntu 7.10 is every bit as good as XP is right now. And with KDE 4 getting better everyday I expect the real Vista experience in the fall this year - Kubuntu 8.10

Re:My favorite Vista rant...

[The Cydonian]

Wasn't clear the way the GP was worded, but you need to specifically shut-off indexing for that to happen. Will, of course, be extremely interesting if you did, in fact, shut-off indexing before trying this.

(Windows 2003 Server user)

Re:"No to all" in XP

[EvanED]

WTF is it with Microsoft and shift-click doing something useful?

Ever want an image of an Excel chart? For a long time, I would do it by hitting printscreen, pasting it into Paint, then cropping it. But there is a better way: select the chart, shift-click the edit menu, then choose the option "Copy Picture." I'm not sure I know what exactly the options do in the dialog that pops up, but that's a minor inconvenience compared to the old way.

Shift-delete immediately deletes a file [msdn.com] instead of sending it to the recycle bin. In Vista, shift-right-click apparently adds a "command prompt here" [msdn.com] option to the context menu.

Re:This just in...

[Hatta]

But to this day I've never heard an answer to one question: Since even Linux advocates admit that it's harder to use, what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows, to make it worth switching over to?

Oh that's easy. Linux comes with stuff like find, xargs, grep, sed, etc. So, for example, if I have a text file like this(which I often do in the course of my work):

AatII (G_ACGT^C)
AccI (GT^MK_AC)
AclI (AA^CG_TT)
AgeI (A^CCGG_T)
AscI (GG^CGCG_CC)
AsiSI (GCG_AT^CGC)
AvrII (C^CTAG_G)

I can find all the restriction enzymes with a 5' overhang of 'CGCG' with a simple regex. Or if I download a .m3u file with mp3s from archive.org, and I want the ogg version, all I have to do is: cat concert.m3u | sed 's/_vbr.mp3/.ogg/' > concert.ogg.m3u Again, a simple one line command that AFAIK you can't do in windows without 3rd party software.

So, ok, maybe you don't like the CLI. But the linux GUI is much more advanced than the windows GUI. The linux GUI gets you things like virtual desktops, sloppy focus, windowshading, always on top functionality. Again, essential stuff that you can't get on windows without 3rd party software.

So there may not be any killer app on linux. (Nor is there likely to be, it would just get ported.) But in terms of usability, both on the CLI and the GUI, windows is far outclassed by linux. Once you get used to all these convenient features, it's really hard to give them up. So I'm sitting here on an XP box with Cygwin, VirtuaWin, and TweakUI, which come close to the real thing, but it's all tacked on and kludgy. None of this 'just works' on windows.

Re:Killer app (on Linux)

[DaveV1.0]

The killer app could very well be VirtualBox

No, not even close. A killer app would have to appeal to the masses, not just computer geeks who want to run one OS on another.

The killer app for the adoption of PCs was VisiCalc, not because it appealed to computer geeks, but because it appealed to many businessmen.

A killer app for Linux would have to be available on Linux or work best on Linux, appeal to everyone, and have a strong enough appeal to make it worth while to learn a new system.

Re:My favorite Vista rant...

[PlusFiveTroll]

Maybe I don't want my files indexed ;). Maybe I don't want my computer grinding away doing some stupid shit I'm never going to use. Maybe I want a run line, that's actually a run command line. This is beyond noobs messing up a configuration, it's sheer fucking stupidity, something that deviates from every other operating system out there including previous versions of windows.

Yes, I am a system administrator, and yes I can make vista run decently well and crash free on a computer. That's because I've had 20 years experience doing this for a living. I don't remember seeing near as many issues from NT4/W2K > XP transition as Vista has presented. Main problems I have with it...

Another redesign of the UI. XP was simple enough to reset to W2K behavior. No need to retrain secretaries/lusers where there application links/files have gone. You can set Vista sorta kinda but not quite like XP behavior. Unfortunately for many people this means retraining them how to use there desktop again.

Different control panels. Microsoft hasn't figured this one out yet. People(luser in this case) don't fix their own computers, they call their power user friends to do it. By changing the control panels and network settings, all you've done is forced all the professional and amature IT people to learn new crap. Most people plug it in once and expect it to work, if it doesn't, they call somebody. It doesn't matter how simple and full of eye candy the screen is they won't be able to fix what the issue is.

Re:Tried Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shrike was the "code name" for Red Hat 9.

I installed it too and wasn't overly impressed. Mainly what a user is experiencing when he/she "tries" linux like this is the desktop environment. In the case of "Shrike" it was an earlier version of GNOME, which felt like a hard down shift on the highway compared to the Windows desktop experience around the same time.

GNOME has gotten much better in recent months. I would expect one's experience with "trying" a GNOME-based linux distribution would go a lot more smoothly these days.

Re:My favorite Vista rant...

[dodgyc]

I just tried this in Vista myself, with Search indexing shut off (as it always is on my machines) and, lo and behold, it went up to 99% CPU usage. Even after I closed the Start Menu, it stayed at 99% for at least 10-15 seconds. Fortunately it did not crash my Dual Core PC, no matter how many times I tried it. SP1 does not fix this issue either.

Re:My Vista experience...

[whyde]

I think you meant 'grep -Rl some-string .'
Don't fork a new grep for each filename, if you can avoid it.
If that's not what you wanted, consider learning to use 'xargs', perhaps:
    'find . -type f | xargs -n 1000 grep -l some-string'
The '-n 1000' is there in case the output of 'find' would exceed Linux's built-in 128k limit of command-line length.

Re:My favorite Vista rant...

[Nebu]

I did shut off indexing. Searching for "Zoooooooooooooooooooooo" worked fine (0 results, as expected, since I don't have any files with that name).

Re:This just in...

[Master of Transhuman]

Amen!

In fact, you don't have to worry about it "coming up", either - since you almost never have to reboot it, unless your distro just sent you a kernel upgrade.

The only time I reboot Linux is when I had to boot into Windows to do client work. And I dread that, because as soon as the desktop comes up on Windows - there's a problem. It might be waiting updates, it might be anything. The one thing I can guarantee is - there's a problem. And that problem will take an hour to resolve, delaying the reason I booted into Windows in the first place.

Anybody who thinks Linux is "hard" is simply someone who doesn't need anything more than a browser and an email client anyway.

Fortunately I've never paid for Windows since I got XP and 98 free from a developer who had open seats, and I got 2003 Server and some other Windows software (which I've never used) free from the educational program I was in. So I've never had to complain about the cost - except of course for the cost of my wasted time on this crap.

CYMK?

[alizard]

Krita supports it right out of the box, as does Xara Extreme. No guarantee on whether or not the packages have other features you need, but I like either a lot more than I like GIMP.