Windows 7 Beta Screenshots Leaked 587
Slatterz writes "Screenshots of what is said to be the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system have been leaked onto the internet. The ThinkNext.net blog posted a range of screenshots over the weekend which it said represents Windows 7. Overall, the screenshots show a distinctly Vista-like interface, but there is still plenty of time for tweaks and changes to take place."
*Yawn*, I think I'll stick with Ubuntu. (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I can tell, there is nothing that looks really really special that would prompt me to shift off what I'm running now. The fact that they still require malware protection (evidenced by the "we can't detect any anti-virus software, panic" screen), tempts me to question why they haven't focused more energy on securing the system.
The only really interesting thing I saw was the sharing option, "homegroup"? Could be interesting. But overall, nothing revolutionary.
Come to think about it, I remember reading before MS Windows XP came out about all the wonderful things that were going to be in it. Yet, when it did come out, it wasn't a revolution, just more gradual changes.
This promises more of the same.
So, as I said, I'll stay with Ubuntu, because if nothing else, at least it runs on my machine with only 512 MB of ram. (I'm poor, and it works, why would I upgrade?)
This is a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
With a product that's been stable for a long time (stable in the development sense, not in the 'not crashing' sense) you shouldn't expect any large changes between major versions, and no changes at all between minors. You don't just throw away decades of work to make it different for the sake of it. If there are any differences they're probably only there because the marketing department demanded something obviously different so people would upgrade for the new eye candy. Or, at a push, because some HCI guru has had a brainwave about how to make things radically easier to work with. That's very rare though.
Frankly, the fact it looks very similar is a good thing. It might mean MSFT aren't just doing some window dressing.
Why would I update? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately for Microsoft Windows XP is the first OS to "work well enough" which makes me ask, why would I update? IE 8 certainly looks nice along with the enhanced GUI features, but they aren't so large an improvement that I'm going going to spend $120 to upgrade.
As long as OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird and Gimp work on my computer, I don't see any pressing need to upgrade. They're going to have to pull out something much better for Windows 7 to get my hard-earned cash.
Even getting it "free" when I upgrade my computer isn't enough of an incentive because my computer's speed seems good enough at 2.67 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. I've also only used 32 GB out of 201 GB (I actually have more then that but they're on a separate partition for Linux which I need to develop in sometimes for university).
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a note: XP Professional and Vista Enterprise or Ultimate can run a NT subsystem for POSIX, including a fairly complete Unix-like OS called Interix. On XP, look for the "Services For Unix" (SFU) downloads, on Vista it's called "Subsystem for Unix Applications" (SUA).
Although bash isn't included in Interix by default, it's downloadable for free, either manually or via command-line package manager, from http://www.suacommunity.com/ [suacommunity.com] (along with many other tools, including perl, ssh/sshd, svn, and the full GNU build toolchain, to name the ones I use most often). You can run Win32 programs from within an Interix shell as well, so I actually use bash as my primary Windows CLI shell these days.
WindowsME Replay? (Score:2, Interesting)
From my brief experience with Vista and then seeing this, I am not sure they are really changing anything. Take a look at the new "Mojave" advertising campaign. They rename the product, display a few stable elements of the OS, and fool few sheeple into thinking it is new. Then we have screen captures of "Windows 7" which look amazingly similar to Vista. Yes, the GUI is one of the last things developed but why not use something less memory intensive if you are still in the core development areas? Why not use just a basic (think Win98)and functional GUI until you are sure the thing runs like it should? This leaves me wondering where I have seen this before... oh yeah, WindowsME. You know. The one where MicroSoft took one thing, repackaged it, made a few "improvements", and basically created some abomination that was seldom seen as an improvement of it's predecessor. I can't help but get this strange feeling that Windows 7 is nothing but Vista 1.2.
Sigh. No matter how much you try to repackage and redesign a turd, it will still be a piece of shit when you're done.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:3, Interesting)
In general, I agree with you here. But really, how much can really be that different? Desktop environments (whether we're talking Windows, Linux, or whatever) have generally looked/worked the same since I can remember. Yes, each new version has added flasher/fancier/more efficient bits and pieces, but in general, it's all the same.
It's what the software does, not what it looks like that really makes the difference. Even then, the differences are pretty nominal, as the OS/Desktop is mostly just a platform for running the applications you actually *use*. The desktop just UI/Eye-candy for the most part...so leaked screenshots really mean little, IMHO.
Re:So, it's basically Windows Vista again then? (Score:3, Interesting)
Since you've been using Windows for so long, clarify for me if you share the same experience with explorer?
Do you find that with mapped network and optical drives, that essentially the 'pauses and hangs' or nuances of the OS's seem essentially identical (in some regards) to previous versions? Almost down to the millisecond, it honestly feels like the same code to me.
Re:So, it's basically Windows Vista again then? (Score:2, Interesting)
increasingly irrelevent (Score:4, Interesting)
Who cares?
Apple (who is even more proprietary than Microsoft) has seen amazingly significant growth in their user base.
Desktop Linux (this is the year! again.) is growing.
People don't want to pay $200 for their operating system and another $400 (or more) for application software, just to write a few letters, surf the web, balance their checkbook and (maybe) run spreadsheets or create presentations. That's just not worth $600.
Ubuntu, Fedora, or what have you, and you get all this for free.
Vista (the OS that nobody wants) is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Windows 7 will suffer the same fate.
Re:I can see they fixed the big problem with Vista (Score:2, Interesting)
"having worked" implies (to me at least) that you are currently not working on that project anymore. You also state that there is both a 2000-XP kind of difference and a refined-version-of-vista difference. That, together with the fact that the product will not ship for some time (if MS' release history is kept in mind one could argue this would not happen before 2010), leaves me unimpressed.
Win7 might change considerably before being released.
Re:Pointless (Score:2, Interesting)
I use bblean on win2k when I'm forced to vacation in Windows land. The awful XP interface is a masterpiece in comparison to the cluttered mess of garish icons and redundant dialogs in Vista, you can see better design on the typical myspace page. The vista UI reminds me of the sickly sweet colors in kids tv adverts, it probably was designed to appeal to 7 year olds. For someone like me who's (a) an adult and (b) sat infront of a computer for the majority of their waking hours, visual clutter is distressing and impedes productivity.
Re:Sure those are pics? (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone in Redmond must have gotten up early for a cofee and to read Slashdot. The pictures on the blog are gone now--he was made to take them down.
Re:Sure those are pics? (Score:5, Interesting)
I only need to use Vista for a little testing every few weeks. I can't use it for 5 minutes without wanting to throw the computer out of my 7th floor window. The interface is very inconsistent. It's also constantly popping up message windows (not just the security Allow/Deny). The mouse pointer doesn't always indicate the system is busy when it's doing something, so I often think it's not responding to my clicks, but I can never tell. Although it's purely a matter of taste, I hate the translucent windows. They're very distracting.
I would never touch Vista if I didn't have to use it occasionally for testing.
Re:Sure those are pics? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's wrong with the Vista interface?
The impression I get (not having actually compared Vista and XP side by side) is that Vista makes less efficient use of my screen space, preferring to make aesthetically better use of whitespace and prettier icons.
The real thing I've noticed is that Windows Explorer no longer accepts custom columns, which is a major pain for a shop that uses TortoiseSVN. That is an interface issue that I resent. That and the much more subtle (than in XP) difference between active and inactive title bars.
Aside from that, Vista SP1 runs close to acceptably fast on a 2.83 GHz quad core with 4G of memory. It does compile fast, but the OS itself is sluggish at times, compared to, say, XP SP2 on my 1.66 GHz (or so) dual core Mac Mini at home. (Yes, I did turn off something compositing and Aero Glass, like the Windows Vista Annoyances book suggested.)
Having looked through lists of Vista advantages, it appears to me that the only real advantage is that we will be able to continue to buy it, unlike XP, which is becoming less available. I'm very definitely not a Microsoft fan, but XP SP2 was an OS that basically worked, and didn't get in my way very much. Vista SP1 is not there yet, and may never be.
To wistfully try to counter some of the follow-on comments: These are my experiences. They are real experiences, not made up. They can be ignored, but not wished away. Your experience with Vista may differ; frankly, I hope it's better for you.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I can see they fixed the big problem with Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
I was a summer intern. I was implying that XP is also basically just a refined 2000; aside from the look and feel, it's a remarkably similar OS overall. In particular, the biggest differences that come to mind at XP's release time were the fast user switching and system restore (there were others, of course, but it's hard to remember much else that was very new and exciting).
We (the team I was on) were running Win7 on most of our machines, including production boxes, by the end of my internship. I won't claim it's ready to ship yet, but it's easily within a year. It certainly may change in several significant ways before release - there was a substantial (if behind-the-scenes) feature cut while I was there - but for the most part it's already usable and entering the heavy bug-fixing stage, rather than still in the feature development stage.
Re:increasingly irrelevent (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple have been starting to lose touch with the FOSS community when it comes to Darwin, they don't even post modern releases of Darwin anymore, and one has to figure out the URL http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ [apple.com] which I might add is not simply posted anywhere on Apple's site telling you, you can find the latest sources there.
Um, the top level link to Apple's open source releases has always been www.opensource.apple.com and the link to Darwin is on the front page. That *is* posting modern releases of Darwin.
I have found that Apple's documentation is practically useless on Darwin, because it is all focused on OS X, rather than Darwin.
Trolltech's QT documentation is focussed on QT, not Linux, too. You don't go to XOrg to get your UNIX documentation either. The basic UNIX documentation, on any UNIX system, is in the reference manual. And there Apple does a better job than pretty much any Linux distro I've ever used.
See, Linux documentation itself tends to be a bit scattershot. I often run across man pages that simply say "go to this website" or "look it up in Info" (which means "you better enjoy using Emacs"). Apple's man pages are amazingly consistent and complete by comparison.
The BSD subsystem in OS X does not perform to specifications either.
You think? It's missing some subsystems (UNIX tape APIs, for example) but it's a pretty straight UNIX implementation. And the man pages are up to date. And if they're not, the source is available. AND you don't need to sign away your right to publish what you find out from that source, like you do with Microsoft.
[bunch of griping about how certain components aren't useful for interoperability]
Well, first of all, I was responding to your claim that the open source code was "just the kernel and some old BSD tools". That's complete balderdash, and you know it. As to the benefit of things like the NeXT code... the whole NeXT application framework model is the best scheme I've seen anywhere for distributing software that has to interoperate with each other, because it bring "late binding" to libraries and shared files. It avoids Microsoft's "DLL Hell" and Linux's "RPM Hell".
I don't know about the merits of launchd. It's certainly an interesting approach to system startup that's arguably better for desktops than the traditional UNIX "rc" files. Again, it uses "late binding" to reduce the complexity of the restart process. There are of course other approaches to it... but having developed their approach they chose to release it unencumbered so other systems can use it.
If they choose to.
Just like any other open source project.
This isn't moldy old stuff like a Windows installer framework that nobody uses any more, which was Microsoft's inaugural Open Source project. It's something the engineers at Apple believed was useful enough to replace the NeXT system starter, which was already a step ahead of inittab and /etc/rc.
Then there's mDNSresponder, Apple's Zeroconf implementation. But that was apparently not "open enough", or it was too tainted by Apple.
The biggest problem with Apple and Open Source isn't Apple, it's the open source community looking at what Apple's offering and rejecting it because it's Apple. The open source community treats *Microsoft* better than that, and Microsoft actively fights people who do open source implementations of THEIR protocols and APIs.
Re:I can see they fixed the big problem with Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
Hm, maybe you should read up a bit :)
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0104.html#7 [schneier.com]
It happened in 2001... doesn't mean it can't happen again -- the attack was purely social engineering.