Windows 7 RTM Reviewed & Benchmarked 792
An anonymous reader writes "The code is final, and CNet has reviewed the final version of Windows 7, with benchmarks to support the case that it's not only the fastest version of Windows to shut down, but also looks like 'the operating system that both Microsoft and its consumers have been waiting for.' The review continues: 'By fixing most of the perceived and real problems in Vista, Microsoft has laid the groundwork for the future of where Windows will go. Windows 7 presents a stable platform that can compete comfortably with OS X, while reassuring the world that Microsoft can still turn out a strong, useful operating system.'"
Fast way to shut down! (Score:5, Insightful)
Pull the plug!
Seriously.... they claimed all this same stuff for vista. and we all found out they were full of crap.
7 might be better than vista. but i still dont believe it's the fastest ever or any of their other bs.
This isn't news. it's an ad.
Vista was the fastest Windows (Score:5, Funny)
From installation to wipe in an average of ten days. A pioneering achievement.
As for the rest of this prerelease hype, I'll believe it when I see it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fast way to shut down! (Score:5, Interesting)
Pull the plug!
Seriously.... they claimed all this same stuff for vista. and we all found out they were full of crap.
7 might be better than vista. but i still dont believe it's the fastest ever or any of their other bs.
This isn't news. it's an ad.
You might like to actually test it, people have been telling good things about Windows 7, and the interface and updates do look quite nice. Personally I'm using Vista as I never bothered to replace it with XP, so I should notice it even more.
Judging from the article and what I've read before, they've spend time on making sure interface and the system responsiveness improves a lot. That is what people usually consider as "fast", even if its fake-fast it looks faster. Its pretty much the only thing OS can do to appear faster anyways - You cant magically get more CPU power.
Re:Fast way to shut down! (Score:5, Insightful)
You might like to actually test it, people have been telling good things about Windows 7, and the interface and updates do look quite nice.
You missed the point! CNet and PC World seems to be very much just reproducing Microsoft's marketing material, just like they did when Vista came out.
And the benchmarks doesn't prove anything, if you ignore shutdown time, it looks to be slower overall then xp AND Vista..
And since Vista came out, both Linux and OS X have improved tremendously when it comes to performance and boot times.
Is Snow Leopard mentioned anywhere or compared to earlier OS X versions + all the Windows versions? NO..
Sincerely yours,
Vista 64bit user
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Hardly 'fake' imo. 'Invisible' latencies (say 0 - 0.5s) are anything but if you look out for them. Even if you don't, they play on the subconscious like a dripping tap.
One day, button mouse down will activate buttons and other GUI widgets. That in itself feels much nicer than waiting for the LMB to be released. Chrome uses this for its tabs, and it's so much nicer.
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:) Glad to hear you think these small latencies are important too.
Because they're typically hard to measure and sporadic (with the smaller ones not even consciously noticed by many), I tend to think it's a very under-rated and unspoken about metric (similar to the way input lag was 'unknown' and argued against on some LCD monitors for a while).
Re:Fast way to shut down! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fast way to shut down! (Score:4, Insightful)
I like to conserve energy, so I don't leave my PC running when I'm not using it. I also don't use "standby", it's a useless power draw. When the PC is off, I physically separate it (and all the periphery) from the grid - so I do have to wait until shutdown is complete.
Hence, like booting up, shutting down is something I do once or twice a day, and it's comfortable to have it out of the way as quickly as possible so I don't have to sit around twiddling my thumbs.
Re:Fast way to shut down! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one thing benchmarks unfortunately do not show, but is where Windows 7 (and FreeBSD as well) excel - responsiveness.
On a modern multitasking machine, I (for one) don't care so much if a task takes a little longer to complete in the background so long as I can carry on working in the foreground.
7 Multitasks better than any previous Windows OS bar none, and I think this is why it "feels" faster. It responds to user input a lot better.
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Re:Fast way to shut down! (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't news. it's an ad.
Wait - a review of the finished latest release of the most dominant OS on the planet, from the biggest software company in the world, isn't news? Yet the daily stories we get of every possible random rumour about the Iphone and the "[do mundane activity] On Your Iphone!" stories we get aren't advertising?
Great goals (Score:5, Insightful)
> fastest version of Windows to shut down,
Was that ever a problem? start shut down, and turn out the lights, It will be down when you come back in the morning.
How about boot up time?
Re:Great goals (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great goals (Score:4, Funny)
Shutting down is part of the restart process, which I personally do several times a day just to make sure everything is running A-OK!!!
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Re:Great goals (Score:5, Insightful)
> fastest version of Windows to shut down,
Was that ever a problem? start shut down, and turn out the lights, It will be down when you come back in the morning.
If only...
Far more likely it will be sitting there saying 'StupidTaskbarApp.exe did not shut down. Press 'OK' to close this application' or some similar shit.
One of the reasons I hate Windows so much is that I can't even rely on the piece of crap OS to shut down if I tell it to shut down and then walk away. It literally expects me to sit there for up to five minutes while it 'saves my settings' and stops all the processes to ensure the bloody thing turns itself off.
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You should look into nLite [nliteos.com]. It might help you out - there's a setting there that can terminate anything that refuses to shut down within 5-10 seconds.
nLite lets you customize your WinXP ISO.
Re:Great goals (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the reasons I hate Windows so much is that I can't even rely on the piece of crap OS to shut down if I tell it to shut down and then walk away. It literally expects me to sit there for up to five minutes while it 'saves my settings' and stops all the processes to ensure the bloody thing turns itself off.
Sounds like you hate computers in general and have likely chosen the wrong profession.
Why is his requirement unrealistic? I'm a computer professional, I love computers, and I fully agree with the original poster. Why should I wait and watch what should be an automatic, guaranteed to succeed operation? No user-mode application should ever be able to interrupt a critical kernel-mode operation like 'shutdown'. Not ever. There are several use cases where a timely, user-intervention-free shutdown is critical to the correct functioning of an operating system. It's an operation that must always succeed, or the OS is broken.
Have you ever done a remote reboot and had the machine not come back up, because the OS hung during shutdown, for whatever reason? I have, many times, and it's not fun. If you're not working on a server with an integrated management board, but a PC or a beige-box server in a remote lights-out environment, you're basically out of options if that happens.
What if it's a shutdown triggered by a UPS? The server now has just a couple of minutes to shut down cleanly. If it just sits there waiting for the user, it won't be a clean shutdown when it finally loses power, not to mention that it's wasting precious battery power when it doesn't have to.
Laptops and batteries come to mind also. I've once put a laptop into its bag, only to realize 10 minutes later from the hideous burning smell that the OS hadn't really shut off, it had just turned the screen black.
Your reasoning sounds like the excuse of a lazy developer. Why can't applications be written in such a way that they can be shut down quickly and reliably without user intervention? This has been standard for database systems for decades, but GUI application developers are only now catching up. Firefox can now recover almost all of its 'state' after even a crash, which is a good start, but why do trivial applications like text editors ask stupid questions like "Would you like to save this file?" and HANG the machine during shutdown? Is it so hard to respond to a "machine shutdown" event by serializing the application state to a temporary file, and then restoring it when the user runs the app again next boot?
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OK, perhaps you have a valid point in all of this, but now you've totally changed the topic. This whole thread was about the OS, it's improvements, and whether faster shutdown was a noteworthy feature. Now you are talking about what applications should do, not the OS. If you can demonstrate the linux apps and OSX apps all serialize their state when the OS shutsdown, then maybe you've got a valid and relevant point. But the point is, most apps for any OS do not do that at present, and nothing the OS itself c
Re:Great goals (Score:5, Informative)
from commandline: shutdown -f -t 0
For completeness' sake :
shutdown -f -t 0 # shutdown
shutdown -f -t 0 # reboot
shutdown -h -t 0 # hibernate
shutdown -l -t 0 # logoff
At least that applies to /c/WINDOWS/system32/shutdown.exe.
PowerShell users should be happy to know they can type:
(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem -ComputerName ).shutdown()
Between the dozens of third-party utilities people generally download and install (Sysinternals, among others), and Microsoft adding/subtracting what's in the various Resource Kits or generally making things up as they go along, I've always relied on Cygwin's own version of shutdown.
Here's a randomly selected page [tesco.net] that details some of the ugliness.
Re:Great goals (Score:4, Funny)
You lie...
Windows is an easy to use GUI based OS, therefore there is no possible operation that requires, or is easier done with, the CLI...
You must be thinking of Linux, where simple tasks like shutting down the system must be done from the command line.
Re:Great goals (Score:5, Interesting)
>>Ah, but you didn't know that Windows has "shutdown -f -r" you say. Well, stop blaming the OS for your own ignorance then!
I seriously hope you're making a joke there. No normal user should ever need to know command line flags to TURN OFF HIS COMPUTER. This functionality has always been broken in windows, forcing a user to babysit his machine to make sure it successfully turns off, something you don't always have the time to do (at an airport, or you're running late for something).
Besides, the bigger problem is the immense amount of astroturfing going on for Win7. If you hated Vista (and nearly everyone does - I do tech workshops for a living) you'll hate Win7. They didn't fix the broken Vista file browser or windows explorer, and so *nothing else they did* matters.
But when you read things like this (from TFA):
"Although the look of Windows 7 may seem to be nothing more than some polish applied liberally to the Vista Aero theme, make no mistake: this is a full replacement operating system, and more than just 'Vista done right'. From driver support to multitouch groundwork for the future, from better battery management to the most easy-to-use interface Microsoft has ever had, Windows 7 is hardly half-baked."
Then you know that there's something seriously screwy going on. It sounds like all the press outlets are creaming themselves for Win7, and I can't figure out why. Usability is the most important feature they should be concerned about, and both Vista and Win7 are steps backwards in usability.
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so every time you close the lid on your laptop you have to carefully check it to make sure nothing's running that might disrupt the process?
Sigh. Reading is apparently quite difficult these days. I said it was a good idea. It is if you run Linux too. My HP laptop, for example, running Linux, will occasionally not go to sleep when I close the lid. Ask HP why. The Lenovos are a lot better, but I have gotten off planes at least twice even with those, and it was warm from being left on.
Generally it works, but not 100%. Linux or Windows.
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Ah yes. About 1 in 5 times my laptop wouldn't suspend when I closed the lid, and I'd get home to see the "Your computer crashed because it overheated in your laptop bag" boot message. I've given up on ever getting suspend to work reliably in Windows or Linux.
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XP shutdown actually destroyed my laptop. I hit shutdown, waited a minute to start shutdown, closed the lid and put it into my bag. The next morning I opened the bag and heat was pouring out of the bag, some warning message about serial port still in use or driver failed, but XP had disabled power savings, and it wouldn't shutdown until the only choice "OK" was clicked. How valuable was that dialog? The hard drive didn't work a lick, and the screen was discolored after that.
With netbooks shutdown time
This is why the tagging system sucks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is why the tagging system sucks... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shut Down? (Score:3)
Did they run out of thing to be proud of?
I sure wouldn't be someone to boast about how fast my OS can shut itself down i'd find something that people actually cares and wait for: booting
When i shut down my computer, i'm certainly not looking at it and even less timing how long it takes for it to be completely off...
So basically... (Score:5, Funny)
"'the operating system that both Microsoft and its consumers have been waiting for.'"
So it's Snow Leopard?
Not faster than XP, not faster than Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
Just FYI-- the claims of better gaming performance from 7 than Vista or XP have not materialized (not on my machine at least). It's just as slow as Vista.
That said, it's still worth having (like Vista) with UAC turned off, simply because the aggressive prefetching loads frequently used programs into RAM. Stuff opens faster.
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Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFA: "Importantly, it won't require the hardware upgrades that Vista demanded, partially because the hardware has caught up"
Yes, but how does it do on my old hardware that struggled with Vista in the first place? I know Mac OS 10.1 > 10.2 > 10.3 > 10.4 gave me better performance on the same hardware. It wasn't until I moved to Leopard that I REALLY noticed my PowerBook 1Ghz PPC chip was at it's limit.
16GB? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:16GB? (Score:5, Informative)
My fresh install of Windows 7 RC Ultimate on my old rig, didn't take up 16GB of space. Only about half IIRC.
Re:16GB? (Score:4, Informative)
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I have no idea but it usually just cruft and poor programming... you'll probably find that it only peaks at 16Gb during installation but uses 5-10 Gb for a "final footprint" after the installation is complete. They might even take into account drive formatting, swapfile, etc. into that which will give quite a hit.
To be honest, the initial install for Windows was always stupidly large for what you got - you can nLite and UPX and do all sorts of stuff and still get a working Windows installation in half the
Free ugrade for Vista sufferers? (Score:4, Interesting)
If Operating Systems Were Guns (Score:4, Funny)
Linux is anything from a little single shot Derringer to a 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger Gatling gun at 4200 rounds per minute.
OSX is clearly stamped down the side "Desert Eagle point five oh"
And Windows has "'Replica' written down the side"
--
BMO
Re:If Operating Systems Were Guns (Score:5, Funny)
That's certainly an apt comparison, since most people that have or want DE50's think they look cool and work really awesome, but have no fucking idea what they're doing when using a gun. They feel this strange sense of smugness about the elite status their choice in firearm has afforded them, perhaps not having any idea that a boring old Casull 454 has more muzzle energy, or that the DE50 is utterly impractical for essentially any worhtwhile endeavour. They know that they spent way more money than other guns cost, but they don't realize that there's always something cheaper that does a better job.
Yet nothing else seems to have caught and held the affection of hollywood so effectively, so nothing else will suffice for the discriminating individuals that know nothing about firearms or marksmanship --- except that they are better than everyone else at both by virtue of their wise purchase.
I'm not sure you had any idea how good of an analogy you were making. Bravo! :)
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yeah, but everyone knows you have to clean your gun regularly or it'll stop working properly.
which is a lot like Windows too, shame the detailed disassembly instructions are never included in the box.
it doesn't matter if the OS is better... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm for _anything_ that gets more people to stop using IE6. :)
SMB still sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows network file service is just as slow and as network-chatty as ever.
When you compare it to NFS4, it is most miserable. With SMB, the client and server shoot packets at each other all day and barely any data gets transferred. NFS4 will totally saturate my gigabit ethernet and it's almost all data in those packets.
Microsoft should just embrace NFS4 and drop SMB like a hot potato. It serves noone's interests to have such a crappy file service system in this day and age.
Re:SMB still sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Slowest windows yet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this article a joke? I clearly see that vista beats Win7 in 3 out of 5 benchmarks, and XP beats Windows 7 in all but one (how can we forget the all-important "shutdown time" benchmark.
Yet CNet is telling me that *this* is the version of Windows I've been waiting for?
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Yes, CNet is telling you this.
In case you haven't noticed already, they make Fox News look fair and balanced.
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Can I just get XP that can use more that 3 point whatever G of ram?
Windows XP Professional, x64 Edition [wikipedia.org].
Released nearly five years ago.
Windows 7: My First 24h (Score:5, Informative)
Reposted with a few slight edits from my own blog a few days ago:
My poor PC broke. Some of my RAM went bad due to the summer heat, combined and my obstinate refusal to turn the AC on until the temperature in my office is well into the 90's. Fortunately RAM is cheap as hell these days, and I can get twice as much memory for half the price I paid a year ago, so I ordered a full 8GB of replacement memory, as much as my motherboard can handle.
The problem is that I was running Windows Vista 32bit, which can only address a bit under 4GB of RAM. The only way my Windows computer could use the extra memory I'd purchased would be to re-install a 64-bit version of Windows. But I've already pre-ordered Windows 7 Pro, and it seems silly to install Vista 64-bit now when my copy of Windows 7 will arrive in October. So, over the weekend I got a correctly-checksumming ISO of Windows 7 from The Usual Sources and installed it without a key, giving me 30 days to register. The plan is to just use the rearm trick to tide me over until my legal activation keys come in the mail.
It took a few hours to get everything installed, but today all my apps and games are back, and my files are copied over. I gotta say, if you're going to run a Windows desktop, this is the way to do it. It's NICE. It feels much snappier than Vista, and while it's got more overhead (and thus runs a bit slower) than XP 64-bit, the UI enhancements make up for it. Since today is apparently a bullet-list day, here's a quick rundown of my favorite things:
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:5, Funny)
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Excellent.
When Microsoft turn Windows into OSX then all the businesses will run the the next best alternative to avoid it, Linux.
Then they will all pay me licensing fees. (channelling Darl Mcbride)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:5, Insightful)
"Remove Bash. That's right, no Bash, no Korn, no Bourne, no shells of ANY kind. Do that with a fresh install and see if it will run six months, with allowing updates, without any access to CLI."
That's an absurd thing to say and betrays your ignorance here. The shell is an integral part of a Unix system. If you remove /bin/sh, the system will not even boot. Any Unix system will be this way, including OS X, because this specific interpreted language is part of what makes Unix Unix.
As far as not using the shell for day-to-day tasks, you can do that with Linux now. Ubuntu has all those point-and-click controls you love, and you're free to use them instead of the shell if you like. You'll get things done more slowly, because GUI configs suck, but that's your choice.
What may make you believe it's impossible to go without using a shell in Linux is the fact that Linux people tend to suggest typing shell commands when people ask how to fix problems on a forum. This is because the shell is the best, fastest way to fix problems in Linux, even when other options are available, and we won't suggest an inferior solution unless pressed for it.
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it's less about superiority of the shell when I suggest a solution. Saying "Open the terminal and type..." is a lot easier than "See that thing there? Click on that, and then in the menu find..."
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That's a good point, but I consider the ability to easily communicate shell-based directions to be a legitimate shell advantage. After all, what you're basically doing when you say that is giving the user a script -- even if it's a script written with the human as a preprocessor since you didn't have enough info to actually write it out yourself :)
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:5, Insightful)
You have an operating system with buttons or icons you can click to fix any sort of problem you might ever encounter? Must be an insanely cluttered GUI then...
Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be easier than to say 'open the terminal application from the menu and first type 'dmesg' and copy paste the results here, then type 'lspci -v -v -v' and post this output here as well'
Point is, the CLI is much more efficient for many, many tasks. Maybe not the common everyday ones, but that's what we have GUI apps for. Linux is no exception. If you have system problems or have to do crazy stuff to fix something at least in Linux you are able to do that through the CLI and to post instructions for other people to help them, even though they have no idea what they're actually typing. In Windows you're generally stuck unless you know a friend or relative you can offer a beer to fix it (which would be the guy I used to be for half of my family and friends until I finally ditched Windows for OS X and Linux. Now officialy "I know nothing about Windows PC's" anymore ;-)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Also I don't see how 'Open the control panel, click on the hardware icon, open the driver panel, click on the devices tab, find small icon with the plus sign before it that reads audio devices, expand it, find the audio card in the expanded list, which would probably be the one that doesn't have the word codec in it, see if it has an exclamation mark before it, right click it and pick properties, go to the resources tab, write down all the values in the list of ports/interrupts en post them here' would be
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You have obviously never done tech support over the phone.
Wait until you are trying to figure out what the person on the other end of the phone is looking at and where they clicked wrong and you will understand why tech support people love the shell.
When I am helping people fix osx over the phone I am more likely than not to wind up telling the person to type commands into the terminal.
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:4, Interesting)
Well let's put it this way: I simply disagree with everything you say, but I guess that's personal.
When I have to do stuff in Windows it takes me 10 minutes of mucking around all the stupid settings windows, tabs and icons, every Windows version shuffles all that around, and eventually I find out I have to edit some obscure registry key just to stop some stupid program I didn't install consciously from loading on startup. The fact that you remembered what icons you have to click to get somewhere doesn't mean it's easier to remember or anything, most likely you've had so many stuff to fix on your windows machine that you now know what is where from the top of your head. Most non-geek people I know who use Windows don't even know they have a control panel.
I also don't really get why you think you have to remember any commands for everyday linux use, like many people alread posted a fully working linux system doesn't need the CLI, and it just keeps working unless you deliberately screw it up. It's sometimes a hard way to get there, especially on new hardware, and that's what the CLI is really useful for, much more useful than the Windows GUI (you know how to see the system log for example? Or the boot log? Or the PCI ids of that 'unknown device' on your system).
Last but not least let me add that people often view Windows as 'much easier' because they are used to it, and they bought the machine pre-installed and ready to go. Most people wo think Windows is easy would be completely lost if you gave them a generic installation CD and told them to get the machine up and running with all the hardware working properly.
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"Well let's put it this way: I simply disagree with everything you say, but I guess that's personal."
No problems there ;)
"When I have to do stuff in Windows it takes me 10 minutes of mucking around all the stupid settings windows, tabs and icons, every Windows version shuffles all that around, and eventually I find out I have to edit some obscure registry key just to stop some stupid program I didn't install consciously from loading on startup. The fact that you remembered what icons you have to click to ge
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Never having seen a Windows PC before, using common sense and your ability to read, you can figure out how to get (almost) anywhere.
In as much as this is true of Windows (not very) it's equally true of Linux. I've plonked naive users down in front of a PC running Linux with a Gnome desktop and they find it just as easy to use as beginners on Windows. People who have previously learnt to use Windows (and believe it or not - learning to use Windows also takes time) tend to find it slightly harder because they think they know where things should be and then are surprised to find them somewhere else.
When it comes to *administration* (whic
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Or I can, ya know, get things done faster by using GUI configuration tools that don't suck.
THAT would require a Windows Server, however.....
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Whilst removing the shell is obviously going to break the OS, and therefore nonsensical, I think the spirit of this post is worthwhile. Can a user survive without the CLI in Ubuntu, for example?
My experience is: not really. It's not that far off, but it's not perfect. People who argue that Linux users spend all their time configuring things on the commandline are exaggerating, but equally it's unrealistic to say that a GUI can be used for all configuration.
In my current Ubuntu install, I've had a wireless
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It's no longer 2002. Install Ubuntu and you will NEVER have to use the CLI. That's right. NEVER. I like it because you can do some neat things with it, but then I use CLI in windows too. But is it required for normal operation? No. It's not.
Do I think Linux is retard-friendly on the level of windows? No. But It's come a long way. And the old CLI complaint has officially died. Buried next to driver support qq and native-app woes.
Don't like? Fine. But leave your FUD at the door please.
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That's not true. I've installed Ubuntu on three different computers (two laptops and a desktop) and with pretty much every major update (8.10->9.04 for example), I needed to use the CLI to fix crap. Hell, even recently I (in vain) attempted to get my ATI card to work properly with hardware acceleration in 9.04 and had to drop into CLI to fix my now-broken X.org.
Look in the forums of any distro (even Ubuntu) and I bet you'll find the vast majority of the fixes don't start with "goto System->Preferences
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:4, Informative)
Look in the forums of any distro (even Ubuntu) and I bet you'll find the vast majority of the fixes don't start with "goto System->Preferences/Administration ..." but "open a terminal, and paste this into the shell".
Well obviously. A forum is a text based system. Text commands are the easiest way to provide help. If you were getting help from someone in person maybe they'd show you how to solve your problem using a GUI. Describing GUI actions in a forum is much more difficult and error prone for both parties, that would never be my first choice when helping someone on a forum.
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User that know what they are doing can perform more tasks per unit time via a command line than poor old GUI users wandering through menus and dialogs. Objective studies have repeatably shown this. Just compare the time it takes you to copy a file via the old Windows COPY command versus selecting the file in Windows Explorer, right clicking to copy, then paste, then rename the copy. You don't have to be an expert to appreciate the command line.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, I choose to do most of my file management from the command line just because it's usually the quickest way to go about it.
There's only one situation I can think of where the GUI is better, when I need to select a number of arbitrary files from a directory. Since globbing or find can't be used to quickly match the files you want I find control-clicking a bunch of icons is quicker than typing out a bunch of file names. That's the exception though, the rest of the time the CLI is better.
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Hell most Mac and Windows users don't even know there IS a CLI interface, and they sure as hell don't want to be using it!
You're so mad that you're bordering on saying nonsense.
How come you know that the users don't want to use something they don't even know about?
Are you the god thinking for all these people?
What did strike such a nerve into you? Seriously. It's hatred at this level.
Look, I'll be the first to admit that Linux rocks on servers. It is rock solid, secure, a real tank of an OS. But we are talking Windows 7 here, which is most definitely NOT targeted at servers. It is targeted at home users. Home users, I might add, who often can't even find their way around control panel without someone holding their hand. Windows is quite good at that BTW.
I agree with everything you say, even the part where you say that Windows is quite good at making people unable to find their way around control panel.
Me too, I always have problem finding the correct option in control panel, usually I have to par
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a "sophisticated" user, installing client PCs for just about everyone around me, including some small companies. I'm having a very hard time getting into Linux on the desktop.
I just managed to install Linux for the first time 4 days ago. All other times (about 10), installation failed, due to MB drivers I suppose. That was very disappointing, the PCs were very vanilla, with no expansion cards, and XP installed without a glitch on them.
I don't mind using a bit of CLI since I'm a nerd, but, believe it or not, I can't find how to mount a windows networked share via fstab. I can do it in the graphical thingy, but it mounts it only after I've clicked on it. I need it mounted sooner, and.. I need to know where it gets mounted... I did find how to install VNC, but could not make head nor tails of how to install an RDP server on the linux PC.
My question about it in the forums has been answered by the usual 'you're an idiot', or "you don't need it with our wonderful graphical interface". I'm not an idiot, and I need it outside of Gnome. And remember, the hardest part of any problem is asking the right question, so yes, I didn't ask clearly the first time around.
So, again, I think Linux needs
- more and better drivers. It's progressing, but still. Having to turn off the compositing thingy to be able to use VLC sucks, too. Then again, Aero in Vista causes problems with many games, too.
- better documentation. there's lot of good stuff and how-tos, but out of date.
- nicer community attitude. Yes, I'm an incompetent idiot that not only does not know how to do things, but doesn't even know where to look for the answer nor how to ask the question. I'm trying to change !
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Are all these non-server versions in your view?
Yes, of course. Enterprise is for "enterprise" desktops (it has BitLocker, not sure what else, above Professional). Ultimate is the one with everything. None of them are server versions. Server one is 2008 R2 (which also comes in Standard, Enterprise, etc editions).
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The primary difference between Enterprise and other SKUs is that is uses volume licensing (no license keys, instead it connects to Windows Server box on its domain, and activates through that). However, one other thing that Enterprise has and no version below it does (Ultimate also has this, but sadly not Business/Professional) is the POSIX subsystem. Subsystem for UUNIX Applicaitons (SUA) is a POSIX-complaint user-mode subsystem on top of the NT kernel. Microsoft provides a minimal but functional operating
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Wow, your anecdotal evidence is rock-solid, ergo he must be an idiot. If only there were a counter-point... Oh, here is an anecdote "proving" that you are an idiot!
I installed Ubuntu on my Vaio laptop. I've had to use the CLI to...
Guess what? In Windows, all of tho
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:4, Interesting)
This interests me greatly. I just had to install Ubuntu (9.04) on my gaming computer because my wireless card "just works" with it and I don't have a way to get it up near enough to the router to plug it into the intertubes.
Downloading wireless drivers for windows on Linux ftw. :-)
I have been running Ubuntu on my other (non gaming) computers for over a year, as well as setting up my parents with Ubuntu, and have so far used a CLI about 4 times.
Installing flash was interesting, and was the biggest pain. However it should be noticed that I was installing a workaround to allow flash to run in an 64 bit browser and that's not even possible in windows as far as I know.
meanwhile I am constantly having to kill the explorer process and restart it from the task manager in windows. I'd personally much rather have a CLI to fall back on.
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:5, Insightful)
Try reinstalling that VAIO with a different Windows version, one that hasn't been customized by Sony, and then post your luck getting all the right hardware drivers and configuring the system. You're comparing a PREINSTALLED version that has all the kinks already worked out by some guy at Sony, to a MANUALLY installed operating system you have to configure yourself. It's like saying how much easier it is to just drive that new car you just bought from the dealer to buying the same car and then swapping the engine yourself.
As a counter-example: I once bought an HP pavilion laptop with XP home on it (which I couldn't remove or have upgraded to another XP version by the way because HP tied the license to the machine and didn't offer anything but XP home). Because I needed to logon to a Windows domain, I upgraded to XP pro. After that, I didn't have 3D acceleration, the TV-out stopped working, no wifi until I installed drivers from directly from the card manufacturer and it took 4 months before HP finally released downloadable drivers for the ATI chip that was in it, the stock ones didn't recognize the card because HP screwed with the PCI ids, and the only way to get the machine to work fully was to do a full system recovery. Using the XP home recovery discs...
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu installed in under 40 mins, including applying all security fixes, and was able to access pron^h^h^h^h Youtube with no grief. After installing about 40 apps, it asked for a reboot for some reason. I went to bed and started it the next day.
Eventually I got the NIC drivers by fowl means (Yeah, someone e-mailed me a chicken with the drivers on an SD card clipped to its leg), and was able to get Windows running. Approx two days and 33 1/3 boots later, the urgent updates were complete, and it was ready for use, apart from the limited range of apps (Windows Paint is not all that useful). I asked not to install IE8, but it sneakily tricked me into installing it as a "necessary update" anyway.
Default boot is going to be Ubuntu for now! If i get any of that "Windows Genuine Disadvantage" crap, then I will reclaim the disk space and use it as a dedicated partition for something. Windows is just annoying the hell out of users for no benefit.
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Since when is checking SMART info a standard task in Windows?
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares if it's standard? It still doesn't require a command line in Windows.
A good operating system is discoverable and user-centric. At the moment, the desktop environments available for Linux are somewhat discoverable (but the second you drop to the command line, you've thrown discoverability out the window) and process-centric* rather than user-centric. Windows is not perfect at either task (OS X is much better), but Linux is really, really bad at it.
*: Process-centric operations don't focus on what the user wants to do, they focus on what the computer needs to do to accomplish the task. Frame everything around the user or you'll lose them.
The GUI is not the end-all, be-all (Score:4, Funny)
I take issue with a viewpoint that a GUI magically makes things easier. If you have thousands of paths with very advanced concepts, it will not be possible to extract the data with any degree of enhanced ease. In fact, navigation becomes clunky when there are too many options to parse at once or too many layers of depth to traverse. In that aspect, Windows really punishes advanced users or those seeking to give simple instruction. In linux support, I can generally paste a line or few of shell script. For Windows, I end up having to take several screenshots generally (the command was quicker to type as well, *and* more amenable to scripting and using against many machines at once). The 'cmd' scripting is painfully bad and severely lacking and awkward (many MS provided capabilities are possible via CLI, but not in as useful a manner, and many installers must run with a GUI, even if not interacted with). 'Powershell' is their 'answer' to the inadequcies of their cmd shell, but it's horribly slow and in many ways misses the point. An example central to that is how they deal with piping. They thought piping providing a dumb stream was not useful enough, so they made their piping require more work to describe simple concepts. Yes, dumb piping is limited to some types of programming, but for shell, the simplicity makes 95% of the usage cases easier, and you just have to go to a language like python for the other 5%.
For me, Windows not having a CLI for everything is worse than Linux distros not having a GUI for advanced features that you either had to search online for or already know ahead of time even under Windows. However, I believe at least SuSE endeavors to have a GUI for everything within YaST that is not frequently used by typical users.
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Organising the start menu by software manufacturer name is user centric? Sometimes windows seems easy to use *because you have been using it for decades.* I hope they haven't, yet again, shuffled around the *user centric* control panel. Every time I get asked to help someone fix their windows computer it gets harder to find anything now.
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IMHO that's usually better than staring at a blank screen prompt not even knowing what command you're even looking for, let alone what options you need to actually use it.
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Windows Vista and up automatically checks the SMART data for you and will display a warning to the user in case SMART data reports critical status.
I've found SMART to be almost useless, though. But that's another story.
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Re:The competition is OSX (Score:4, Insightful)
It's well past Windows in terms of usability and elegance
Get off my lawn. You were referring to OSX in that sentence... right? Or was this a joke/troll that was lost on me? Ok I'll bite:
What I have to point here is much to the disdain of a acute microsoftus haterii patient, we all know Linux is not elegant or stunningly usable by any reasonable and pertinent definition. Maybe you were more impressed with wobbly windows than most of us, but while there is an outstanding choice to customize and make it beautiful it just not pretty out of the box. I have yet to see a elegant Linux distribution that doesn't have amateurish desktop and default themes. Don't get me started on the ugly fonts. Multimedia is still broken on Linux. Usability is a very mixed bag, but I will concede that is getting very good.
I'm using Win7 RC to write this, which has been my main desktop OS when I'm not in a bash shell.
Linux is the far superior workhorse, OSX and Windows are better show ponies, don't get the them confused. Mod me down for saying it I don't care.
Re:The competition is OSX (Score:5, Insightful)
Go play with Cocoa / Xcode / Interface builder, and you'll get a bit of an idea as to why Linux is even now, still trying to catch up to NextSTEP 1991.
This is why there is a lack of high quality applications.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is great and I'm trying to get into OpenStep development myself (so i can do OS/X -> Free unix cross platform application development), but the state and lack of standardization on toolkits on Linux is quite apparent.
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That is complete bollocks.
The point of the major version number in nearly every piece of Free Software ever is as a marker of backwards compatibility. Version x.y+n will be backwards-compatible with version x.y, for arbitrary n.
If backwards compatibility is broken, that is invariably a bug, and you will usually find version x.y+n+1 released within a day or two fixing back-compatibility. The broken ve
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Which version? Do GTK and QT provide APIs for database access, network connectivity, HTML rendering, etc? No... you need Gnome or KDE for that, and they're still in flux.
Re:Start-bar aka Dock! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used KDE before and the problem with KDE was (is?) the sort order is wrong when you have a double/multi height taskbar - the items are organized from top to bottom then only left to right. This is bad because if one item is removed, everything to the right of it gets shuffled up or down. So you lose track of where stuff is. Windows does it right - right to left then only top to bottom. Perhaps I should put the taskbar on the side to sidestep the problem.
The other problem with KDE is "everything" is named starting with a "K" which makes it harder to scan to find stuff quickly.
Re:Start-bar aka Dock! (Score:5, Insightful)
The other problem with KDE is "everything" is named starting with a "K" which makes it harder to scan to find stuff quickly.
This drives me absolutely batshit insane...
Re:Copying (Score:5, Funny)
No, you still cannot copy it.
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I'm using 7 right now and copying is just as fast as XP, and that bug was fixed in Vista a long time ago.
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Exactly. And this is where 7 wins. It "FEELS" extremely quick, because it responds to user input better. If you need to take a minor throughput hit for that, so be it. Most people multitask these days anyway - some fractional of a percentage point difference in throughput loss means jack shit if you can actually use the computer while its doing stuff in the back
Re:Wait.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"the fastest version of Windows to shut down" (Score:5, Informative)
DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit). What you had to do was to press CTRL + ALT + DEL before turning off the system, to let SmartDrive write back to disk the dirty blocks in its cache. It would display a short message during the operation, then reboot the computer. This behaviour was recommended in the DOS user's manual.
Re:"the fastest version of Windows to shut down" (Score:5, Funny)
DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit). What you had to do was to press CTRL + ALT + DEL before turning off the system, to let SmartDrive write back to disk the dirty blocks in its cache. It would display a short message during the operation, then reboot the computer. This behaviour was recommended in the DOS user's manual.
And only NOW you tell me!?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Mail on Mac OS X even saves the window positions, come to think of it.
How does it compare to XP? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's slower than XP for everything but the critical "shut down" benchmark.
No, I'm not making this up. That's straight from the article.
Windows 7 is Vista R2.
The server version even makes that explicit. Vista's server version is Windows 2008. Seven's server version is Windows 2008 R2.