Comments on: Linux Fanboy switches to Vista? oh boy…

By: Soli

Soli — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:19:01 +0000

Happy you are aware that you are “one of those on the tech-edge kind of people who usually have really current hardware”. I guess that must be because you work with Microsoft right?

By: Matt Jones

Matt Jones — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:40:20 +0000

I agree with most of what you say. I do love having linux back-end built-in ssh daemon and 90% cmdline driven usability on the server side. But find that would be mostly useless for Windows to do something like that on the desktop side. I’ve been using Vista since Beta 2 and have had very little issues but with 3rd party drivers from companies like Dell and nVidia that really have no excuse.

Some issues i have had, some addressed in releases and some addressed in SP1. But no less than i have had with XP. Only wary to deploy it in my office due to UAC being kind of a pain. Wish it was a little more like OS X’s root privileges and keychain, but i understand the need for it and applaud most of it’s implementation.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:11:48 +0000

my toshiba came with vista, obviously it runs smoothly. vista was very simple for me to figure out, the learning curve was only an hour or two. it does seem to take a bit longer to shut down though.

By: Jason Burns

Jason Burns — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:33:50 +0000

Mark » Linux must have forgotten to “just work” the last time I was compiling intel wifi drivers into the Fedora kernel. Come on man, Windows “just works” a lot of times to, I have seen them both misidentify hardware, when you have as many 3rd party hardware vendors as PC does, with more than half of them being no name writing garbage drivers, it’s not odd at all that it can’t find things. I would say if you bear the same standard apple does, which is pretty much ATI or nVidia on intel chipsets, Windows and Linux would “just work” all the time too. I can remember way back in the day, on Windows 95 no less, when I replaced a motherboard, video card and CDROM drive in a machine WITHOUT reinstalling the OS, the only thing I had to install was a video driver, of course this was pre-ubiquitous internet.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:04:25 +0000

Thanks for the good reply!

I would like to point out that I do realize that I’m not the average user. Your 80/20 argument is perfectly valid.

And yes, I do know of putty and powershell, but for me personally (as I did label it “Personal User Experience”) they fall far short of what I desire. So please, I’m not lazy. I’m just spoiled.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:34:44 +0000

You forgot to mention that Linux is easy to install and just works. Also when Linux boots up it is quick to get working with, and it doesn’t get slower and slower over time.

Whenever I see a Windows machine it reminds me of why I don’t touch it. Even a clean install of Windows requires shed loads of other programs to fire up just to keep the slapped together O/S *safer* from malware.

Microsoft is a joke, but it is eye opening to see that people will buy any old crap if there’s a big name behind it.