What do you know, other OS’s have teething problems too
October 31st, 2007Linux, OS X, Tech, WindowsThose of you who read this blog regularly will know that I’m pretty unimpressed with Vista, whether it’s the ham-fisted UAC implementation, the ‘burn resources for zero practical benefit’ attitude of Aero and the generally derivative nature of most of its enhancements. As an OS it rates very much in the ‘could do better’ camp, and when measured against a 5-year development cycle it edges into ‘what the bloody hell have you all been doing?’ territory.
However in the interests of balance it’s worth pointing out that it’s not the only OS released recently to have some issues. OS X 10.5 aka ‘Leopard’ has just been released, to less than a rapturous welcome in some cases - it appears there’s much to like about it, but there’s also some counter points and even a fair amount of bitching going on about some of the design elements, and it appears that the upgrade can be far from smooth for users of some add-on software. The latter you could blame on said add-on software screwing with the kernel, but it appears to be fairly popular software so I’m surprised Apple didn’t incorporate that into their testing, given how big they are on usability. I never jump in on a first iteration of core software like this anyway, I don’t have the time for it, although my Mac is currently in for repairs in any case.
There was also the new release of Ubuntu, 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon, and that’s been fraught with some networking issues in particular - the kind of thing you would have thought should be pretty solid by now, and some people are also having some Xorg issues (something I’m not unused to!) with the new version.
Of course, no doubt all these things will be rectified via patches and the like, but it’s only fair to say that Microsoft aren’t the only ones to have rollout problems on a new OS. I have to say that my installation & setup experience with Vista was actually very good (especially since drivers had stabilised by the time I installed it), it’s the end result that I found rather underwhelming.
I do intend to install Leopard early next year, and the new Ubuntu may well get an outing on one of my new test boxes I plan to set up soon. In both cases I’ll let others take the initial hit though, early adoption is not something I particularly have time to waste on right now.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Did you miss the announcement that the firewall doesn’t work on leopard? See slashdot
October 31st, 2007 at 12:46 pm
If you plan to install Ubuntu imminently, I suggest you to use 7.04. Last week I tried 7.10 while helping a friend to set up everything and the existing support was, let’s say, deficient. I know this will change soon (just giving some time to update the repositories and such, but not ready yet), but it’s not nice to install 7.10 to move back to 7.04 and later to 7.10 again
October 31st, 2007 at 2:09 pm
7.10 works perfectly for me, for the record.
Vista seems to have tons of issues beneath the surface, some at the kernel level. The file copy slowness is a sign of major issues, and the way it utilizes multiple CPU’s is completely wrong - one app freezes, the rest bog down, where in Linux if Firefox freezes for a little bit (as it regularly does on some sites), the rest of the system is as responsive as ever.
Heck, Vista can’t even download a file on my laptop without making the cursor skip slightly but noticeably - that indicates a very major issue. Don’t think it’s just that my laptop is horrible - it’s a 2Ghz Core 2. Something is just very wrong with Vista.
None of these issues were present in XP. Microsoft somehow seems to have rewritten an OS from the ground up to be better than ever before and managed to make it worse than ever before.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:04 pm
@Jay: yeah, I missed that one
October 31st, 2007 at 11:05 pm
I’m another happy 7.10 user. No issues so far. Installation was extra smooth compared to Edgy, which I still ran. After basic install done, it even asked me, if I wanted to install non-free hardware drivers for my Radeon, and it worked out of the box.