I really don’t think Vista itself is as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Much of the problem with Vista comes down to hardware compatibility (or lack thereof). The steep hardware requirements for Vista to run decently (and not just the aero eye candy part) no doubt alienated probably 90% of the existing XP user base. Not good. So by bringing out a new OS upgrade that won’t run acceptably on most existing hardware… 9 out of 10 people are going to complain (and rightfully so) that Vista is nothing short of horrible. And I don’t blame them one bit because for 9 out of 10 people… Vista IS horrible.
To compound that, I think that some of the new(er) machines that came bundled with Vista still weren’t quite up to the task. The 1GB of ram which seemed like ridiculous overkill last year isn’t even close. Anyone working with onboard video ram (or worse, sharing system ram for video) is likely in for a severe case of “click and wait”. And nothing will infuriate a user more than to buy a newer system supposedly “Vista ready” only to find out that while their system will physically run Vista… the user experience is absolutely terrible. This is why MS quickly ushered in XP “downgrades” for many “Vista ready” machines.
In that respect, MS really did drop the ball with Vista. No one who bought a supposedly Vista ready machine really cares if their problems are hardware, or software related. They just know that it sucked! Had MS stretched the truth a bit with their claims “Vista ready”? Apparently. But again, it really doesn’t matter why to the end user. They only know that if they go back to XP they will certainly return to an enjoyable user experience. And too, that their Vista experience “sucked”.
I’m primarily a Mac user so believe you me I’m NOT sticking up for or defending MS or Vista in any way, shape or form. I’m just trying to put things into perspective. In the past year or so I’ve run “the big 3” (Mac, MS and Linux) so as time goes on I really become less of a Mac user and more of just a “system” user, using whatever tools best suit the task at hand. There’s lots and lots of PC and Linux software out there too so I really like having those options. And virtulization really is the way of the future.
On a brand new Q6600 quad core machine with 4GB ram and 256MB Nvidea card Vista runs just fine. Oh sure, it still has it’s share of MS “quirks” (I can’t create a useable Photoshop droplet on Vista for some reason, stuff like that.) And yes those dumb security nags ARE pointless and silly but still not as bad as everyone makes them out to be. On that same machine my experience with Fedora 8 really was dismal. I could not get Flash or Java to work and after literally weeks worth of reading and trying this, that and the other thing still could not solve the problem.
Anyway, I think the majority of people bashing Vista these days are simply parroting what they’ve heard/read without any firsthand experience whatsoever (or perhaps installed Longhorn beta on a P4 with predictably dismal results). I would invite anyone to sit down at a truly capable machine and put Vista though it’s paces. Then you would be evaluating the software itself for it’s merits/detriments without the bias of unsuitable hardware. Now what constitutes a truly Vista capable machine IS a very major problem and that’s really the only point I’m trying to make here. So yes I think MS absolutely dropped the ball on Vista to be sure, but not for the reasons that most people think. ~ZP
