Pity the User

I have recently got the opportunity to get my hands on a copy of Vista Ultimate at MS employee prices. I jumped at the opportunity and, as soon as I ensured all my crucial apps actually ran on Vista (VMWare Workstation in particular), proceeded to install it on my laptop. I spend my working hours (and others for that matter) using this laptop so, although I surely did not get to explore all the niceties of Vista, I got the daily use experience of running it. The first impression was the "Wow" that MS advertises so much. It is indeed an eye-candy-filled OS. It looks awesome and all the UI interactions have been tuned to please the eye, Windows Aero is indeed really enticing. But...the niceties of a new UI only last so much...My daily work is spent mostly on another OS environment. All my work is done on Linux and I had been used to depend on VMWare Workstation to be able to get the best of both worlds and jump around as needed. My experience with XP and VMWare Workstation had been impeccable and I could not recommend it more...Then came Vista...oh well...Suddenly my Pentium 4 3.4Ghz with Hyperthreading, 2Gb RAM started grinding to a halt. Although a year old now, this is not (I believe) a run-of-the-mill laptop...A laptop with these specs should be able to handle this OS plus the apps that I needed to run on top of it! My frustration grew when looking at memory usage on Vista...Just starting up brought me to 600Mb usage, with VMWare I was up to 1.6Gb...this on a 2Gb RAM machine...And I started looking through the nice UI and thinking seriously that I could not work daily with this...The initial "Wow" turned into "Wow, this is unbearable!". So, after some serious consideration I decided it was time to byte the bullet and wipe out my system and replace it by something more snappy that actually made good use of my hardware...Ubuntu 7.04 to the rescue! Ok, I am not religious about the OS war and am one of the people who tries to take advantage of whatever each has to offer so, being the gamer that I am, I left Vista on a dual boot setup alongside Ubuntu (I still have hopes of playing Halo 2 on Vista someday to get my achievements! ). Now I am running Linux as a first OS...my life became a lot less stressing...and I can still run Windows XP or Win 2K on a VMWare Workstation virtual host for all the testing I need to do...The best of both worlds I would say...

With this Windows Vista we are bound to see a new need to get new hardware where once what you had was just fine...and, to be honest, without any real *day to day* real important enhancements that I can see (again, I stress the *day to day*... you might do cool and important things on Vista but I'm betting these are completely irrelevant for the common user).

But I believe Ubuntu 7.04 (and Linux in general) is still not there as well...I had to jump through some serious loops to get my Wireless card and my sound card to work on my laptop...It has evolved immensely no doubts. I still remember the old Linux installations of the early nineties where you really had to be courageous and curious to even try it. But good as it is this is hardly mass user ready...

Pity the user indeed!