During the last couple of weeks I’ve been checking on Windows Vista Home Basic edition. I intend to buy a license for this edition of Windows to use on one of my computers and I decided to run it in trial mode for a while before actually purchasing it together with some other software I will need. This is the first time I use Windows Vista and the first time during the 4+ years with the Linux Desktop that I spend more than one hour being logged into Windows.
I guess I have changed a lot regarding how I see computers during the last years. At this moment, all I care about is to accomplish several tasks and that will require me being focused on those tasks rather than on the operating system. Quite frankly, I do not care if the operating system is called linux, windows, solaris or “jack’s operating system”. All I need is stability, reliability, performance and being able to install and use even the rarest piece of software with ease in a few seconds without having to deal with stupid naming schemes, forbidden items, license incompatibilities. I definitely do not need any pimping regarding the software I use on my desktop.
The Linux desktop’s progress in terms of stability, reliability and performance has been extremely slow. This is not the developers’ fault or the users-testers’ fault. I believe the problem lies in the huge number of linux distributions which result in a tremendous waste of time and effort. Moreover, I believe that people spend way too much time and effort in organising the communities that surround the linux distributions instead of spending time to improve the software, which is the actual goal after all.
So far, I am impressed with windows Vista and with the other software I am checking out. Time will show what I will finally use on my primary desktop.
Checking on Windows Vista by George Notaras is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Windows is more friendly than Linux. At least you have a lot of time to lose every time you have to install something, the right choice is Windows. I prefer XP rather than vista, beacause it doesn’t need so many resources…
I thought I was the only to like Vista better than XP. I consider Vista an improvement although MS’s effort was not welcomed by the world-wide market who preferred to stay on WindowsXP.
Either way, talking about productivity… have even been on a mac? Because if you like vista, then you should try the (admitedly) most advanced operating system alive: Leopard (waiting for Snow Leopard).
Apart from that, I’m the other way around: I was for 4 years sitting on a mac/windows platform and crashing occasionaly on Linux servers via cli (ssh).
Imho UBUNTU has made a great thing, it made linux more user friendly, but then again I just use linux for simple office tasks, while most of the time I just use Gmail-services (it could be done through *any* computer). But, again, Ubuntu was a very positive surprise.
@Panagiotis: My views are pretty much aligned with yours, except for Macs. I’ve never used one and I feel just too lazy to learn anything beyond Linux or Windows. Of course, I do not undervalue Macs.
I will probably write a detailed post about some of the things I liked or disliked about Vista in an upcoming post.
Thanks for your feedback.