My fiancee got her new Dell Inspiron 6400 yesterday. Dell are only offering the different versions of Windows Vista as OS options, so obviously, the new laptop came with Vista.
I had a look at it, used it for an hour or so, just to see what the fuss is about! And, to be honest, there’s nothing substantially useful in it. Sure, the new GUI looks good, but it’s nothing that hasn’t already been done elsewhere. The fancy 3-D window switching app is more of a gimmick than a useful tool. The widgets for the desktop are mostly toys and distractions. And, to top it all off, you need a powerhouse to run it on.
The GUI is nice though – it’s new (for Windows) and clean. However, looking from the GNU/Linux side of the bridge, there’s nothing in Vista that hasn’t been available for any GNU/Linux distribution for quite a while. Take the semi-transparent window borders – I’ve been using semi-transparent terminals on my Debian and Ubuntu machines for years! Of course, this transparency is terminal to background, and not to the window underneath. But, there are already mature projects available for Linux which do this (eg. Beryl).
The “Start Menu” has been changed around a bit. It’s got a new “Search” box, instead of going through a few clicks to bring up the search window. I saw this, but didn’t test it – this kind of thing should wait until there’s plenty of files and stuff sitting around on the machine. The menu has maintained the XP side-by-side menu look, but less sizeable. The left side contains a bunch of programs, with access to the full Programs menu from a button at the bottom. The right side has links to your home directory, music, videos (etc. etc.), Control Panel and other bits. It’s a bit confusing, with quite a lot of options that probably needn’t be there.
While having a look through the Control Panel, I came across the “Baseline Score” in the “System” dialogue. Windows will now grade the hardware in your system out of 5 to indicate how well it will perform certain tasks. For example, it says you should have a score of 3 or over to run the Aero desktop environment, but less than 4 means it mightn’t run it well on two monitors. While it’s not a bad idea (software developers can put a notice on their software to say above what baseline their software works best), it again shows the how much computational and graphical power Vista requires.
I really can’t see why this OS was delayed so much. There’s no really substantial updates. Of course, people will knock out the increase in security, phishing protection, the new search, but these things don’t take this long to write! Microsoft missed the opportunity to come out with a substantial upgrade (eg. WinFS) this time, and instead filled their new OS with fluff. It looks pretty, but in essence, it’s XP with a fancier GUI and requiring twice the power.
At the end of the day, the OS is meant to facilitate us in what we want to do. It’s meant to get the hardware into a useable state, then provide a method of using it to the software above it. The software is what we use to do whatever it is we want to do. Microsoft seem to have overlooked this, and filled Vista with bells and whistles, most of which I suspect will be sidelined once people want to use the OS to do something productive.
