Double post

Okay then. What I was going to say, but shorter.




Market figures
XP: http://pcpitstop.com/research/osxp.asp
Introduced Oct 25 2001 (seems longer don't it!). By June of 2003, it had 50% marketshare - 20 months at most (Looks closer to 17 to me on that chart, but since we're eyeballing it, let us be pessimistic.)
Vista: http://www.e-janco.com/vistamarketshare.htm
Introduced Jan 30th 2007. in the 17 months till May of 2008, it has acquired 14.55% market share.

Fast defined thusly - in the same time period, more or less, XP achieved three times the market share. Them's the cold numbers - there may be a few percentage points difference and if I were doing this for a college course I would verify things like methodology and such. But the fact is it's not going to make that big a difference with data this clear cut - if XP was 5% worse and Vista 5% better, you're still arguing about over double the uptake rather than over triple.

That's not to say that Vista necessarily *deserves* to do well - but establishing that someone doesn't 'deserve' to have problems doesn't help deal with the fact that they got problems.

Personally - I don't like Vista. I think Microsoft made some bad calls that have contributed to it having some fundamental problems, in addition to some problems I think it would have if MS had made perfectly good calls all the way. But before we argue that, I think it's sensible to acknowledge that, no, the Vista issue is not just XP all over again.

Jonnan

What in the world are you talking about? Taking advantage of multiple CPUs is more about how the application software is designed, not how the OS is designed. XP and Vista are both aware of multiple CPU systems and can control which threads go to which CPUs. How do they not take advantage of multiple CPUs?



Only if you want all of the cool Aero transparency effects. Vista works fine without the effects. If you don't care about the cool effects, you don't need to spend a dime on a video card.

Not to mention that the vast majority of video cards, even the cheapest ones, can handle the transparency stuff. My old GeForce 6800 had zero troubles with Aero's effects. You can buy a video card that handles it for $20.

I've been using Vista on two systems so far, and while yes it initially had troubles, I don't think the problems are anywhere near as bad as people are saying they are, especially after the first service pack. It's running quite smoothly on my system at the moment.

I really don't see that it's so bad that anybody needs to downgrade a system. Especially systems that have it already installed! As far as I know systems with it already installed have zero troubles with it, so there's no reason to downgrade them except for pure emotional hatred of the OS.

Especially after SP1 of Vista there's really no need to downgrade. I don't think there's any killer bugs left after SP1. I think this is mostly left over anger from Vista's rocky start.

Yeah but how many people where included in that survay? I'm willing to bet there are a lot more people with computers now than their where back in 2003.

Precisely!! To be blunt, I think anyone (not talking businesses here) who downgrades their Vista PC to XP is a bloody idiot... given most driver/software incompatibilities have been resolved, that nowadays propriety brands are Vista built and hardware compliant/compatible.

After having paid for Vista, it makes no sense at all to wipe it entirely off the machine to favour an older OS that's gonna get the manufacturing/support death nell from its creator sooner rather than later. Hello, dual boot, anyone???



That and the fear of change... having to learn how to navigate/use a new OS when the last one took an eternity to get accustomed to.

Uh - What?!?

Whether you have a market of a million, a billion, or a trillion is rather irrelevant - the question at hand is whether business are accepting Vista at the same rate they were accepting XP.

Statistically, the answer is no - 85% of businesses so far have decided to hold off for the moment, whereas at this point in XP's Lifecycle, well over half of businesses had upgraded to the new system.

To have an intelligent conversation about the subject, you kind need to either accept or debunk that premise, and arguing size of the market does neither - at this stage, the market is commoditized and unless you can argue for some factor that doesn't scale with the market size itself, the size of the market is irrelevant.

This is a matter of percentages. Vista isn't getting them.



As someone that works at a helpdesk that supports corporate clients, while Vista is improving, exactly 0% of our high end clients have moved over because of software and driver compatibility issues. From personal experience - Let me put it this way - My mother switched from Vista to 64bit Ubuntu, and driver compatibility improved.

If Linux *improves* your driver issues, you might be a not ready for prime time operating system.

Well, you can't exactly blame Microsoft for driver issues - it's the hardware manufacturers that make the drivers, not Microsoft. The only drivers Microsoft makes are a few generic drivers and drivers for their own hardware. All of which currently work great.

Sorry, but that's just not Microsoft's fault. They've been pushing hard for the hardware manufacturers to release new drivers. Problem is, they have no direct control over the situation.

But I am curious: Which hardware are currently having problems?

No matter how many times it said people still can't seem to understand things, businesses very rarely upgrade unless they have no other option. And by no other option I mean they are more or less forced into upgrading. That or corporations are so large that when they finally sort through all the bureaucracy it's probably been a few years and the chances of a newer OS being released are very likely. Calling Vista a failure because many corporations have not upgraded is a terrible example.

And the amount of people in the survey does matter. Here's a theoretical example: If 25 percent of people used XP out of a million people a year after releases, and 15% of 20 million people use Vista a year after release. Thats going to be a bigger number of people using Vista a year after release than XP, yes? That was my point. You really can't compare numbers like that because 25% of the market is much (emphasis on MUCH) more people when compared with 2002 stats and 2008 stats.

XP's uptake percentage had to have been helped by the windows ME situation. It got to move in when every one hated the last windows release. Vista doesn't have that.

As for having the correct hardware to run Vista - for the love of God does anyone remember when XP came out? How many computers came with it and only 128MB ram with some of that shared to the video card? Or 256mb and an entry level Celeron CPU?

For the record I support Vista and XP computers daily for work. As a general rule any printer or camera made in the last 4 years will work with no problem with Vista and the same can be said for most software (although sometimes it can take a bit of effort for the more obscure). The catch is in the unique software coded for a very small percentage of the pc community and this is where I can understand corporate hesitation (not to mention IT support for the large % of people who would freak out at an OS change)

I also find it odd that people never mention the positive sides to Vista - how many people have used "instant search"? Its an amazing search utility that takes very little time to do a search of the entire drive. Much much better than XPs search (for those of you in IT it vastly reduces they "It didn't save (when they just don't know where it was saved)" or "I don't know where it was saved" complaints)

Also, there is the built in support for flash memory (The new super fast SSDs). XP can, but only with a decent amount of 'tweaking'
Better multi core CPU support
Improved network-ability (Vista to Vista networks always seem easier to set up than XP to XP - esp in regards to printers. Vista to XP can be a crap shoot although thats usually XPs fault)
And there are the versions of Vista that are 64bit

I had the good fortune to win a HDD and a Vista 64 Ultimate disk in April of last year. At first I ran into a fair bit of problems with programs (no driver issues for me though). Some of my games would crash and a lot of free programs I got for XP didn't work so I spent a lot of time dual booting.

I took a couple of months but now I rarely use XP as even with the 64bit version, I encounter next to no issues and am a very happy Vista user

Agreed, there are advantages to using Vista.

Instant search is cool, but it seems like the indexing happens at inconvenient times, causing my system to crawl unnecessarily. I would love to be able to schedule when indexing happens.

There are a lot of small improvements in Vista. The troubleshooting is much improved, allowing the user to see if there are any patches or fixes available. Vista tries much harder to automatically resolve networking and other problems than XP does, and if it can't resolve the issue, it fails with much more informative messages.

Under the hood, a lot of stuff has been rewritten. It's not obvious to the user, but it will make a big difference to developers.

There are actually 64 bit versions of XP, but very few hardware vendors support it because almost nobody uses it.

Actually, properly configured, XP's search rocks quite nicely - I concede that it never occurred to me to properly configure it until i had a program that made use of it (Pixvue IIRC, a nice little IPTC search/editing program that I *do* wish had a linux equivalent), but it wasn't hard to do.

For myself - for anything but games, I like Ubuntu, 32 *or* 64 bit, better than either XP or Vista - it only takes slightly more power than XP, but it's as powerful or more powerful than Vista in almost any metric. Prettier too - {Grin}.

As for WinMe? Actually, just doing some searches now, it looks like Me never broke single digits in market share (I'm seeing 3.78% in 2004, not finding earlier data - but Me was only out for a year when XP was introduced), people got it with their PC's for that year, but nobody really upgraded to Me. Then of course XP took a lot of the good features of Me and put them in a much more robust package. So XP was primarily competing with Windows 98, and Windows 2000, both of which were not hated, but XP was a definite improvement.

Vista on the other hand, I just don't see a good reason to use. Linux is now a viable desktop OS, my games will run on XP, and no one has made a case for me to go from XP to Vista. The only genuinely powerful improvement was the new filesystem, and that got killed off the year before release.

Jonnan

Try WindowsBlinds . You are, after all, in Stardock's forums.



I pretty much quit using Linux because dual booting isn't my idea of fun, and Windows does what I need anyways. Vista has DirectX 10 for games, has a much faster search tool than XP, Aero is so much better than Luna, and don't forget security: Vista is Microsoft's first OS to compete on *nix's level for real security. I'd even say that secure desktop makes it more secure than Linux, since it makes it more resistant to keystroke loggers.

Ah - No. Vista doesn't really compete with Linux on security issues. Don't get me wrong, it has some genuine improvements, but as someone that has to support it for people, it's security methodology is simply an improved implementation of a philosophy that goes back to Windows being a single person OS.

That is not BTW, something I think MS is particularly at fault for - it *does* have an evolutionary history there that is reflected in coding practices, while Linux/Unix evolution is very much based on multiple accounts with differing privileges, but it does mean that the NSA can produce a Security Enhanced Linux kernel, and it doesn't mean altering my practices after it's been adapted into the baseline kernel. The same features aren't implementable under Windows, because the coding practices have a great deal of momentum - they still expect access to privileged areas of the OS, and having a new user click an "okay" doesn't mean they aren't going to compromise their OS - that is after all the same protection scheme MS tried to use to get people to not click on virii in their email, writ large.

(I am also personally aware of some network weaknesses in Vista that are obscure, but go back years, and MS seemingly has no intent to fix. There is stuff that bypasses *way* too much security that I don't understand why MS has allowed to stand - they *don't* seem to connected to any good reason I can come up with. I'm bamboozled by the fact that there hasn't been a major security breach based on it - it's obscure, but fairly powerful.)

All that said - in the hands of a computer literate user, XP and Vista are both "Good enuff", and if it were based just on program availability - well, almost everything on Linux is either ported, or port-able to Windows - Gimp and Blender are good examples. The only feature that I think isn't going to get ported (Because of the different security models, and the risks it would create under Windows that just aren't there under Linux) would be apt-get/synaptic.

But frankly, that's enough - Imagine a combination of windows update and stardock that automatically updates every program - Game, browser, word processor, security holes, *everything*, everyday. You want to install a program for looking at stars, search synaptic for astronomy, it tells you five programs, pick which one you want to install - if it needs something else installed first, it gives you a heads up and if you still want it downloads everything the program needs. And it's all installed. Almost never needs to reboot (Which doesn't bug me like it does the hardcore linux junkies, but is nice. If you don't shut it down, linux only reboots when the kernel updates - that's it.)

For Games - I will keep my dual-booting XP Partition. But for day to day work? Having everything up to date, every day, Ubuntu is so much better than Vista it's not funny, and I have it running, and running well, both on brand new hardware (My Moms PC actually - works better than the Vista it came with. At least, according to my Mom.) older hardware that Vista would laugh at (my 3200+ AMD 32 bit PC), and on old 700 Mhz hardware (My music/tv/file server is a 700 mhz processor, with 256 Meg of Memory)

So, why exactly would I want Vista again?

{G} - Jonnan

Windows has supported multiple user security since NT, but the problem is convincing users they want it, and convincing developers to avoid writing code that requires administrative access.

A lot of users are doing the equivalent of logging into *nix as root all of the time and ignoring user accounts altogether. Windows is perfectly capable of running in a manner similar to *nix if it's set up properly. I advise people in XP to have separate user and administrative accounts all the time. What happpens? They decide, against all advice, to dump the user and run as admin 24/7.

In Vista, the equivalent is turning off UAC. Again, they just went from a dual user (with the user switch being the UAC prompt) to a single user setup with the user being an administrator. It's actually a bit more complex, but that's the general effect.

What would you do if all of the people ran *nix on their PC, and ran as root all of the time? It would be a complete security nightmare, would it not?

Truth be known, most home users don't want the multiple user stuff. They're not running a business, so they don't want or need it. They want a single login where they can do everything and they want to be secure at the same time.

So this is the security nightmare that Microsoft has to deal with - nearly all home users want to run as admin/root, against all good advice.



I would wager a wild guess and say that it's not something that somebody outside a firewall could take advantage of?



I totally and completely agree that the one thing that is missing from all versions of Windows is a centralized package management and update utility. Steam and SDC are nice, but so far they're just for games and Stardock's own software.

Yes, NT supports multiple user security, but it tacked it onto a system that did not have that originally, either codewise, or culturally, and both of those make a vast difference. Codewise, because there are internal systems in windows that were designed without it - items have been upgraded in layers, patched and so forth, and it has improved vastly over the years, but beneath the surface, even on Vista, there is not a cohesive philosophy. Imagine a building, a skyscraper, built with multiple doors and windows in an undeveloped area - you trusted your mailman, the back door was never locked, but as more people moved into this rural area, you needed to lock doors, except the mailman had a mailroom, so he needed keys, and then sometime in the nineties you hooked your Integrated Echoing system through everything because the government said it was illegal, but you thought if you could present it as a fait accompli they'd leave it be, but it has airducts so large as to only make sense in a spy movie, the mailman has retired . . . and on and on.

Culturally of course because all the engineers that work in this building are *used* to having keys to all the doors, they know all the shortcuts, there's a maintence stairwell nobody else uses that goes from level four to level 22 so you can ignore the keycard check-in in securities floor on five . . . Shut up or they'll LOCK it! Then you'll have to wait in line with the peons!

So Code and Culture both act against securing Windows. And of course, there's the simple fact that all too often you actually *do* need admin access for some specific thing. If you're at work, IT may modify permissions properly, toggle things around. Or they may just say the heck with it and give you admin rights.

The flip side of which is that Unix/Linux was built this way from the ground up. Culturally - yes, I do see people coming over from Windows that set themselves up as root, but if you convince them not to, they find out - they really *don't* need root access on a regular basis, because Unix and Linux *assume* you don't have admin rights - why would you? Thus on Windows you have to learn to code specifically to avoid invoking something that requires admin rights - On Linux, you have to code specifically to take advantage of admin rights if you're going to need them. In both cases, most people don't.

As for the other - Microsoft has chosen security through obscurity on this. Yes you need basic network access - but given that, if you can access shared data at all, you can access all shared data regardless of permissions through a non-trivial but easy to implement 'feature' of explorer. From what I've tried to find on it, there's not a lot you can do to stop it on a network, and I have not gone to the effort to find the ultimate limits of the access, but it's considerable. 'nuff said.

Jonnan

Well, Microsoft does seem to claim they've overhauled everything, including the network stack. Yeah, the older OSes were very insecure when it comes to file sharing, practically by design. The security holes you see are likely Microsoft trying to maintain backwards compatibility with older OSes - I'm sure Microsoft is aware of the problems. I think there's an option somewhere to increase network security at the cost of compatibility. I know that in my networking options I can tell the system to require a password.

At least it can't get through a firewall or router, so there is some separation between the network and the Internet, even though inside the network it may still be a bit vulnerable.

And you're spot on with the developer culture: Current Windows developers are way too used to coding assuming administrative rights. In fact, one of the reasons for implementing UAC in the first place was to tell developers "yeah, we're serious about moving people away from administrative accounts. Get used to developing in user mode." UAC is as much about changing the habits of the developers as it is making the users more secure.



I wouldn't be surprised. What they really need to do is to move to a new protocol, one that requires encryption and authentication. I haven't looked at the networking stuff recently, but I wouldn't be surprised if the file sharing stuff wasn't encrypted. It's been a long time since I was on a LAN shared by a lot of people, but I do remember file sharing being very insecure.

With people just sending files via email these days, and with flash drives holding a lot of data, I've found that I almost never use file sharing anymore, so I usually just turn it off. I think that Microsoft plans on completely replacing file sharing with their new "Live Mesh" concept. If it's successful, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually got rid of their old file sharing system.

https://www.mesh.com/

Yea, it is a terrible loss not to be able to type a string of lengthy lines into your command prompt in order to install the programs. And then to search the internet for a couple of hours in order to find out which programs you have to install (more command prompt -lines) as well, just to be able to run the one you wanted to install originally. Double-clicking on an *.exe-file is soooo much harder after all.

Yes, I am aware that the newest Ubuntu flavours handle the dependencies for the user, and even provide a graphical UI for installation. But I can still vividly remember the days of the command prompt, of compiling and of giving up totally frustrated after trying for two days making a little proggie work on your linux-system.

Linux is an excellent OS, and I have been double-booting since I built my first machine. But I would never go as far and praise the apt-get system over the Windows 'double-click on the file and it installs itself completely' approach.

Win98 BSOD' and froze much more frequent than WindowsXP. A lot of smaller businesses had used Win98 rather than Win2000 because of its cheaper price, so upgrading to WinXP would have been a definitive advantage.

Vista always had the problem that it had to follow the most successful MS-OS released to date. Besides buying a new computer, people just don't have a reason to upgrade to Vista as XP is still as rock-solid and still runs most of the programs released.

I have the feeling Windows7 will have an easier start as it will be released at a time when a lot of those old XP-machines out there will start to die. Not just in the private homes, but also in all those businesses that had waited until 2005 to upgrade their fleet of computers and with it their OS to XP.

Vista is a good OS, but the market was just not quite there right from the beginning.

Windows 7 is

I think they learned their lesson, having overhyped Vista so thoroughly and then scrapped virtually all the most ballyhoo'd features.

Short answer - That's *really* out of date for Ubuntu - synaptic under Ubuntu is *nothing* like that.

Truth in advertising: I'll confess - before this apt-get synaptic system was introduced, I was never willing to deal with linux because of exactly that - I could install a good OS, but Good God - updating anything was a nightmare, and I, quite frankly, was unwilling to deal with it. It was sometimes easier to compile the &*^%*% thing than it was to do what should be a simple install.

Under synaptic - it is (IMO) *easier* than installing a windows executable. Not *much* easier - it doesn't get a lot easier than doubleclicking a file. But, if you had to go to all the ah 'trouble' of actually downloading it from a familiar website when you knew exactly where it was, then you've actually gone to more trouble than synaptic will give you.

The hardest thing I've done with synaptic so far was add a third party repository (Because my Mom loves Picassa, and wanted it on her machine), and if the site has a repository on it (Google does btw) then it's just add the repository, add the signature key, and tell synaptic to install it.

For basic use - that's *it*. No compiling, no RPM's or deb files - you are done.

There *are* things you can do with apt-get using it directly that you can't do with Synaptic - I think they're a tad quick on the trigger linking some packages together (ex. I found you can't install just 1 KDE game from Synaptic, without it considering a bunch of other games as a package deal) but for anything that's already in the repository? Search, select the package, click apply - go make a sandwich while it downloads and installs the files. Wanna install 20 programs - Search, select the 20 packages, click apply, make a somewhat bigger sandwich.

And of course, once you've installed it via Synaptic/apt-get, it updates automatically.

So I *am* an unapologetic Synaptic fan-boy. I think, if repositories really get rolling on this where it becomes common practice to just give someone a signature file and a repository URL, synaptic will the the 'Killer App' that kills windows off. It is *the* primary reason I am on Ubuntu rather than windows. Security and stability are nice, but not worth giving up the selection of windows software for, same with eye candy (Pretty as Ubuntu is.)

But putting my mom on a computer and *knowing* that her copy of evolution and staroffice and her drivers and everything else she uses is up to date - *that* is *so* worth it. At this point she's comfortable installing stuff herself, she may ask me for an opinion, but last month she downloaded four astronomy programs for my niece and nephew, decided she only liked two of them, and uninstalled those two.

She's 60, She started on Linux in February, and she is *that* comfortable with it.

Jonnan

Short answer too; That's exactly what I said as well.

Sorry - it sounded like you were peripherally aware that it had gotten better since the bad old days, but weren't aware of how much.

As far as I am concerned, Ubuntu has gone in a very short period from being lightyears behind Windows in ease of use to lightyears ahead - I was shocked at the difference in such a very short period, and assuming that anyone familiar with Linux would 'Just know' how much it has changed seems unwarranted - {G}.

Again, with apologies - Jonnan