Back story
Well today I was upgrading one of my systems from edgy to feisty, and someone rebooted my computer, causing my primary partition to somehow disappear. Being that there was nothing critical on it, I figured I would just do a fresh install anyway. But I have had this Vista disk for some time just sitting here, so I figured I would check it out.
Install process
Install process is very easy. Only like 4-5 clicks. I would say that the Feisty installer is about on even footing with the Vista installer. Initially I tried to put it on a 10 gig partition, but it wasn’t having that. Instead of saying that I didn’t give it enough space, it just kept telling me I didn’t have an appropriate volume. Gave it 30 then it went.
Once installed
Vista doesn’t support my sound card out of the box. Feisty does. Score one for the little guys. I immediately went to download firefox, and when I went to install it the screen when blank for about 8 seconds with a flashing cursor, then came back. Quite odd. Played a little bit with the 3d desktop but it didn’t seem anywhere near as useful as compiz at this point. I finally found out how “user access controls” work also. Everything I tried to do, I was asked again if I was trying to do it. Click add user -> Box comes up asking me if I want to add a user. I supposed I wouldn’t have clicked the icon for it if I didn’t want to add one?
Art
The default art in Vista outclasses Feisty in my opinion (then again so does Fedora). Although I suppose that is trivial as there are a ton of themes at art.gnome.org, but first impressions mean a lot to some people. Getting gdesklets by default, and a bit more polished would compete with their default widgets easily.
Fonts
The best thing about vista is the fonts. Their fonts by default look pretty darn good. I think that might have to do with the default feisty font issue that I blogged about earlier this week.
Conclusion
This may sound bias, but it really isn’t, as my copy of Vista was free, so I have no vested interest in bashing Vista if I am just going to use it in the secrecy of my computer room. I just don’t see a compelling reason to run it. 99% of my computer usage revolves around web browsing, instant messenger, emailing, web design and coding. In those scenarios, Ubuntu provides a better platform that doesn’t get in my way.
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#1 by MattW on April 22, 2007 - 4:38 am
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I think you’ve got a good point about the fonts. Microsoft spent what was presumably a great deal of money getting a whole new set of screen and UI fonts for use with Vista and Office 2007, and they’re very nice – backed up of course by their ability to use patented font hinting systems with impunity.
Still, Linux doesn’t do so badly on the font rendering these days.
And it was nice to see Vista’s installer getting an overhaul. XP’s was essentially unchanged since Windows NT, and that was just getting ridiculous. That said though, the wording used in Vista’s installer at times implies that it’s going to just go ahead and install without asking what partition to target or anything like that, which is a bit scary. For that, I give Ubuntu the edge because at least it does tell you what’s going on in nice clear language.
#2 by erik on April 22, 2007 - 7:48 am
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Funny that you mentioned gdesklets. It has got major problems because the content and the formating are bolted down together. It’s similar to not using CSS on web pages and doing the formating the old way. What it leads into that when you find a good desklet it doesn’t look good with the rest. Also the desklets don’t know how to change to fit the overall desktop colors etc either. Then, there are many overlapping desklets of which none do certain things really well. (For instance most of the mail checking desklets are not imap/tls aware etc)
The idea to enable something like gdesklets by default is pretty awesome but gdesklets should get completely reimplemented.. Also, it needs some definite SVG/Cairo love. For comparison there are couple different ways of making new plugins for the Microsoft’s solution. You can either really start programming or then you can make small xhtml snippet with some scripting.
It’s btw sort of funny that you also mentioned instant messaging as the alternatives for Linux desktop are mostly horrible. It’s the lack of nicely integrated voip and desktop/file sharing that sucks. You have to run separate applications for those needs. Furthermore it’s the idea of running applications.. Geeks love it too much. The normal people want of such applications pervasiveness. The open source solutions are just not well integrated or comfy. Telepathy based stuff could make it but it’s still 2-5 years away from being usable.
Gaim earns a special appreciation here. It doesn’t re-connect automatically to some/all networks. Gaim is a communication application. Communication requires network connectivity. Gaim screws up that part often. That means it screws up the communication part often. The reliability of Gaim is piss poor. It’s like getting a cell phone and having to reset it daily at random times to stay connected to the phone network. It simply can’t work. Imho Gaim developers should be dragged behind the sauna.. (and it still lacks support for voip stuff)
#3 by randomwalker on April 23, 2007 - 6:42 pm
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Echo comment above. Gdesklets needs MAJOR bugfixing and usability work, and perhaps fundamental architectural changes, I don’t know enough to know.
Feisty has the beginnings of online desktop integration. I would love to see web-based file stores enabled by default. How about if Abiword could transparently edit your google docs, or evolution automatically sync with your online calendar.