Vista a review and comparison with Ubuntu.

Big Dan

I’ve been using Vista for a little over a week now and even though I’ve got Ubuntu 7.10 installed I find myself keeping Windows as the default operating system. Even though, I ordered an OEM copy of XP Pro and installed it but got rid of it because text looked like crap on the screen even with my proper drivers installed. I’ve had to reinstalled Vista twice due to my own screw ups, mainly frying my master boot record whilst trying to triple boot Vista, XP, and Ubuntu.. I got the dual boot down pat, for what ever reason I just cannot get the hang of triple boot, yet.
Some of you are going to hate me because I’m saying this but I’ll apply an OSX phrase to Windows.. “It just works”. So far, I’ve only gotten 1 BSD (Blue screen of death), which was while I was trying to install Zone Alarm; It was so bad that when I rebooted I couldn’t log in to Windows without getting another BSD and a forced reboot. I don’t think a botched firewall install should bring any OS to it’s knees but luckily Vista created a restore point from just before I installed Zone Alarm.
Setting aside the supposedly self hindering and spyware like components of Vista which I haven’t run into yet so I cannot speak of them, Vista just works. Anti-Malware software is built right in, Windows update is very well integrated, just as good as Ubuntu. Although I still get updates for old drivers for my printer when Vista already installed a newer one, it still works pretty darn well.
I got my brand new computer so Vista runs very fast in fact at boot even with anti-virus, Pidgin, and Google Talk running in the background I’m only using ~33% of my RAM. Sure Ubuntu boots faster but doesn’t have as much eye candy. Now, unlike most people I don’t mistake eye candy for a quality OS but I have to say Vista’s eye candy is pretty darn nice. The Sidebar is bar far my favorite feature, it would be nice if the “gadet” directory was better organized and easier to navigate but we all know why MSN is the #3 search engine, the UI sucks. I’d like to see some more gadgets over all it’s a very small selection and I find it interesting that OS X has so many widgets and such a relatively small user base when compared to Vista.
Some minor annoyances with Vista include: User Account Control, that has to be the most annoying piece of crap ever; even running a temp file cleaner like Ccleaner require UAC authorization and it really makes no sense because they don’t even ask for your password so as long as I stay logged in anyone can bypass UAC. Duh, Ubuntu does a better job here requiring a password for administrative tasks, and there’s no false positives. Disabling UAC creates a security warning that won’t go away, I have to research how to make that go away. If I know enough to disable UAC Vista should trust me enough to know it’s repercussions.
Vista’s built in unzipping utility is horribly slow as evidenced by my screen shot but that’s easily overcome by installing a third party utility like 7-Zip, which works A LOT faster.
Other than that I really cannot complain about Vista, it just works. Sure you can get a sidebar like effect with Ubuntu by using either gDesklets, which is buggy or Avant Window Navigator (AWN) but some of it’s applets don’t work correctly and of course these are the ones I want. And that’s often the problem with Linux over all, something won’t run on your hardware OR applications on partially work, it’s the many little things that add up to a major annoyance like installing AWN which isn’t automatic through the apt-get system, it’s annoying to need to copy/paste commands from a forum thread to install something relatively simple when on Windows I could just install Google Desktop or the Yahoo Widget engine for similar functionality. For instance my HD sound card doesn’t work well under Ubuntu sure it will play music but lots of times Ubuntu decides to use the system speaker and beep for what ever reason. A search of the forums turns up no solution.
This isn’t meant to discount all the hard work that’s done for free by many developers all over the world in order to produce a FOSS OS as good and polished as Ubuntu but it’s the little covets that are the clinker for me and I suspect many others.
For now, Vista will remain my default operating system and I’ll boot into Ubuntu for web development work where there’s plenty of nice utilities for that.
If you like what you see buy thee a beer!


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