Sorry, Windows XP was a fantastic success because nothing better came after it for 8 years? Surely that's an indictment of Windows Vista, rather than an endorsement of Windows XP?
And while it sounds like there were plenty of useful improvements with Windows XP (I skipped straight to Mac OS via flavours of Linux so I've never used it in anger), are you really saying that the single thing that changed the world most in the last 10 years is something that let people share spreadsheet files easier, rather than, say, the Internet (e.g. wikipedia and imdb), or suddenly being able to listen to shitloads of music wherever you were?
It was such a fantastic success *that* nothing better came along for 8 years.
And yes, I think "the simple, consistent, easy interface into computers, which was the same everywhere you went, and yes happened to give you access to all the internet stuff in the same way everywhere" was pretty fucking significant.
It's not that it *couldn't* have been anything else, but it *was* XP.
I don't know if I think it's quite as huge as you say, but I will pitch in with the XP love. Clown-car graphics aside (which turn off anyway and wasn't that just the first thing everyone did?) it has made me very, very happy.
Oh, XP was lovely. It took the "just works technically" awesomeness of Win2k and sanded down the corners to make it easier to use. And personally, I never minded the interface.
Windows 7 feels much the same way to me. Most of the time it's possible to forget it's even there.
I am very curious about Windows 8 for pretty much that reason. I am wondering what they are going to do to it, and whether it will make it worse, or if they will surprise me...
There are so few ways in which it could be any more perfect.
I have Windows 7 at home, so that I can play Half Life 2 and Plants vs Zombies. Almost every day I swear at it for annoying the hell out of me.
It still reboots in the middle of your game, because it applied updates in the background and didn't bother to alert you. It still refuses to install all large updates, because the partition size is too small (I gave it 20Gb, and put everything else on another partition -- how much space do you need?!). Oh, and in the time it reboots once, I can cold boot my netbook three or four times.
The mouse jerks all over the place and I cannot get it to sort itself out. Nor can I figure out how to apply X mouse settings.
The command line is shit; there's only one desktop; I can't move windows around by pressing alt and clicking anywhere in the window; I can't transfer files back and forth from my Linux partitions; every single application you install has its own updater sitting in the background trying to update; should I mention the pain I went through to install the damn thing? Windows still uses a registry, about the most user unfriendly way to store settings in existence, and sometimes you're forced to edit the registry to fix things; DirectX; I have some funny bug where all the menus on the task bar appear 10 pixels above, and I can't select anything any more, but I didn't change anything! Aaaargh!! >_<
Any of the above might be fixable with 3rd party programs, I don't know. I understand that not every one will feel this way, and might not miss or even know about the features that others feel should be there, but it just makes me feel that Win7 provides a really shoddy and basic experience, that's actually less functional to me than Win2K. I despise every minute that I'm in Windows 7, but not in Plants vs Zombies.
The mouse isn't jerky so much as the acceleration is all wrong, and I can't figure out what to change.
I needed to touch the registry by hand to install Windows (that is, if I didn't want to install XP and upgrade to 7), and there have been other things I've needed to change. The fact that it exists at all despite being a user catastrophe for 15 years is an issue.
I said reboot, not boot. Either way, it's still slower than Mac OS or Linux (admittedly not all distributions are fast yet).
Powershell? I'll have to look into that. Although it probably won't fit, since I only gave Windows 20Gb of hard drive to play with </snark>.
DirectX is not awesome, it's terrible. So bad that it's positively an anti-feature. Microsoft's amazingly incompetent handling of DirectX has pretty much led to stagnation in PC game design for several years, and a whole pile of graphics cards with a whole pile of features going unused. They got greedy, and though they could control the gaming market, but ended up fracturing it. Is it any surprise that most games are still being written for DirectX 9, because it's the only system guaranteed to capture most of the market?
I don't see why The Registry is a disaster. It's a central database of user and system settings that's designed entirely for programmatic access. If you're having to touch it at all then you're doing something you probably shouldn't be.
I'm not sure what your problem with DirectX is, as numerous people (including John Carmack, who knows waaaaay more about this stuff than I do) have said that it's a better interface for 3D than OpenGL is. Certainly, the first few versions were bad, but my understanding is that it's been a well-designed interfaced since about version 5.
I'm not certain what John Carmack's view on DirectX is, but I note that his as-yet unreleased idTech 6 engine still uses OpenGL.
The problem with DirectX is that Microsoft decided that they could get all the gamers onto Vista by making DX10 incompatible with XP with a few changes to the driver model (there was no good technical reason for doing so, especially since DX10 offered so little over DX9, Microsoft have even admitted this to be so). Unfortunately, Vista didn't attract the gamers, and many people continued to use XP, and were stuck with DX9. Videocard manufacturers designed their cards to use DX10, and then DX11, but very few games companies bothered to make use of the extra features (why, when more than half your market can't make use of them?). To add further friction, the XBox 360 uses a version of DX9, discouraging designing games with DX10 or 11, and so the XBox is complicit holding back PC gaming.
Even now, when many more people are using Win7 and DX11, games companies still aren't interested. DX was at one point great (unless you were an OpenGL fan), it was competitive, adding features, drove games design and promised to unify the market, but instead it did the opposite. DX became poisonous, and the game market is going to continue to stagnate for a while yet, until they start to trust Microsoft again (beyond the usual ways that we don't trust them).
Aaaah. I agree that they should have backported DX10 to XP. It does seem to have been entirely a marketing decision, and one destined to leave it basically unused by the mainstream.
Once XP dies off (it stops getting security updates in 2014) I suspect MS will continue to have this problem.
DirectX 10 not running on XP was painful when Vista was new, but I'm not sure it's a problem now?
I mean, surely most the people still using XP also aren't going to be the people who have the latest graphics cards anyway. Writing a game to require the latest hardware features is going to reduce your market anyway. (You can write games that work on older hardware, but you can support DirectX 9 and later versions too; both involve a bit more work.)
I've heard the argument that consoles hold back PC gaming in general - again, the hardware issue, but this would apply with non-MS consoles too.
On the other stuff, I think Ubuntu and Windows 7 are both great, and each have some minor advantages over the other in various areas. I'm not sure there's much of a difference in boot times (both are far slower than my old Amiga!), and Ubuntu if anything requires more reboots due to all the bloody updates all the time.
I believe Win7 adoption has been far better than Vista, with a large proportion of home users now using it, but I'd imagine that there are still a great many people using XP even with the latest graphics cards. Knowing how far some gamers go for performance, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few went for XP claiming greater framerates (although I can't provide any data on that myself). And what about all those business users, running games after work? ;)
Ubuntu does claim to need rebooting fairly often, but the only time it's actually required is after installing a new kernel (and even that isn't set in stone). Often restarting X will be sufficient to bring any new libraries into play. Of course it's much easier to suggest to most users just to reboot, but it's mostly just a suggestion.
Incidentally, they've achieved 5 second boot times with Ubuntu now, with other distributions like Fedora are getting pretty fast too. I know it's not that impressive, considering how much faster these machines are compared to the Amiga, but it's not bad going. My netbook doesn't quite manage 5 seconds, but it's still pretty quick.
I've never had Win7 reboot on me without waiting for my sayso, and it lets you put off the next alert for hours at a time instead of having to click 'no, fuck off' the way I did every ten minutes with XP.
I know for a fact there's software available that lets you have multiple desktops (as my workmate uses it).
I haven't experienced your mouse problems. Maybe I just have an awesome mouse (it is a pretty awesome mouse).
Although you're obviously finding it harder to navigate around, I'm finding it easier than ever before with the awesome and very pretty 3D carousel you get with Win+Tab. Further to that I love the way I can click+drag a window that's maximised and it automatically puts it on window view for me to move it.
Can't speak for the more techie stuff 'cause I'm not a techie, but then, neither are most users of Win7 or indeed basically any mainstream OS, so I'd say the logical response on that front would be: it's not made for you, techie, go use Linux!
Windows 7 is fast, user friendly, and intuitive. System settings are more rather than less accessible, and things always go exactly where I expect them to. Even the little bells and whistles that I thought were pointless (like the window frame transparency and the way the toolbar does a fade into the foreground of items when you hover over them) actually turn out to be really useful for generally speeding up my user experience when trying to juggle a billion different things at work on a dual monitor set-up.
I'm not saying that any of your quibbles don't exist. I'm just saying that if most people don't have them, they're not major quibbles. The sad fact I've learned working in IS is that a problem in development world is only as big as the number of people affected by it.
I've never had Win7 reboot on me without waiting for my sayso, and it lets you put off the next alert for hours at a time instead of having to click 'no, fuck off' the way I did every ten minutes with XP.
The alert probably came up mid-game, and it rebooted when I was on flag 47 of survival endless. I was not happy. Anyway, it seems to want to reboot a lot.
I know for a fact there's software available that lets you have multiple desktops (as my workmate uses it).
I did say that 3rd party software might solve some of those problems, it usually does (e.g. something other than Internet Explorer, a better text editor, a better word processor assuming you didn't get Office bundled with your PC etc.) Since I'm not a regular windows user though, I don't necessarily know about it unless it's already on my machine and I can have a tinker round and find it.
I haven't experienced your mouse problems. Maybe I just have an awesome mouse (it is a pretty awesome mouse).
Mine is an awesome mouse (or was when I bought it 5-6 years ago). I needed to install Logitech's software to use all the buttons, whereas it just worked in Linux. The acceleration problem is that it doesn't feel the way it should, and no end of fiddling will fix it. I know that some systems handle things differently (e.g. Mac OS does many things differently to Windows, like how it handles fonts) and there is no objective best way, but it's annoying when you can't get something so basic just the way you like it.
Although you're obviously finding it harder to navigate around, I'm finding it easier than ever before with the awesome and very pretty 3D carousel you get with Win+Tab. Further to that I love the way I can click+drag a window that's maximised and it automatically puts it on window view for me to move it.
I've never encountered the 3D carousel, but that might be because I've always used alt-tab, and you say it's Win-tab. I'll try it out.
Can't speak for the more techie stuff 'cause I'm not a techie, but then, neither are most users of Win7 or indeed basically any mainstream OS, so I'd say the logical response on that front would be: it's not made for you, techie, go use Linux!
I do use Linux the rest of the time! This is what happened when I tried to use Windows for its primary purpose (games). Seriously, I actually went out and bought a copy of Windows, direct from Microsoft, giving them money! There are some places where Windows really should try harder, like at the very least recognising that I have a hard drive with a partition it can't read without a 3rd party driver, rather than just calling it free space (and would I like to format it?). It does sometimes feel like Microsoft are willfully ignorant.
Windows 7 is fast, user friendly, and intuitive. System settings are more rather than less accessible, and things always go exactly where I expect them to. Even the little bells and whistles that I thought were pointless (like the window frame transparency and the way the toolbar does a fade into the foreground of items when you hover over them) actually turn out to be really useful for generally speeding up my user experience when trying to juggle a billion different things at work on a dual monitor set-up.
I disagree with fast, Windows spends far too much time being slow (and I've not loaded anything except antivirus and anti spyware, so it's probably not that -- maybe it's Steam?). Intuitive is subjective, and from years of using Linux I've found myself doing things in a particular way. I'd imagine Mac OS users trying Windows might have a similar experience.
I'm not saying that any of your quibbles don't exist. I'm just saying that if most people don't have them, they're not major quibbles. The sad fact I've learned working in IS is that a problem in development world is only as big as the number of people affected by it.
Well, by intuitive I meant that there are quite a few things that work differently from XP, which I've been using for the best part of a decade, and yet I had no trouble whatsoever transferring.
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andrewducker) wrote2011-08-28 09:58 pm
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And while it sounds like there were plenty of useful improvements with Windows XP (I skipped straight to Mac OS via flavours of Linux so I've never used it in anger), are you really saying that the single thing that changed the world most in the last 10 years is something that let people share spreadsheet files easier, rather than, say, the Internet (e.g. wikipedia and imdb), or suddenly being able to listen to shitloads of music wherever you were?
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And yes, I think "the simple, consistent, easy interface into computers, which was the same everywhere you went, and yes happened to give you access to all the internet stuff in the same way everywhere" was pretty fucking significant.
It's not that it *couldn't* have been anything else, but it *was* XP.
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Windows 7 feels much the same way to me. Most of the time it's possible to forget it's even there.
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I have Windows 7 at home, so that I can play Half Life 2 and Plants vs Zombies. Almost every day I swear at it for annoying the hell out of me.
It still reboots in the middle of your game, because it applied updates in the background and didn't bother to alert you. It still refuses to install all large updates, because the partition size is too small (I gave it 20Gb, and put everything else on another partition -- how much space do you need?!). Oh, and in the time it reboots once, I can cold boot my netbook three or four times.
The mouse jerks all over the place and I cannot get it to sort itself out. Nor can I figure out how to apply X mouse settings.
The command line is shit; there's only one desktop; I can't move windows around by pressing alt and clicking anywhere in the window; I can't transfer files back and forth from my Linux partitions; every single application you install has its own updater sitting in the background trying to update; should I mention the pain I went through to install the damn thing? Windows still uses a registry, about the most user unfriendly way to store settings in existence, and sometimes you're forced to edit the registry to fix things; DirectX; I have some funny bug where all the menus on the task bar appear 10 pixels above, and I can't select anything any more, but I didn't change anything! Aaaargh!! >_<
Any of the above might be fixable with 3rd party programs, I don't know. I understand that not every one will feel this way, and might not miss or even know about the features that others feel should be there, but it just makes me feel that Win7 provides a really shoddy and basic experience, that's actually less functional to me than Win2K. I despise every minute that I'm in Windows 7, but not in Plants vs Zombies.
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I've not had to touch the registry by hand in about the same amount of time.
DirectX is awesome.
And my machine boots to the desktop in under a minute, despite running far too much crap that I can't be bothered to streamline.
And Powershell shipped with Windows 7, which gives you a very nice command line.
Not being able to tell it not to reboot I'll give you.
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I needed to touch the registry by hand to install Windows (that is, if I didn't want to install XP and upgrade to 7), and there have been other things I've needed to change. The fact that it exists at all despite being a user catastrophe for 15 years is an issue.
I said reboot, not boot. Either way, it's still slower than Mac OS or Linux (admittedly not all distributions are fast yet).
Powershell? I'll have to look into that. Although it probably won't fit, since I only gave Windows 20Gb of hard drive to play with </snark>.
DirectX is not awesome, it's terrible. So bad that it's positively an anti-feature. Microsoft's amazingly incompetent handling of DirectX has pretty much led to stagnation in PC game design for several years, and a whole pile of graphics cards with a whole pile of features going unused. They got greedy, and though they could control the gaming market, but ended up fracturing it. Is it any surprise that most games are still being written for DirectX 9, because it's the only system guaranteed to capture most of the market?
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I'm not sure what your problem with DirectX is, as numerous people (including John Carmack, who knows waaaaay more about this stuff than I do) have said that it's a better interface for 3D than OpenGL is. Certainly, the first few versions were bad, but my understanding is that it's been a well-designed interfaced since about version 5.
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The problem with DirectX is that Microsoft decided that they could get all the gamers onto Vista by making DX10 incompatible with XP with a few changes to the driver model (there was no good technical reason for doing so, especially since DX10 offered so little over DX9, Microsoft have even admitted this to be so). Unfortunately, Vista didn't attract the gamers, and many people continued to use XP, and were stuck with DX9. Videocard manufacturers designed their cards to use DX10, and then DX11, but very few games companies bothered to make use of the extra features (why, when more than half your market can't make use of them?). To add further friction, the XBox 360 uses a version of DX9, discouraging designing games with DX10 or 11, and so the XBox is complicit holding back PC gaming.
Even now, when many more people are using Win7 and DX11, games companies still aren't interested. DX was at one point great (unless you were an OpenGL fan), it was competitive, adding features, drove games design and promised to unify the market, but instead it did the opposite. DX became poisonous, and the game market is going to continue to stagnate for a while yet, until they start to trust Microsoft again (beyond the usual ways that we don't trust them).
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Once XP dies off (it stops getting security updates in 2014) I suspect MS will continue to have this problem.
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I mean, surely most the people still using XP also aren't going to be the people who have the latest graphics cards anyway. Writing a game to require the latest hardware features is going to reduce your market anyway. (You can write games that work on older hardware, but you can support DirectX 9 and later versions too; both involve a bit more work.)
I've heard the argument that consoles hold back PC gaming in general - again, the hardware issue, but this would apply with non-MS consoles too.
On the other stuff, I think Ubuntu and Windows 7 are both great, and each have some minor advantages over the other in various areas. I'm not sure there's much of a difference in boot times (both are far slower than my old Amiga!), and Ubuntu if anything requires more reboots due to all the bloody updates all the time.
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Ubuntu does claim to need rebooting fairly often, but the only time it's actually required is after installing a new kernel (and even that isn't set in stone). Often restarting X will be sufficient to bring any new libraries into play. Of course it's much easier to suggest to most users just to reboot, but it's mostly just a suggestion.
Incidentally, they've achieved 5 second boot times with Ubuntu now, with other distributions like Fedora are getting pretty fast too. I know it's not that impressive, considering how much faster these machines are compared to the Amiga, but it's not bad going. My netbook doesn't quite manage 5 seconds, but it's still pretty quick.
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I know for a fact there's software available that lets you have multiple desktops (as my workmate uses it).
I haven't experienced your mouse problems. Maybe I just have an awesome mouse (it is a pretty awesome mouse).
Although you're obviously finding it harder to navigate around, I'm finding it easier than ever before with the awesome and very pretty 3D carousel you get with Win+Tab. Further to that I love the way I can click+drag a window that's maximised and it automatically puts it on window view for me to move it.
Can't speak for the more techie stuff 'cause I'm not a techie, but then, neither are most users of Win7 or indeed basically any mainstream OS, so I'd say the logical response on that front would be: it's not made for you, techie, go use Linux!
Windows 7 is fast, user friendly, and intuitive. System settings are more rather than less accessible, and things always go exactly where I expect them to. Even the little bells and whistles that I thought were pointless (like the window frame transparency and the way the toolbar does a fade into the foreground of items when you hover over them) actually turn out to be really useful for generally speeding up my user experience when trying to juggle a billion different things at work on a dual monitor set-up.
I'm not saying that any of your quibbles don't exist. I'm just saying that if most people don't have them, they're not major quibbles. The sad fact I've learned working in IS is that a problem in development world is only as big as the number of people affected by it.
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The alert probably came up mid-game, and it rebooted when I was on flag 47 of survival endless. I was not happy. Anyway, it seems to want to reboot a lot.
I know for a fact there's software available that lets you have multiple desktops (as my workmate uses it).
I did say that 3rd party software might solve some of those problems, it usually does (e.g. something other than Internet Explorer, a better text editor, a better word processor assuming you didn't get Office bundled with your PC etc.) Since I'm not a regular windows user though, I don't necessarily know about it unless it's already on my machine and I can have a tinker round and find it.
I haven't experienced your mouse problems. Maybe I just have an awesome mouse (it is a pretty awesome mouse).
Mine is an awesome mouse (or was when I bought it 5-6 years ago). I needed to install Logitech's software to use all the buttons, whereas it just worked in Linux. The acceleration problem is that it doesn't feel the way it should, and no end of fiddling will fix it. I know that some systems handle things differently (e.g. Mac OS does many things differently to Windows, like how it handles fonts) and there is no objective best way, but it's annoying when you can't get something so basic just the way you like it.
Although you're obviously finding it harder to navigate around, I'm finding it easier than ever before with the awesome and very pretty 3D carousel you get with Win+Tab. Further to that I love the way I can click+drag a window that's maximised and it automatically puts it on window view for me to move it.
I've never encountered the 3D carousel, but that might be because I've always used alt-tab, and you say it's Win-tab. I'll try it out.
Can't speak for the more techie stuff 'cause I'm not a techie, but then, neither are most users of Win7 or indeed basically any mainstream OS, so I'd say the logical response on that front would be: it's not made for you, techie, go use Linux!
I do use Linux the rest of the time! This is what happened when I tried to use Windows for its primary purpose (games). Seriously, I actually went out and bought a copy of Windows, direct from Microsoft, giving them money! There are some places where Windows really should try harder, like at the very least recognising that I have a hard drive with a partition it can't read without a 3rd party driver, rather than just calling it free space (and would I like to format it?). It does sometimes feel like Microsoft are willfully ignorant.
Windows 7 is fast, user friendly, and intuitive. System settings are more rather than less accessible, and things always go exactly where I expect them to. Even the little bells and whistles that I thought were pointless (like the window frame transparency and the way the toolbar does a fade into the foreground of items when you hover over them) actually turn out to be really useful for generally speeding up my user experience when trying to juggle a billion different things at work on a dual monitor set-up.
I disagree with fast, Windows spends far too much time being slow (and I've not loaded anything except antivirus and anti spyware, so it's probably not that -- maybe it's Steam?). Intuitive is subjective, and from years of using Linux I've found myself doing things in a particular way. I'd imagine Mac OS users trying Windows might have a similar experience.
I'm not saying that any of your quibbles don't exist. I'm just saying that if most people don't have them, they're not major quibbles. The sad fact I've learned working in IS is that a problem in development world is only as big as the number of people affected by it.
True. Meh :P
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it's loaded with Vista.
the temptation to swing either way [XP, 7] is vast. Just waiting to see whether I can get away with Ubuntu at uni