I’m considering OS X an OS that is about one decade ahead of whatever
MS is doing and I’m not really talking about the UI here, more about
the system as a whole (from the kernel to the UI process and
everything in between).
LOL… OS X is nothing else but BSD with a pretty dress!!! I am sorry but no, OS X is not a decade ahead of windows.
Anyways…
I am not a MacHead, nor a MS fanboy. I like Linux because is free and solid, and yet I am an XP user. I prefer XP because is where I found a middle ground on usability and control without having to dig 10 man pages to do a task. I am not willing to pay $2000 for a Mac (a PC) with a ripoff BSD.
Windows 7 seem OK in beta, but in my opinion it has many quirks to be worked out before I am willing to move.
As for all of us getting off XP, well, it will not happen anytime soon. The company I work for has more than 3000 desktop computers running XP in single processor 2.7 Ghz with 500 MB of RAM. You do the math. they will not change unless they get forced to.
No silver bullet for any of us. Like it has been said before: Use the right tool for the right job.
Ask yourself what are you need and then chose an OS. Linux for your server, XP for the office, Win 7 for the entrepreneur, and OS X for grandma and your aunt so you don’t have to spend time fixing their PCs.
Sure, screwdrivers aren’t sexy, but using one that is bent at a 90 degree angle day in and day out gets a bit… how shall we say… retarded. I’ll go for the power drill (e.g. osx), thanks.
Well, I won’t upgrade my old Celeron 733MHz PC, for obvious reasons. I will be upgrading at work (8GB, 3GHz Core 2 Duo) and my media centre at home - I want the new 7MC features!
Have just bought a new laptop with Vista Home Basic and will put 7 Business on it straightaway.
Speaking of price, I use Linux and get a free, virus-free operating
system that gives me no grief at all and provides endless opportunity
to learn with 1000’s of free programs, some of which are clearly
better than paid proprietary alternatives.
Why bother with Vista/Windows 7?
@Pete: Yes, when you think of it, it’s rather insane why everybody still uses Windows so much, but from a historical point of view understandable.
But also most people do not buy Windows separately, they buy a new pc or laptop with Windows pre-installed and so you don’t ‘feel’ the added price, it’s all in the package…
But since i have always build my own pcs, i usually pay the full price, which is quite a lot i think, especially when i have to pay that same amount again within two years.
I like using Vista, i think it’s a great OS, really, it does everything a good OS should do, but knowing there is an alternative that’s free, has always made me doubt to finally switch to a linux distro.
For now the only thing that really keeps me, is the Adobe Software family which i use very frequently. I really hope it will one day be available on linux.
jeeezus! On one hand you have Linux:OS-X:Windows fanboys, and now on the other we have XP:7 fanboys. And the PPC:Intel for the macs.
Personally, I prefer to live the 1700s, back in those days women had no votes; actually, no-one had any votes, but then voting is for pussies anyway so it never bothered me so there; the health system consisted of some leeches and a hack-saw (who really needs all this so-called ‘medicine’ anyway, it’s just eye-candy), and oh how I miss those witch hunts, back then we really knew how to fix bugs in our society. And for farming let’s be honest, all you really need to feed 6 billion people is a horse and some turnips. For these reasons I see no reason to ‘upgrade’ to a little ‘service pack’ for these so-called ‘2000s’
if you don’t find screwdrivers sexy, why do you want to convince us to get a new one?
I’m saying you should avoid using the rusted screwdriver which is liable to burst into fragments and cause a crippling hand wound at any time!
Jeff Atwood on July 27, 2009 7:02 AM
Many of us thought of that a long time ago and moved to Mac or Linux.
I wonder how Windows 7 will handle those things that made me move–the fact that closing and opening the case caused XP to crash more often than not, the fact that XP degrades significantly over time, the fact that XP is pretty much always infected with some virus or keylogger…
I would not move from XP for looks/sexyness, if that’s really what you are after move to a Mac or Ubuntu (which has far sexier graphics than pretty much anything out there once they are enabled…)
On the other hand, I won’t know if 7 works until it gets loaded up with dell’s crappy drivers, the crappy drivers that come with the video card, some crappy mouse and network drivers and an anti virus system; yet is fully usable within a second or two of opening the lid of my laptop.
@Thras I see comments like this EVERY time Vista is brought up. You were lucky, and had a good experience. Good for you. I installed it despite the nerd rage because I figured by SP1 it should be stable enough. I built a new system on Vista-compliant hardware, and suffered for months until I finally had enough and put XP back on.
The majority of my problems can be attributed to driver problems. I wiped it when the USB system quit working completely, even in safe mode, so I was totally unable to do anything. Before that I was plagued by sound problems, wifi problems, you name it. It was just beyond frustrating. Win7 will be a better experience just by virtue of the fact the the drivers are finally getting stable.
Some of us have just had a really bad experience with Vista through no fault of our own. And there are a lot of us.
Speaking of price, I use Linux and get a free, virus-free operating
system that gives me no grief at all and provides endless opportunity
to learn with 1000’s of free programs, some of which are clearly
better than paid proprietary alternatives.
Why bother with Vista/Windows 7?
@Pete: Here is my problem with your comment: “some of which are clearly better”. “Some” is not good enough for most of the world and “clearly better” is completely in the eye of the beholder.
“A world where people regularly use 9 year old operating systems is not a healthy computing ecosystem”
so unix is too old to use too?
I’m not getting it Jeff…
if it’s patched and up-to-date, who cares if you have the whiz bang new feature if you dont need it?
Great news about the Family Pack for Win7. Unfortunately from the comparison chart at Microsoft’s web site it looks like I’ll need Professional in order to connect up to my domain at home. I may very well be wrong about that as the feature comparison chart is rather, uh, light in details.
I’m just reluctant to replace something that is working just fine for me with something new and shiny just 'cause. I was more than happy to jump from the Win9x ship to XP, but my machine will run for weeks without a reboot now, so I’m just not seeing the compelling reason to put Win7 on my old computers.
For corporate users I think one of the most important features of W7 hasn’t even been mentioned yet. Windows XP app virtualization. I am also an Enterprise Windows admin and this one feature makes W7 an easier upgrade than any previous version of windows.
Bill K says:
“I wonder how Windows 7 will handle those things that made me move–the fact that closing and opening the case caused XP to crash more often than not, the fact that XP degrades significantly over time, the fact that XP is pretty much always infected with some virus or keylogger…”
You know, maybe you should stop visiting random porn websites and run alien binaries with no discretion? No operating system will protect you from your stupidity. I never had a single virus/malware infection in Vista with no antivirus ever since January 31, 2007. AND yes there are lots of other ways to check viruses without installing anti viruses.
@EBGreen
Have in mind that you will need to pay for two licenses, one for Win 7 and one for XP in order to use virtualization.
So now you company have to buy 3000 Win 7 licenses in top of the 3000 XP ones. Upgrade all the hardware. Oh!! and don’t forget: It is 3000 clean installs!!! I love to see all the missing documents these users will have.
And all of this for what? What makes this a good business decision to upgrade?
Completely agree - I migrated from XP to Vista early on and was very impressed with it. But, after 6 months of using it (and losing my XP installation disc), Vista was on the verge of becoming completely unusable. I reformatted 4-6 times while on Vista.
As soon as the Windows 7 beta was released publicly, I installed it as my primary operating system and I haven’t looked back since! This is truly the best operating system to ever come out of Redmond.
I wouldn’t mind using Vista or Windows 7, so long as I could keep the Windows XP user interface - in particular, Windows Explorer (including start menu) and the control panel etc. layout.
Speaking of price, I use Linux and get a free, virus-free operating
system that gives me no grief at all and provides endless opportunity
to learn with 1000’s of free programs, some of which are clearly
better than paid proprietary alternatives.
Why bother with Vista/Windows 7?
You are clearly out of mind.
It’s virus-free because less than 1% of world population uses it. It gives you endless opportunity to screw up your system if that’s what you mean.
AND tell me, what are “some of which are clearly better than paid proprietary alternatives.” out of your 1000+ programs. I guarantee you, with rare exceptions, 900+ of them are all crap.
For example, give me an FOSS equivalent MS Office Suite. Like Excel, Word, OneNote, Outlook and stuff. No, OpenOffice, and Tomboy don’t count. Their functionality is equivalent to like MS Office 97 with 10x more memory usage.
I’ve long thought that the only things keeping people on XP (besides plain old fear of change) are (1) that they are locked into Microsoft document formats and (2) aging hardware.
Obviously an OS with higher hardware requirements doesn’t solve problem 2. Linux is more and more user-friendly. I think many people would be surprised that a light Linux distro on their aging hardware can perform better than XP.
But for that to be reasonable we also have to solve problem 1. We need a real Linux office suite that interfaces well with MS formats (OO.o doesn’t count last I checked). Until we have that, or until everyone has oodles of money to throw at new machines, XP will always live on.
