Windows Vista: the first impressions…
Well, I had some problems, few weeks ago, installing the Public Beta of Windows Vista, so I leave the DVD at home. Yesterday I have installed VmWare on my Ubuntu 6.0.6 and I decided to try again. The first time I had some problems with the dual boot, but this time, in a virtual environment, the installer was successful!
The virtualization is slower than the normal environment, but my t42p is quite good and I have to admit that vmware performances under linux are quite good!
First of all I have to say that the appeal of the new Microsoft OS is really great: they are pumping up the “Digital Experience” (as they call it). Both Gnome and KDE has still a lot of distance to go to reach the new Vista! In a certain way, Vista resembled me of Mac Os X: the widgets, the gray forms and the closing buttons have a lot of the Cupertino design. There are no hard corners, everything seem to be “in armony” with the rest of the layout, more or less like Mac!
The OS is not that fast, even if I set 1GB or RAM only for itself, and of course the virtualization gives the machine “only” 64MB of video ram, that is not enough to play with a lot of gadgets…
Gadget!
This is the word that can express my first impression on Windows Vista: a very good layout with a lot of gadgets that caught the eye of the users! But the functionality? Vista is a RamSucker, the Dracula of the OS as far as I have been able to see, and a lot of this resources requirement is used to caught the eye of the users, to give them all the little stuff they love so much, but sometimes the windows were quite slow in opening, closing or moving!
In the name of the “Security” (and I didn’t understand yet it the users security or Microsoft one) every time a user tries to access a system option the OS requires to confirm the action.
“An administrative function has been started. Did you do it? Otherwise Windows will not let the process to be executed… FOR YOUR OWN SECURITY!”
And in all this security I wasn’t able to change my hosts file… because I got no Admin privileges, even if I was in the Administrators group. In the end I discovered that some applications can be launched “with administrative privileges”…
The performances of Windows Server 2003, on a Vitual Machine equally configured, are still much better, and the feeling I had using Vista was to have a game under my hands, not a powerful server or a dedicated development environment!
Of course I know that a book should not be judged by its cover, but if from one side this cover is brilliant, really eye catching, from another I was like a child playing eith a new game!
I know that the appeal of the new OS will be very welcomed by the world, because the eye candy is loved all over the world… the perfect example is that the most used web applications are those with a lot of skins, not those with the best performaces…
I will work on it a little bit more, trying to stress it with some “killer apps” in order to understand where this Vista is going, if it will be a suitable environment for the development or if this version I have (that is still a beta) will try to attract the eye of the end users, while a performat version will be released without any graphical support (as it was for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003).
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