I doubt very much that MS will be gone, but Linux distros will have grown considerably and command a greater market share than they do now. I am playing with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon at present, and if progress in the Ubuntu distro is anything to go by, I foresee more people adopting it as time passes.

I may use and like Vista, but I also like and use XP and Ubuntu.... and if I had a Mac, I might also like and use OS-X. I guess what I'm saying here is that each OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and by embracing all of them, I can access the best computing there is to be had.

The way I see it, I was given two eyes, so I'm not going to look at Oses with just one of them and decide which ones to keep and which ones to hate. Like anything else, you have to go into it with both eyes open to get a true evaluation... sadly, there are one eyed opinions everywhere, but none will dissuade me from forming my own.


I find Ubuntu rather different, not as easy to navigate and with a steeper learning curve than XP or Vista, but I don't hate it.... and I think sometimes people who are unfamiliar with something will shy away because it is inconvenient to learn something new in today's busy, busy world... in some case it's sheer laziness, simply because learning is too big an effort....why bother when what they already have just works!

I have used many different Linux distros and I can say many of them are very good. KDE is getting better every day.

If your computer use is light and is online most of the time instead of running Photoshop or CAD tools (some of the most advanced CAD tools run on Unix/Linux platform though), you will have no problem with today's Linux.

I don't expect MS to go away and don't believe that will somehow give us a "choice". Today if you are not using Linux and don't like MS, you are not using your choices. If someone who is comfortable with computers is not switching to Linux, MS will remain the choice for average people.

Very well said, Fuzzy.... nailed it perfectly

the things is that unlike in the 70's when software writters and distributers used to have many "computers" to write foer now theres really only the PC and the Mac. What has taken over is the OS's where there are really only 3 real contendors, M/soft, Linux(pick a flavour), and the Mac.

This can now be split into 2 catagories intel based or Motorola based. Because there are more intel based computers out there software manufacturers usually don't like write for mutliple processors anymore and the intel has the biggest share..

and going back to the OS's the most used OS out there for home pc's is windows.

so we are in a catch 22 situation.. we can't change os's or PC's to what we really want to use because the software that we want to run isn't available for them.. and the software writters won't write for other os's that don't return enough revenue. in order to get the software writters to once again support other os's / PC's we need to buy them..

rather then like in the 70's where our first consideration was the Computer we purchaced and then we ran what was available for on them and were content and happy..

This goes against M/softs way of thinking .. this is why the Software we want to use is now more important.. so as long as no new kids come on the block to threaten their strong hold on which OS gets written for they can and do dictate what hardware we use because of our wants and needs.

also we have the 70's to thank for m/softs success as thats when computers were always sold with an OS and sample programs (otherwise no one would have bought one).
now that there is only the 3 os types at least 2 of them have us by the short and curleys.. Linux is the swinger.. Linux systems were never never really designed arounsd the home user. but more like an alternative for business machines. which is strange as businesses that can more affoed to purchase OS's are benifiting the most out of the Free Linux's. X windows only really came about to help display and organise scripts run regularly as push buttons and to give a common library to display crapgics.. it was never started like Windows and Leopard were to be desktop oriented from the word go. so it'll never really compete. also Linix being open format makes things harder to develope a standard for these desktop platforms.. why.. because many ppl have their own ideas on how it should work.. hence all the many mirad flavours of linux and why software writters just shake their heads when it comes to writting for linux, they don't just have to concern themselves with the OS but the different desktop managers where M/soft and Apple don't .. they have just 1.

Now with Windows Vista.. there has alwas been security Flaws and weeknesses in it. inlike linux you were actually encoutaged to just have the one account (due to the old 70's computer where you never really had to even log into most) many ppl don't even have passwords set-up. M/soft has been fighting against years of built up habbits.. and peoples lack of understanding. Linix on the other hand has always required you to log in to their users are used to it.. and the limitations that come with. Now that Vista requires you to have a normal user account that ISN'T admin/system wide access and now requires people to give programs / events permission to change files and access to do certian things people are not liking having to click those requestors all the time.. of which a lot can be over come by installing the software as a user as opposed to an admin.. ie: each user has their own set of files .. a concept that most home users arn't used to.. ie: if its on my HD i can access them (but then can everything and everyone else)

Vista is the First Version of windows for the home user that is not pandering to the simpleness of the gone by eras where everyone wasn't our to get you and your data.

As for the timing of Vista every OS has a lifespan.. otherwise the software is limited in its expansion.. (remember the good old days when all PC software was fully backward compatable .. and how limiting it was to write for the new hardware because its routines weren't backward compatable.. it was an idea doomed from its inceptiption) As hardware improves so must the software was the old addige .. now days its more the other way around.. where the software is now telling us what hardware to get. and if we don't upgrade we'll be left behind.

Yes Vista isn't just an OS anymore .. a lot of it many of us will never really use or understand.. but like all things people want more for their buck. an OS is really just that .. its meant to Operate the System Hardware. anything above that isn't really the OS .. they are tool's and utilities and games, to help Sell windows it has a lot of dressing and eye candy.. which is what ppl want to see these days .. (don't believe me.. ?? just look at all the top selling games out there.. if they don't have drop dead exciting graphics and don't look realistic then no one will even look at it until they've run out of those that do..) So a lot of windows bloatware is OUR fault. its also easier for m/soft to sell one package than heaps of smaller ones.. so thats why they have so many things in there.. we are paying for them even if we don't use them

M/soft has been very slow in making us accept things that we should have been made to many many years ago.. about user accounts, security etc.. now that they are people are complaining.. people hate change at the best of times.. anything that breakes their statusquo is bad.. and the winge.. change is inevitable we all know it but don't normaly like it because then we have to change our ways

M/soft isn't to blame for Vista we are.. if we'd have a;ll stayed good little boys and girls then we wouldn't need all these security changes etc.. and if we paid for what we got instead of wanting everything for so called free then it wouldn't be as bloated.. Even linux systems aren't even just the OS anymore. neither is the Mac..

Even though all this has changed there are other things that are spoiling us now that can and do take over from the easyness of the old PC's with just as much eyecandy.. yup you guessed it game console machines .. just like in the old dos days if you didn't want to do things yourself others will do them for you at a price.. and a lot higher price it is too.. Computer hardware is changing in an very fast rate.. more than 4 times a year ther are new cpu's g/cards etc .. so generally speaking when you buy a console machine its normaly already outdated.. but at least you don't then have to worry about Viruses and security because you simply turn it off and everything is back the way it was ready to start afresh.. but without the freedom of a home computer..

Sorry for rambling on so much but yes its really only one OS out there if you want to play PC games and thats m/softs.. of which the latest is Vista .. like it or not .. we have to accept it unless we all want to convert all the games we love to play onto other platforms.. Emulators and Virtial Machines arn't the Answer as they Can't do what the original OS does the exact way .. or as fast

So to a;ll the complainers out there i have only one thing to say and thats to go and get a game console machine then you never have to worry again (well not untill the next model cones out in 6 months to a year .. unlike Windows which comes out with a new flavour every what.. 2-5 years.) Yes the life Span of any OS out lasts the updating of Software for console machines.

I know there will be those who disagree with some if not all of what i've said and thats ok.. just don't flame me for my opinions rather think about what i've said and compare it to what you think.. life is too short to winge and complain get over it

Granted, Aero looks “cooler” than XP's fisher price "Luna" UI, however that seems to be vista’s only advantage i’ve seen thus far. Now before I get accused of being a troll or windows basher, I never hated XP, far from it, in fact the only thing I disliked was Luna, which could easily be remedied. The thing I loved best about XP and 2000 pro to an extent was how those OS’s prevented program hangs from bringing down the entire system. A quality I thought could be enjoyed in vista as well, which it can but only after tweaking and disabling certain “features”. The first thing I hated about windows vista on first run were most of the default settings which are essentially unnecessary crap, guess they didn’t learn from their previous OS regarding services. I won’t elaborate as there are far too many to name, furthermore they have been addressed here many times and all over the internet. Secondly, aside from annoying and seemingly useless “features”, Vista doesn’t seem to play nicely with the nForce 590 SATA controller at all. True story: I installed vista on a new 500GB hard drive attached to the n590 controller on my motherboard, installation was expedient but when shutting down or restarting, my pc would take an eternity (I gave up counting after 10 minutes). I thought I'll just upgrade the drivers since I was using the defaults supplied by vista. So I went to the OEM's website and downloaded the latest drivers hoping to remedy the shut down problem and it did. Unfortunately after upgrading the drivers, vista began crashing and system stability gradually declined until one day it just refused to boot at all giving me a black screen with grey text informing me I had to reinstall vista WTF??? Ok fine I though i'll just format the HD and switch it to the Sil3132 ctrlr on my mobo and everything will be alright, WRONG! That annoying shutdown problem persists! Ok so I figure if I install the n590 drivers this time, vista won’t crash since the HD is on the sil3132 and not the n590 ctrlr. I reinstalled the drivers and the shutdown problem is gone without crashes or system degradation, great I thought. I then noticed a strange sound like hard drives down spinning but vista was still running ok, so I dismissed it as nothing. It wasn’t until I rebooted into XP and had to wait 30 seconds (which felt like an eternity) for my PC to finally detect my XP array, that I figured out what was going on. The driver update was now apparently fucking with my XP raid setup on my n590 ctrlr. So either I put up with an agonizingly slow shut down or eventual hard drive failure due to vista being a piece of shit software “product”. Suffice to say I’m back in XP using the vista designated hard drive as a backup now... People will scream “oh, you’re just an idiot who doesn’t know anything/any better!” or “you have to be experienced in windows, it’s not for beginners like you!” all I have to say to them is that when bill gates advertised windows (to death I might add from his own mouth and “unbiased” “news” articles) he stated it was designed to be faster, better, easier, verb, adjective, noun, ect. than it’s predecessors…for the average even novice user. Nowhere did he ever state that vista was for the technologically elite and that “people who don’t know what their doing” should stay clear, or at best not criticize vista’s indisputable “perfection” because any flaw the end user discovers is nothing more than a mere comprehension deficiency on the part of the end user and not a design deficiency of the consumer product itself. Micro$oft wanted a monopolistic stranglehold over personal computers and they got it. The fact is that there is no longer a need for the Redmond company to provide competent hardware support anymore, because the user has no other alternative and Microsoft is fully aware of this. Further proof of this is the lack of empathy Microsoft has for it’s customers whose hardware MS “refuses” to support, another example is pricing, the reason Microsoft products are so expensive is not because of “innovative” design or because it’s “new” (hardly the case as it’s just a heavily revamped server 2003 code) but as stated earlier, gone are the days competition and sadly innovative incentive. People can argue but what about the MAC? What about it? Apple prices low to mid-range hardware at cost prohibitive premiums. They arrogantly claim superiority to “PC’s” because they are a “hardware company” but the only thing that’s really “apple” are their cases! OSX is based off of FreeBSD and last time I checked neither ATI, NVIDIA or Intel were subsidiaries of apple. Furthermore by shackling their OS to a proprietary platform, it’s almost as if they have signed a non-competitive agreement with Microsoft. Back to vista though, clearly vista is crap priced as if it were gold. If you read the EULA carefully you don't really "own" this product but rather the "privilege" to use the license, which I might add can be revoked at their will at anytime for any reason. Might not seem like a problem now but when support ends for this crap (which it will) and you need "mandatory" activation it will be nothing more than a $500.00 reflective coaster as E.T. won't be able to “phone home” anymore. Micro$oft and monopoly are a bunch of crooks since when do you make an expensive purchase for something and not own it? Oh right, it’s different because it’s “intellectual” property…Microsoft can spin it anyway they wish but in the end it’s just like the emperors new clothes, where a group of crooks deceive an emperor by masquerading as tailors and take a commission to make him new clothing. They flatter and build up the monarch’s ego so much that he actually believes them when they tell him how good he looks in his new clothes, that he doesn’t realize he’s completely naked and that he had been swindled. The truth of this is revealed by a child who is not fooled by the nonsensical rationalizations of the emperor and the pragmatically obedient grown-up subjects of the monarch and focuses on the obvious truth, which can be seen merely by believing what your eyes and ears are telling you. Micro$oft are the tailors, the critics, the morons who bought this operating system and defend their purchase are the duped Emperor and his suck-up subjects. Those of us who know a collection of bullshit recordings when we see them are the lone child who hasn’t rationalized himself into a state of utter stupidity.
I may not be “733t” but I’m far from being “an idiot that doesn’t know what he’s doing”, I don’t own the best “rig” in the world but here are my specs:
M2N32 SLI Deluxe, Athlon X2 6000+, 2GB RAM (2x 1GB DDR2 800 PC6400), BFG 7900 GT 256MB, 800GB (2x 400GB raid0 striped XP Pro x86), 500GB SATA (Vista Ultimate x86)

my wall,

Please take the time to format your thoughts into something other than a neverending "wall" of text. Your points are getting lost, which is a shame.

I have to agree with you that Vista has been MUCH more picky and less forgiving at install than XP, by a mile. I just installed XP 32 and 64 and Vista 32 and 64 on the same machine (different drives) so I can give a head to head comparison. I hope that is remedied in SP1, but then we'd all have to install only the slipstreamed version, etc.

But now that I have have fixed a default bios ram setting that was in error on my new machine, I have been able to install and run Vista under 32 and 64 bit flawlessly. It runs amazingly. My default desktop provides a visual experience that stops all users in their tracks (thanks to Stardock's product line, CD Art Display, and DeskPhoto) AND it runs all the software that can't be run on OS X or Linux, so a win win from a Beryl vs. Core Animation vs. Vista DWM point of view.

If *this* Vista had been released this summer/fall with the performance and compatibility patches and the mature drivers we are now seeing, it wouldn't be getting the bad rap it has deservedly gotten. So, it'll take a while for the ripples of that complete MS screwup to fade (and don't get me started on the 8 versions and the out of modern reality pricing) and SP1 is a natural, if arbitrary milestone for redemption.

But then again, for the first time EVER (and I've been a MS beta tester for 20 years now), a Service Pack upgrade (beta or otherwise) munged my OS install (LOST the control panel, etc.). So, while it was great and welcome that Vista was able to uninstall a service pack beta cleanly, I was less than happy that I needed to do so...sigh.

DJ - nice link. Apparently Excalpius hasn't used any of them. The average new user to Linux barely touches the command line anymore.

The X Desktops (Gnome,KDE,or what ever) still access the command line stuff .. a lot (not all) of the system related icons are actually calling command line or editing the config files that are used by the command line system calls

Excalpius - I'll admit installing programs and drivers is done on the command line normally. But there are GUI front ends to the CL.

And I would disagree with your comment that things are going slowly in Linux land. It's moving pretty fast actually.

I will agree with your last paragraph however. For example I went into control panel and had a heck of a time finding ways to do things that are straight forward in XP.

Just because I tell other to use Linux doesn't mean that I don't use Windows myself...

My girlfriend likes Windows so I keep it around.

Does that satisfy your curiosity NT?

And while you're at it, could you please check to see if Kona has started walking like a penguin yet... you know, with all this Linux talk, I'm just curious.