Hasta-la-Vista

After like 6 weeks I removed Vista from my laptop last week. The main culprit was application compatibility (or lack of thereof) – either not installing, not running, not running well i.e. crashing OR requiring “tricks” (read annoyances) to run (run as admin and stuff) and other random, lesser annoyances.
Off course the fact that I also have Ubuntu on my laptop means that on an average day I won’t use Windows anyway – be it XP or Vista. Nevertheless I miss the integrated search. Beagle sucks. I’ll give tracker a try and post some comments about it – if I remember… I probably wont.

Off course performance (or the lack of it) had something to do with it but it was a significant factor (just another “little thing”).

Generally speaking there’s something about Vista that seems to cause more attrition – you are forced to become aware of it for some reason(s) I can’t seem to figure out what exactly. No it’s not UAC, I turned that off – it got really old, really fast (“sigh. continue”) and I suspect turning off UAC will be the norm among Vista “power users”/experts/wtv. I should probably mention that I’m used to Ubuntu’s password prompts whenever I need to do admin stuff and those are NOWHERE near as bad as UAC – in fact I don’t even consider those prompts all that annoying (except when they take a while and I forget in which monitor they are opening in). That’s because you get the UAC prompts (yes, plural) not at the start of the application/installation but only when the applications actually tries to do the admin stuff. So much for unattended installations. I found it very annoying. And why not go all the way instead of that half-ass “continue” button, why not just ask for the password? (wouldn’t surprise me if they were just afraid of trojans imitating it)

Ok that UAC rant was a bit off-topic… I was talking about attrition, I didn’t explain very well what I meant by it. I’m sure GUI experts have some term for it but I don’t know it. The GUI just seems to run contrary to some common GUI design principles at times – mainly those of directness (try changing the wallpaper or the theme), efficiency/predictability/consistency (the new control panel where everything is at least a thousand clicks away in 100 different types of menus/tabs/wtv and you have to guess where and when you do you’re rewarded with something that looks a lot like the old XP applet where it used to be 2 or 3 clicks away from the starting line), comprehensibility, simplicity and clarity. Though it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly where (except in the control panel case), but it just annoys me (though I think it’s mainly windows explorer and the taskbar/system tray). I used Vista for 6 weeks, and I’ve every version of Windows since 95 excluding ME (yeah I dodged that one, the only (large) version of Windows that became a flop so far), and I couldn’t get used to it. Plus the more Gnome evolves the harder it is for me to go back to any Windows, I just miss Gnome and it’s attractiveness. Something else that is to blame for my lack of patience with Vista is that every time I boot into Windows it feels like a chore. It’s something I don’t want to do, it’s something I’m being forced to do.

Funny thing. There was a time when linux newcomers complained about installing apps in linux and said that I should be more like in Windows. Now it’s the other way around. People try Ubuntu and ask why isn’t app installation in Windows that easy and convenient. I doubt that’s something Microsoft will ever manage to do.

Thank god for Linux and GNOME (and Mark Shuttleworth for Ubuntu).

Now compare my Vista experience with that of OSX: today, for the first time, I used OSX for more than 5 minutes unattended simply because I left my notebook at home and Filipe was in a meeting (thanks btw) . A full half hour! And I got used to it. I was quite impressed with how fast I got used to it – and I how much I actually liked it (loved the growl notifications that kept popping up) – though I obviously didn’t use it long enough for major annoyances to appear (like some linux/windows app that has no equivalent in OSX or having to use interface-crippled software like VLC). Sucks that I have to admit it (but no way I’m going to stop making no-one-uses-it jokes). I feel dirty somehow, like I’ve joined the unwashed mass of Mac-Zealots *eeew* I already felt slightly ashamed of belonging to the same species as them… But I’ll go even further: if I knew what I know now (namely that linux’s power management would keep sucking) I would’ve bought a macbook (one of the 13″ models probably) one year ago when I bought my Vaio. There I’ve said it. Now I’ve got to go take a bath.

But before I do one more word of praise for Linux and another stab at Windows: my Windows XP installation currently occupies around 40GB. My Ubuntu installation (including 3 different desktop environments – GNOME, KDE and Xfce not counting fluxbox which is too small to matter anyway) occupies around 4GB – 10x less.

In Summary:
Why don’t I use Vista? I have something better, it’s called Ubuntu.
Do I recommend OSX? No, I haven’t used it enough to recommend it or recommend against it. One huge disadvantage is that it’s tied to Apple hardware. (Zealots: please don’t bother telling me how that’s actually a hidden advantage, it’s not)

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Related posts:

1. Windows Vista – First Impressions
2. Reasons to Switch from XP to Vista
3. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta White Paper