Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Why Windows Vista will suck

by · 3rd March, 2006

Via the Planet SUSE RSS feed, I got this article on Why Windows Vista will suck by Ziff Davis Internet senior editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. The piece is in reaction to an earlier article at ExtremeTech called “Why Windows Vista Won’t Suck”.

SJVN talks about the staggering hardware requirements of Vista, which will basically rule out any computer bought before 2006. He talks about the fact that the kernel of the OS is basically still the rickety old one - the proof being that MS recently shipped a patch for the Windows Metafile security hole which affected every other version of Windows.

He talks about how it will begin to get a grip on things Unix-type operating systems (like Linux and Mac OS X) have done for years, and about the SuperFetch system someone was raving about:

Intelligent pre-fetching is a fine idea for boosting performance. You’ve been able to use it in any application written with the open-source GCC for years. Microsoft’s execution of it, however, has one of the biggest “What were they thinking of?” mistakes I’ve seen in a long time.

You see, with SuperFetch you can a USB 2.0-based flash drive as a fetch buffer between your RAM and your hard disk. Let me spell that out for you. Vista will put part of your running application on a device that can be kicked off, knocked out, or that your dog can carry away as a chew toy. Do you see the problem here? Me too!

He briefly mentions security, but doesn’t mention the biggest security hole in the whole system … the so-called Trusted Platform Module, which encrypts your hard drive with a key you can’t access! Just so that you can’t do anything naughty with your computer. (See this article by Richard Stallman which appeared in the Guardian, although this is on the website of the organisation the author founded.)

I guess this means that, as an operating system, Linux has a few months for its developers (or rather distributors, as the kernel developers are doing their job fine) to get their act together. Are we going to see viable heavyweight applications, or fonts which don’t suck when displayed at small sizes? This is what’s keeping Linux down, not Windows being any good or Vista being any better.

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