Is Vista really worth it?

[Loniat]

Originally Posted by Ledgem

That video makes me very excited about switching to Linux (maybe a few years down the road). However, the way that guy had his set up does look like a rip of the Mac OS GUI in many ways - although prettier.

One thing that bothers me is people always claiming that everything is a ripoff from MacOS. This type of interface and visual effects have been around for quite some time. One example is Looking glass. If you search around for some time you will see bits of this type of interface everywhere.

[Vexx]

<shrug> all windowing systems conceptually build off of each other ... all the way back to Xwindows and all the way back to Xerox and ... there are probably about five marginally original ideas in all of software - and since one of those ideas is that computers can do visual displays besides text output, that only leaves room for 4 others

[killmoms]

Originally Posted by Loniat

One thing that bothers me is people always claiming that everything is a ripoff from MacOS. This type of interface and visual effects have been around for quite some time. One example is Looking glass. If you search around for some time you will see bits of this type of interface everywhere.

And... Looking Glass/beryl/compiz and all that stuff were created well after Apple developed Quartz Extreme. They were the first to market with a 3D composited UI. It's nice to see Vista catch up, though I wish they'd concentrated on using the technology to better effect. Vista still looks Frankenstein-ish.

[Jinto]

I don't need a fancy window manager, doing all sorts of window animations, looking glassy and what not. I basically like it quite boxy (like the old windows style). Though I'ld like to use a realtime rendered 3D animated background in the desktop, maybe its even a interacting background. And most importantly it should be a background that does not require too much CPU, instead mostly relying on the computation of the GPU. (if OSX or *nix could make use of the new shaders featured in DirectX10, I think something like this might be possible in a specialized *GL environment too).

[Epyon9283]

OpenGL 2.0 (maybe 1.3 too?) has support for shaders.

While beryl and compiz are are well and cool, the contents of the windows are still being rendered by the CPU and just put on a 3d texture to get the neat effects. Its still slow. Its still X. While I love X for its network transparency, the toolkits running on top of it (QT, and GTK especially) are slow. Try resizing a window in a composited desktop and see what I mean.

I'm not sure of the actual benefit to going this route in Linux. Sure moving windows around is fast now but so what? Sure you can have transparent windows but why would you want to make the entire window transparent? Makes stuff difficult to read.

I'm on my iMac and I have adium sitting on the left side of my screen. The background of the buddy list is translucent but the text and icons are opaque. Provides a nice effect and I can still read the text. I've seen Linux apps do this but the effect is faked. It takes a screen shot of the background image and shades it. Move a window behind it and you can still see the background image. Is any work going into making the apps take advantage of the 3d acceleration in Linux? I've only seen Window managers doing anything with it.

While I'm ranting here, Beryl is a terrible window manager. The window placement is some special kind of retarded and I had to enable a freakin plugin so I could resize windows. Kwin > *

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Epyon9283

OpenGL 2.0 (maybe 1.3 too?) has support for shaders.
...

I was aware of that. Yet I doubt it supports the new DirectX10 shaders. It sure will someday... like it surely will support shader model 3.0 fully.. someday. There are imo far more limitations for GLSL than there are in HLSL.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Epyon9283

Is any work going into making the apps take advantage of the 3d acceleration in Linux? I've only seen Window managers doing anything with it.

I suspect that the absence of open-sourced drivers for the 3D cards makes this more difficult. You can't expect people will have the proprietary drivers so you write for the generic open-source drivers which usually only support 2D. That's just a shot in the dark, though; I'm not a developer.

[Loniat]

Originally Posted by killmoms

And... Looking Glass/beryl/compiz and all that stuff were created well after Apple developed Quartz Extreme. They were the first to market with a 3D composited UI. It's nice to see Vista catch up, though I wish they'd concentrated on using the technology to better effect. Vista still looks Frankenstein-ish.

Although Jaguar precedes Looking Glass by a year or less, you can not even start to compare it to LG. Go see from where apple got ideas from (you can probably find the roots everywhere, from Nextstep to Linux and all). The point that I made is that people (Mac fans) should get a grip of reality by stepping out of the reality distortion field and look the flowers.

Has Microsoft copied a lot of feature from other OS? Yes they did. Linux? Yes!. Macs? No,never! Everything that comes out of Cupertino is crystal clear original (tm).

Now, for the question: is Vista worth it? Yes, if it comes pre installed, otherwise no.

[Nergol]

There's an old saying in the Air Force: Never fly the "A" model of anything. This holds true in computing too. Microsoft is wondering why sales numbers for Vista aren't as impressive as they expected based on how fast XP sold when it was released. The reason is that a lot of people learned from their XP experience. They're going to wait six months for the first generation of patches and bug fixes to come out before they buy Vista. And if their XP installation is stable, why shouldn't they wait a while?

[killmoms]

Originally Posted by Loniat

Has Microsoft copied a lot of feature from other OS? Yes they did. Linux? Yes!. Macs? No,never! Everything that comes out of Cupertino is crystal clear original (tm).

Now, for the question: is Vista worth it? Yes, if it comes pre installed, otherwise no.

ROFL. Seems you're in a reality distortion field of your own. I won't even bother trying to argue that statement. Suffice it to say that EVERY OS cross pollinates, but there are certainly some that come to market with technologies before others. And it's clear that OS X is a more advanced system than Windows in many (but not all) areas. Vista's just trying to play catch up.

[Loniat]

So:
Windows=ripoff
Mac=cross pollination

This really settles it, doesn't it? Now, I'll give you a tip: Try to avoid using things like ROFL in a post. It really, really sounds trollish.

[Question]

Wait about a year and see how far vista progresses. Theres really no reason to rush for vista now, and every reason to wait. Now if vista actually had all the features it hyped about before launch...

[killmoms]

Originally Posted by Loniat

So:
Windows=ripoff
Mac=cross pollination

This really settles it, doesn't it? Now, I'll give you a tip: Try to avoid using things like ROFL in a post. It really, really sounds trollish.

I didn't say that. I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make. And what you said legitimately made me laugh, because it was ridiculous. So you can take your "tip" and shove it.

All OSes cross-pollinate. All. OS X got some good ideas from Windows even (a better Cmd+Tab interface, and Fast User Switching). But to claim that Vista has taken no ideas from OS X is just ridiculous.

[SeijiSensei]

As Vexx says, nearly all the features of modern operating systems have long histories. The mouse was invented by Douglas Englebart at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1960's where windowing was invented as well. Some of those people helped establish Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) soon thereafter. Bell Labs released Unix in the 60's and 70's based on a variety of operating system designs floating around places like MIT and General Electric. Digital Equipment Corporation developed the VMS operating system for its VAX line of computers in the mid 1970's. It's successor, Windows NT, dominates office and home computing. MIT invented X-Windows in 1985 which integrated windowing and networking technologies and created the modern *nix desktop (including OS X).

The first effort to put the pieces together in a way that would work for office information workers happened at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the late 70's and 80's. The Xerox Star used the now-familiar WIMP model of windows, icons, menus and pointers. This entire computing metaphor eventually became the standard for Unix workstations, Apple Macintoshes, and Windows PCs.

At the operating system kernel level, Windows NT and its successors owe much to the work of Digital Equipment Corporation. Microsoft hired key developers of Digital's VMS operating system and set them to work on creating Windows NT, the core of all current Windows versions including Vista.

Mac OS X is essentially a clone of Unix from Bell Labs. The desktop environment is a mixture of Apple's older MacOS themes and parts of NEXTSTEP, a Unix desktop created by Steve Jobs's company NEXT during his split with Apple. OS X also shares with NEXTSTEP the Mach kernel created by academic researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Mach itself is a derivative of BSD Unix which was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970's.

Linux is also a Unix clone and adheres to the POSIX standardization of the Bell Labs Unix system. There had been an effort to build a free Unix that could run on commodity Intel hardware called Minix. Linus Torvalds, a graduate student in Finland, decided that Minix didn't meet his needs and began writing his own version of Unix which became known as Linux. His decision to publish Linux under the General Public License, and the dramatic growth of the Internet, created an international collaboration that is perhaps without precedent in human history.

Computing has traditionally been a field where sharing of ideas and concepts seemed a natural thing. That's changed (for the worse, in my opinion) in a world where private ownership of ideas has become more and more the norm. Still all of us today enjoy the benefits of modern computing technologies because of the intellectual brilliance, effort, and collaboration of many men and women over the past half-century. That's true no matter what's on your desk.

[Nergol]

Anyone out there who has questions about who ripped off whose OS would be well-served to watch the very well-acted movie "The Pirates of Silicon Valley", which covers the early histories of Apple and Microsoft, told from the perspectives of Steve Wozniak and "Monkey Boy" Ballmer. Very worthwhile.