Well the time is growing nearer and nearer. Vista will be released soon, and what do you make of it? the fact that micro$oft had to rewrite most of the code a bad thing? The large RAM hungry GUI's going to make it hard to run on lower spec machines? The missing features gowing to annoy you?
Windoz users are you going to buy it? and do u even like the idea of it all?
will it even work properly? There ave already been malcode written for it and this will only increase.



Ryan

Well, if they decided that it needed to be re-written to make it better then I s'pose it's a good thing. Keep in mind that a more secure windows will help the entire internet, not just those that run windows. Imagine a world where windows boxes can't be trivially compromised and turned into spam zombies, and propigate worms/viruses as easy.

In my opinion, all the business/home desktop users will go through the upgrade cycle like usual. However, I think MS is going to lose big in the server market. Slowly at first, but more and more as server 2003 nears its EOL. No competent sysadmin or clued-in PHB is going to buy new hardware across the board just so they can run this behemoth on their web/mail server.

I think Redhat, Novell, and Sun are going to pick up a lot of these MS desertions.

Since they are going to include something called Windows Defender (aka their anti-spyware scanner) I highly doubt Vista is going to be any safer. My guess is the platform will continue to be infected by all kinds of *ware that already exists today.

With the current state of Linux the only companies that may enlighten the general public in time are Mandriva, Suse, Ubuntu, Xandros and Linspire.

They may have rewritten the entire core, the preliminary hardware requirements are surprising as well. It doesn't sound like it will be very efficient. All nixes are still usuable on anything ever build.

Vista will do as other Windows did - a lot of noise Wonder when will be the hacked version. 7 days? And it was my comment about security of Windows - cannot even protect itself, don't even mention a user....

Vista seems overly hyped. However, after reading a review of the new Shell("Monad") I'm kinda curious, it looks very BASH-like. There is also supposed to be a unix-like permission structure. I've started using Windows less and less, but I'm not necesarilly agaisnt it. Despite the fact that MS is making efforts to secure their OS, what really needs to happen is widespread education about malware. Diligence(or lack thereof), and lack of technical knowledge are the two things that I have run into as the reasons for spyware and so forth on people's computers. After I started running Firefox on my WIndows partition, I had substantially less amounts of spyware. Just my thoughts...

Blah, blah, blah, blah, Vista. Guhurmdahurmdahurmda, hurmhurmhurmhurm Vista, blearrgh.

'Nuff said.

Windows is dying slowly, but surely. It's based on a flawed design, and I'm doubt that there's any way to fix it while maintaining backwards compatibility with earlier versions. I'm tired of hearing about Vista.

I'm far more interested in seeing what becomes of Singularity.

Vista does not really present any new and great things in my opinion. I could careless about clear windows or what ever they are called. Seems like Apple has been beating their drum considering the increase in sales regarding their desktops. Them ipods have been converting A LOT of people to their desktops.

I just wish that Apple would write more for the open market like quick time considering that their OS is open source.

Their OS isn't open source. Yes it's based off of an open source project, but you can't call up apple and request the source code for their OS. That'd be pretty cool, and I would probably switch to apple if that happened, but it never will.

It can definitely be done.

Ref: WINE, Crossover Office, Cedega

windows has a lot of bad rep, and even though I don't and can't stand using Windows, I think it deserves a little more respect then it gets around here. Sure, Gates is a money gulping son of a bee, but it must be noted that Windows is good at what it is meant for: to bring computing to users on the most basic level. In other words, point and click and don't worry about what the shell is doing. And it is VERY good at that, but at the consequence of sacrificing stability and versatility. Security is also an issue.

As for VISTA, I have also heard what microsoft/linux said, that the new Windows is adopting a very Unix-like file permissions structure, as well as a new type of filesystem --> something that is supposed to be extremely similar to NTFS, but faster and based off the file tree rather than a file table like the old FAT filesystems. I'm not sure how true that is, however.

@cormack
running VISTA on slower machines would probably be similar to when WinXP first debuted. Between 98 and XP, there weren't really any popular Windows OSes. Yeah, there was Windows 2000 and Windows ME (as well as NT4.0), but as everyone knows, ME was a total failure and 2000 wasn't commonplace in anywhere but the businesses. When XP came out, machines that were about 600 MHz with 128 Mbytes of RAM were still around, and those could hardly run XP. So it's probably just another step for computing...

Well, both WinFS and BASH (er, I mean MONAD, can't forget the Microsoft(tm) branding in their recompile of BSD code) have been dropped from Vista (back when it was still called Longhorn) so there really is no reason to switch to Vista, aside from a pretty shell and DRM to prevent your exercising of Fair Use.

About the filesystem. It was supposed to b called WinFS, and Mr. Gates hyped on and on about it. the some programme told him that it wouldnt work with the rest of the code properly, and so it was scrapped. This was because micro$oft wrote/write all of there code in parts, i.e have 1 team working on one programme and an other team on something else. End when they put it all together they found that some of the new special features didnt wotk like the filsystem

This is a very good point. I have been running computers @ work now for years with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I use McAfee and the SpyBot and I keep up with updates and running checks. And never once have I had a problem related to a virus or spyware. But others, who just use their computers without any knowledge of spyware or viruses, always seem to have a lot of trouble.

I love how people are commenting on a platform they never even used before 'wont be any safer...spyware, blah blah' Hey how about riding a bike first before saying how much it sucks to ride a bike. Here's an article from PCWorld to start. I have had minimal problems with spyware/adware/viruses on my XP pc, and if I switch over to Vista I expect to have even less problems

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122247,00.asp