The article sounds alrite, but quite a lot of the features it metions have been around for a while in other OS's. Now M$ just seems to be copying other developers ideas and putting them into there own software. And all this new GUI stuff really looks like it will use up the RAM then start chucking things into pagefile and that will suck with all its slowness. But it does look pretty nice

My guess is that Vista will be similar to previous Windows releases. There will be some resistance at first. Then, people and businesses will buy their new computers with Windows Vista preinstalled and complain a little more and that will be that. Still, it makes sense that other OSs will continue to nibble away at Microsoft's market share--especially as the Linux distributions become more installable by "Joe Average." Perhaps Microsoft's increasingly malodorous stance on DRM and its incorporation into Vista will turn off more people and they will be willing to put in the effort (and money) to switch to Linux or Mac OS.

Since it is windows, one needs antivirus, antispyware, firewall,adware etc.And this is enough as a reason for me to ignore the whole stuff.I am sick and tired of caring about the windows as a caring mother who is always anxious ,if the child is going to live or die in my hands at any moment. Thank you windows for the stressing moments in my life but I prefer to live in piece with Linux.

I haven't read all posts, but here is what I think: Windows Vista is going to be good. Or at least better then XP. Microsoft has improved a lot the past years and the switch from DOS-based to NT-based home system is definitely a plus. Both Windows XP and 2K are pretty decent with some tweaks and I bet Vista will bring some improvement to their Operating System.

However, if you take what Linux was 5 years ago and look what it is today, you will see a much, much much bigger improvement than with Windows in the same time-period. What I mean is, Microsoft can't keep the same pace that Linux and Open-Source grows... we are too many and we love what we do so much that we do it for free... period.

And I disagree with everyone saying that Windows is secure and spyware free. It's not. You _can_ make it secure by purchasing a bunch of expensive products to secure Windows and the ones that are free has ads/spyware itself and offer a non-spyware pro edition crap.

By default, all you get from Windows is a bad text editor and a horrible Web-browser. Nothing really useful comes with it to make it more secure. And Windows also takes the same amount of disk space that Linux does for a full feature environment with a real browser, Office, Image Editors and a vast number of programs and servers.

Windows does not suck, but the community around it does: creating virus and spyware and companies use that issue to make money out of it.

efi is right on spot as well, I could quote him and say I agree, but I think everybody does... or should

I agree.

Very well put

I'm not installing any Microsoft OS on my PC again, and that's final. When I had XP I was able to maintain it in a way that it was virus and spyware free. But could I prevent the crashes, the bugs, the slow-downs? No I couldn't. I regularly defragged my hard drive, updated the 3 (!) antivirus and antispyware programs and scanned for viruses (every couple of days that is..) and I was officially sick of all that.

Do you really think that Windows will improve from it's current state to a state that could compete with Linux/BSD/*nix?

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Nah..

-A

Yeh total agree with Ahmed, i did get pretty fed up with the 3 anti crap ware and 2 antivirs i had having to update and run them every 2-3 days did get very annoying. and it slowed down my main use for the computer, media/video. I jumped to linux nd not scanned once and will never have to fingers crossed. But yeh i feel that i will have to do the same with vista, and for that reason i will not be using it on my personal comp, my sis mite use it on hers, and i mite at frieds houses and school.

What were you doing? Ive had a 900mhz Duron system running for 5 years with XP and I havent had these problems. I think the only time its crashed is when I connected my IPOD to it, I always monitor my systems performance and like I said Im running on 5 year old hardware and still get good performance. Can Windows improve from its current state? Of course it could. Will it compete with Linux you ask? In some area thats a definite NO, but in other areas quite possibly.

Will it compete w/ linux? in the desktop market, linux competes w/ it. You guys are all very anti-MS. I'm not fully sure why...it's a good enough operating system(I don't know that much about operatin systems, mind you). But when you boil it down, the OS is a matter of personal choice. Whether you like MS or not, that's up to you, but most of it's problems are due to it's massive market share(virii, etc.). If linux had 96% of the market, I would bet you that there would be malware and virii for linux as well.

sure, but they wouldn't install themselves without asking you for the root password.

as long as windows source code is not available under reasonable terms and there is no package management similar to popular gnu/linux distros (with a verification system in order to protect the archive against compromises), I won't use it.

Granted, but w/ the new unix-like permissions and so forth(along with that, I believe there is supposed to be something similar to a root account, and that windows wil set you up w/ a user accout by default)
and again, that's your choice

Having used Windows for a long time (since Windows 3.1 till XP, quite a long time...) I think that Windows is all about eye-candy, superficial but in the core a poorly written piece of software totally disordered, million times patched and still fragile to any attack of viruses, worms, etc... No wonder that most of the interesting features (WinFS a new file system, Monad, etc) have been put aside and Aeron Glass (I believe that is its name) has all the priorities and it will be the only interesting thing to use, after all is all about eye-candy...

Many people will be amazed and will conclude that Vista is a big improvement when they will see the new windows transparent style... to sad but that's what will happen. But hey!, they will have a "pleasant surprise" when they'll discover that they'll be attacked by virus et al the same way as in XP, that they will have to deal with DRM stuff every day, that they'll have to buy new hardware if they want to have the full experience of Aeron Glass, that they'll be annoyed every time they want to upgrade their systems (new licenses schemes), that they'll have to buy new expensive software for their new Vista, that they'll have to beg Microsoft for patches to the system, ................. what a wonderful world they will have.

However, I do must say that it'll be Linux time!, I expect that at the time Vista arrives, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mandriva, and other distros will be way ahead. And the dominance in the desktop area of Windows will erode slowly but steadily, .................. what a wonderful world that will be

Wow! What a dream, what the heck are you on!?!?

It's probably really not that bad a system for the typical home user who's looking at spending £1k on a PC anyway, really. Sure it's a bit of a resources hog, but a new Vista computer's going to be comparable to a new XP computer from when XP came out ('01?) in terms of lag and processing time.

The problem with that statement is that almost no-one on here is a typical home user; we all like to get the most we can out of our PCs (hence the universal switch to some *nix variant), and Vista's worse for that than XP was.

Also, quite a few people on here are on the MSDN, or know people that are, and so have used the betas. I'd be surprised if there weren't a fair few who've used a release version, too.

Personally, the only good press i've seen about Vista is from people trying to sell it. I've seen an awful lot of bad press from people with no vested interest either way, and have still not found anyone happy with a vista install.