A Linux User in Vista-land: Part 1

With my Acer Aspire 5050 I received a free Express upgrade to Vista Premium. After all the talk of DRM, and low performance I at first shunned it as a clearly inferior OS, but my curiosity got the better of me and I had to try it out I haven’t used XP for over 5 years (except when I absolutely HAD to). My “Vista Experience Index” on this computer is 3.0, limited by the integrated ATI XPRESS1100 graphics. Cpu score is 4.6, hard drive is 4, ram is 3.9.

Installation:

Not wanting to touch my Windows XP install, I attempted to install onto a USB disk drive. **BONG BONG BONG** YOU CAN’T DO THAT! No doubt Microsoft doesn’t want you taking the disc around to all your computers (which is, admittedly, exactly what I was about to do for testing purposes). Oh well. So I took the 2.5 inch hard drive out of its case and swapped it with the hard drive in my laptop. At least Linux doesn’t care where its installed.

The installation itself is very painless (as I would expect it to be). Just select the partition and go. I selected the first partition on the disc(22 GB), and went. Interestingly, with this Express upgrade CD, you can do a fresh install without an existing Windows installation. I’m not sure if this DVD will only work on this particular computer, however. It took about 30 minutes to install, and then rebooted itself, coming back to a configuration dialog. I typed in my password, my hostname, and most importantly, selected my wallpaper. I was then logged into a fresh Vista install. Everything worked right off: 3d acceleration, wireless, etc. Of course, this is an customized DVD just for this laptop, so I didn’t expect any driver issues.

Aero:

Of course, the most flaunted feature of Vista is its WOW factor, code-named “Aero”. Let me put it bluntly; after having seen what Kwin can do (not to mention Beryl) Aero is over-hyped. Oh cool, you can see through the toolbar. You can see small previews of the windows in the toolbar. You can do a useful Mac-expose-like effect. You can Alt-tab. What else? Nothing that I can see. Kwin has the functionality to do half of these effects without 3d acceleration. Beryl can do the rest, and much, much, MUCH more. Now,don’t get me wrong, all of Vista’s visual effects are useful (not all of Beryl’s are). But does it merit a price increase from Basic? Not really. Of course, Premium also includes Media Center (more on that later) which may merit a price increase.

One of the most annoying things that I’ve found with Aero(and with Vista as a whole) is that you can’t really tell the difference between an active window and an inactive one. the only difference is the buttons. In Beryl, or in Kwin, you can do multiple things to make inactive windows look, well, inactive. But how do you configure change Aero’s colors? Configuring the colors in “appearance” does not affect Aero. You can configure the Aero style, but they are all just as bad. Kwin and Beryl let you make inactive windows partially transparent. I do not see this feature in Aero, but maybe aero has “decided” that my graphics can’t handle it (but never told me). I also still don’t see multiple desktops by default in Vista. And I don’t see where to turn them on. While I don’t use them very much even in Linux, I do occasionally find them useful, especially in the form of beryl’s cube.

General Usability:

What’s the keyboard shortcut for Flip-3d? Is there one? Is there a place to configure keyboard shortcuts at all? Yes to all, except it takes a while to find each answer. The only way to view them is to search in the help center(win+f1) for “keyboard shortcuts”. Keyboard shortcuts is the most necessary usability requirement, and the ability to easily modify these shortcuts is the second. There is NO WAY to modify the few shortcuts that are available. I say few. KDE has menu’s upon menu’s to do absolutely anything. Beryl adds hundreds more options. Some may argue that such things confuse the user. No, users don’t have to use shortcuts, and shortcuts don’t have to be changed. There are sane defaults. But hiding keyboard shortcuts from anything but a search is doing no one any good.

After using vista for even this one short day, I can see why non-guized configuration is SOO much better. Command line is so much more direct. But the command line in Vista is crippled. It can’t remember past commands from previous runs of the shell. It can’t do ANYTHING!

One more thing. Guess how much disk space Vista is using? 12 whole, gigabytes… yeah.. 12! More on that and other system resources later.