That might be true of other companies but this is Microsoft we're talking about, remember their Vista fiasco.
What about Vista? You mean the part where Vista (NT6) was received rather critically, but then Microsoft was able to release almost exactly the same Operating System as "Windows 7" and it was heralded as "fixing" Vista, even though it made very few actual changes?
but do you honestly believe that it is superior to Linux?
Of course it is. For one thing it actually supports ACLs and has proper FileSystem Security, which requires you to install SELinux with Linux distributions. I like the part where Linux still cannot properly resume USB devices when you wake the system up. This is because evidently they only skimmed the USB documentation.
Further irony: The Linux folks behind this were claiming it was "broken hardware".
At the same time, Microsoft already had a
knowledge base article about that exact issue with Windows Vista and in that article they readily admit that the issue was in fact Vista not waiting long enough according to the USB interface specifications, causing the device to disconnect.
*nix in general continued to blame the device.
Until a few days ago when Sarah Sharp has essentially said, "oh whoops, we were wrong all this time".
I could go ON and ON about this. The fact is that I've argued with Linux zealots ALL OVER the internet and very few of them can really come up with any real positives that Linux distributions have over Windows. The worst of the reasons is usually regarding Security. Linux is not "more secure" than windows by any measurement. The fact is that Linux is not a viable target, so nobody bothers. Not to mention that the same things that keep Linux from being a viable desktop target for Software development also keeps it from being a viable target for software with malicious intentions. Even the game developers that do "support" linux only do so half-heartedly. The Indie Game Bundle usually includes games that support Linux, but each one I've gotten maybe one out of the 4 games that claim Linux support to even work, and it involved rather good familiarity with yum and apt-get to get working. They are hodgepodge pieces of software built like a Jigsaw puzzle into systems and the only distributions that have been able to get any real traction have had huge amounts of money thrown at them and actual commercial interests vested into them (Red hat, Ubuntu). Basic functionality doesn't work half the time, requiring you to write scripts to get basic functionality such as automatic Wallpaper switching, which you get for free elsewhere. meanwhile, the APIs that you have to access to actually script that functionality may as well not even be documented. When I wrote the script to do that for Mint 12 All I could find was information on components that apparently didn't exist in Mint 12 anymore, because they changed the shape of all the puzzle pieces. I highly doubt that script would still work on the current version of Mint. Did I mention that there is never a valid upgrade path? Of course not. Everybody is totally fine with completely wiping their existing install to update to the latest version, or risk making their system unbootable by manually pointing their package manager/update manager at the repository for the latest version.
On the desktop, Linux is simply garbage. Web and Shell Servers benefit from it pretty good though- being able to use yum/apt-get to setup apache/mysql and php/python quickly and easily is pretty useful, even though you can rest assured that your distro's repository is out of date.
And while you say it is an, "incremental improvement over the previous generation of software", that is really a subjective opinion on your part.
no, nothing subjective about it. I wasn't talking usability wise, but generally speaking. The improvements to Windows 8 over Windows 7 are analogous to the improvements to Vista from Windows XP. Like Vista, Windows 8 is getting a critical reception because people are stupid and don't know what they want, as well as simply having different preferences. This doesn't dismiss the improvements made. That's why MS is coming out with 8.1, which people are already saying "fixes everything wrong with Windows 8"; just like Windows 7 allegedly fixed everything wrong with Vista, even though what REALLY happened was hardware and software vendors who were the root cause of most issues had time to catch up to the latest implementations of Driver Models and UI frameworks. It's probably going to be the same story with Windows 8.1.
I really don't need to look much further than Vista to see how stupid Windows 8 haters are. They are the exact same set of folks, in most cases, that gave Vista flak for altogether stupid reasons, and then turned around and Said Win7 "fixed" those problems, when Windows 7 was almost exactly the same system, but because it was the first MS Operating System to be given an Open Beta- and perhaps most importantly the hardware and software available for running on Windows 7 was designed by developers that had time to learn the new system, whereas with Vista you had Vista Drivers that were rushed out, you had Vista Versions of Software that was rushed out, and altogether you created a software environment that ended up being problematic, not because of Vista, but because of the software not being given time to be tested and acclimatized to Vista.
While you might have had a positive experience with Win 8
I never said I did, to be fair. I've just not had to really do anything different. In particular I like how they removed the Start Menu, because honestly that was a pile of vestigial garbage- (let me explain).
Why was the Vista/7 start menu vestigial garbage? The All Programs menu was so unusable it may as well have not existed. With XP you would drill down through a hierarchal menu to find what you needed, which was still ridiculous- but with Vista and 7 they made this even more ridiculous by putting it all into a single treeview confined into this small box in the corner of the screen, meanwhile, NONE of the program folders have icons, instead they are all folders- unlike the XP start menu which would display icons. The reason for this was because The All Programs Menu was only around for people to use that had gotten used to XP's dystrophied methodology, which itself came from the vestiges of Windows 9x which basically had to use a heirarchal layout as an improvement over the one-layer-deep Program Manager, and systems didn't have the oomph to just let you index your entire PC and search them; but with Vista they did, so you could use Start->Search.
Honestly, when I find somebody that uses Vista/7/8 regularly and
doesn't use the Search features, they are simply going to end up being less productive and slower. When you use the All Programs Menu, you don't just wander through and "Browse" the programs you have- you know what you want to start. So somebody decided, "Why not just let them type what they want?" And thus Start->Search. (It's also been integrated into numerous Linux distributions, because clearly Microsoft has no idea how to innovate and Linux and OSX wanted in on their non-innovations).
others have difficulties with it.
And some people have difficulty walking down alleyways, but you won't see me picketing to make alleyways wider for them.
Just cos something is new doesn't mean that it's better
Agreed. However I think the corrolary would be to argue that just because it's new doesn't mean it is not better, which seems to be the stance upon which your arguments are based.
especially when it comes to Microsoft.
How do you figure this?
Vista was not an improvement over xp.
Surely, it was. I find it hard to find reasons how it's not.
First, XP was released in 2001, and it was released as again, an incremental improvement to the previous systems, as well as merging the consumer and NT products into one; a NT-based Windows for Home systems. We had that system for 5 years, and it did not age well. And at the start it wasn't like it was received well anyway. People complained about everything- they complained about the new Start Menu, they complained about the default theme (what was up with that anyway? It almost makes 3.1's "Hot dog stand" look tame), they complained about the Luna Theme Manager, and how it took resources, and they complained about how it was now based on NT. whine complain whine, and complain some more.
And yet, fast forward to today, and there are people heralding XP as some pinnacle of OS excellence. In particular, those that try to argue that Vista was not an improvement. it was. Objectively. There is absolutely no way to say that "Usability and functionality was not improved in Vista compared to XP" Here is why.
1. The Start Menu. Again, same thing as before. the XP Start Menu was abysmal, just like the Start Menu's before it. I find it hard to believe that I not only was perfectly willing to launch an application by spending 20 seconds drilling down through an animated heirarchial menu, but that I actually didn't see a problem with it. Golly, I want to start Paint- Start->All Programs->Accessories->Paint. (Arguably you could memorize the executable names, and hope it was available as an apppath or at least on the system path). With Vista/7/8, I press the windows key and type paint. Then press enter. With XP, let's say you installed a soccer game. Damned if you remember what it was called though- I know it's in that start menu somewhere... Hmm, which company made it? Where did I put the Box for it anyway, I'm sure that will say who made it... So you end up trying to find this software product by simply searching through your All programs Menu, expanding each Company folder, seeing if it's in there, backing out, looking in another... Man, if only there was a way to automate this Searching in some way- like perhaps a small window shown on the Start Menu, which you could use to specify that you want to search. That would sure be a usability improvement, and an objectively good one...
Oh wait what? Vista added that objective usability improvement, that let's you actually find what you want by simply telling the PC what you want? If I want ot play that Soccer game by some Company who's name I never remember, I don't have to make a desktop icon or start drilling down and searching through every All Programs Entry... I just press the Windows Key and type Soccer. Oh, look, there it is.
And while it's nice to have 4GB or 8GB of RAM, it's a shame that XP doesn't really make use of that extra RAM on it's own, instead only doling out the Memory to applications through a mapped Virtual Address space. If only there was an advanced File Cache that analyzed your usage patterns and tried to prefetch Disk data into Memory before you needed it, and kept it readily available through a memory read rather than having to hit the disk. Man, that sort of fetching capability would sure be super! Oh? That was in Vista too? Egads! It's almost as if they were seeking to improve things or something!
And boy, I sure liked listening to Music on my XP machine, but I sometimes played games too and I had to fiddle with the Game Sound menu and tweak my sound player so I could get the right mixing. Man, if only there was a way to control Volume on a per-application basis. What? Vista added that too? And it revised the Sound subsystem so that crappy Sound Drivers couldn't cause a blue-screen since they ran in User mode, and only the Sound Mixer Component ran in Kernel mode? Geez it's almost as if they did usability studies or read the Microsoft Connect submissions!
XP's LUA was crappy and pretty much not really usable- First nobody used it, because they just used the default administrator account, and second even those that knew LUA was a good idea couldn't be bothered with the hassle, even with Fast-User switching it was still too much trouble- I want to install an application- Darn, no permission... I guess I need to log off, log in as admin, install it, log off, and log back into my limited account! Would be cool if the Operating System had some capability that would allow me to run a Limited User Account, but have a secure prompt of some sort when I needed administrator permissions, and then at that point it could run that thing in that administrator context.
Oh what? That is what UAC does? Amazing. (Speaking of UAC, UAC is one of the first things Vista haters will point at- apparently they don't realize that the entire reason that XP is such a RAT's nest is because absolutely everything runs in the context of the administrator account and has full control over everything. That little piece of javascript that was able to use a Firefox Buffer overflow vulnerability to execude arbitrary machine code in the context of the Firefox process sure loved having administrator permissions, since it made it so much easier for it to install that backdoor as a service under the LocalSystem Account.
Why was Windows 7 successful, where Windows Vista wasn't? I sort of explained that. Win7 was merely a set of UI tweaks and more or less a re-release of Windows Vista, with a new name to abandon the mental baggage and negative mindshare that "Windows Vista" had accumulated. I find it hard to believe people when they say that "Windows 7 fixes the problems of Vista" when all I see are some Window management additions, a slightly wider Search Results in the start menu, and the Superfetch starting with a lower priority from the OOBE.
