Windows 7....
03/10/2009 ArchivesTechnology
I’ve been up this morning reading up on Microsoft’s Windows 7 RTM. I wanted to see if Microsoft got their act together. From what I can tell, they have gotten things together compared to Vista... but that’s not hard to do. Vista is today’s version of Windows Millennium Edition, a train wreck and Windows 7 looks like is Microsoft’s center piece, but I have some issues with it.
Performance wise, it seems like 7 runs better than Vista. This was my biggest gripe with Vista. It was slow and unstable. They also fixed all the security prompts in 7. Windows 7 also has a streamlined GUI, but that opens a can of worms.
In my opinion, 7’s GUI looks a lot like KDE 4... A LOT like KDE 4 and KDE 4 came out last January. If they are going to boast about a new GUI, at least make it original. I am not the only one to have noticed the similarities. What really caught my attention was the square shaped regions inside the task bar, the way the clock looks, and the arrow on the side of the task bar to show the desktop. KDE has the same features. I know they aren’t exactly the same, but in my opinion it looks like MS got head start by copying it’s appearance from KDE.
Here is a link to an article that argues the same, but I am using it just a reference for the photos: LINK. The Article argues that 7 looks like KDE 3.5, but I say that it looks more like 4, but it really doesn’t matter.
I know that people are probably saying, “But you can’t run anything on linux” or “It looks like KDE, but it doesn’t function like KDE.” It might not function like KDE, but I have an argument for that. KDE is absolutely free and isn’t the center piece multibillion dollar company. KDE is written by a handful of software engineers, while Microsoft has an army of software engineers that at the end of the day cram their code together and hope it works. And the “I can’t run anything on linux” excuse is also dead. When it comes to business apps, there isn’t much that can’t be done on linux that can be done on Windows. When it comes to pure computations and number crunching I find that having OS X, Linux or a Unix machine makes life easier.
Windows 7, even though performs better than vista, still falls short of Windows XP. A lot of folks have spent the time to perform benchmark tests on all three systems to find that XP still out performs Windows 7 in most benchmarks. New operating systems should outperform their predecessors. The one thing that Windows machines are good at is gaming, and the fact that XP is the best Microsoft OS for gaming is kind of lame.
One feature I wish Windows 7 had was multiple desktops. It seems Windows is the only OS that doesn’t offer that feature yet. And people are stating 7 can compete with OS X... Those folks haven’t experienced Leopard or the new Snow Leopard. This when we can start talking about PC and OS X fanboys, well I am just going to stop here.
I would be willing to buy Windows 7, run boot camp, and run it on my mac for a trial run, but I will NOT shell out $300 to install it. I sure and the heck won’t spend that to upgrade my Vista machine. For now, I will stick with OS X and my Linux machines, but if I have to use Windows I will stick with XP. XP has been a stable and good operating system for a while now and Microsoft should have just improved on it instead or replacing it.
(This is an old blog, so links may no longer work or exist.)
Performance wise, it seems like 7 runs better than Vista. This was my biggest gripe with Vista. It was slow and unstable. They also fixed all the security prompts in 7. Windows 7 also has a streamlined GUI, but that opens a can of worms.
In my opinion, 7’s GUI looks a lot like KDE 4... A LOT like KDE 4 and KDE 4 came out last January. If they are going to boast about a new GUI, at least make it original. I am not the only one to have noticed the similarities. What really caught my attention was the square shaped regions inside the task bar, the way the clock looks, and the arrow on the side of the task bar to show the desktop. KDE has the same features. I know they aren’t exactly the same, but in my opinion it looks like MS got head start by copying it’s appearance from KDE.
Here is a link to an article that argues the same, but I am using it just a reference for the photos: LINK. The Article argues that 7 looks like KDE 3.5, but I say that it looks more like 4, but it really doesn’t matter.
I know that people are probably saying, “But you can’t run anything on linux” or “It looks like KDE, but it doesn’t function like KDE.” It might not function like KDE, but I have an argument for that. KDE is absolutely free and isn’t the center piece multibillion dollar company. KDE is written by a handful of software engineers, while Microsoft has an army of software engineers that at the end of the day cram their code together and hope it works. And the “I can’t run anything on linux” excuse is also dead. When it comes to business apps, there isn’t much that can’t be done on linux that can be done on Windows. When it comes to pure computations and number crunching I find that having OS X, Linux or a Unix machine makes life easier.
Windows 7, even though performs better than vista, still falls short of Windows XP. A lot of folks have spent the time to perform benchmark tests on all three systems to find that XP still out performs Windows 7 in most benchmarks. New operating systems should outperform their predecessors. The one thing that Windows machines are good at is gaming, and the fact that XP is the best Microsoft OS for gaming is kind of lame.
One feature I wish Windows 7 had was multiple desktops. It seems Windows is the only OS that doesn’t offer that feature yet. And people are stating 7 can compete with OS X... Those folks haven’t experienced Leopard or the new Snow Leopard. This when we can start talking about PC and OS X fanboys, well I am just going to stop here.
I would be willing to buy Windows 7, run boot camp, and run it on my mac for a trial run, but I will NOT shell out $300 to install it. I sure and the heck won’t spend that to upgrade my Vista machine. For now, I will stick with OS X and my Linux machines, but if I have to use Windows I will stick with XP. XP has been a stable and good operating system for a while now and Microsoft should have just improved on it instead or replacing it.
(This is an old blog, so links may no longer work or exist.)
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