Getting things done

Ubuntu 8.10 comes bundled with a wide variety of tools, utilities and programs on the CD, as does Windows Vista. In this blogpost I’ll be looking at some of the bundled tools of both.

Text editing

Windows Vista comes with two basic programs to do text editing: Notepad and Wordpad. Notepad is an application to edit plan-text documents, whereas Wordpad is capable of some formatting. Both tools lack certain features the Ubuntu 8.10 included version has such as syntax highlighting and spellchecking. I’m also not entirely sure why both tools are included, as there is nothing that Notepad does that Wordpad can’t do but there are a lot of things Wordpad CAN do that Notepad can’t, such as opening text files with non-windows line endings.

Webbrowsing

See my previous post about Internet Explorer

Mail

See my previous post about Windows Mail

Video DVD creation

Windows Vista comes shipped with a tool called ‘Windows DVD Maker’, which is quite a nifty little tool which makes it very easy to create video DVDs from various movies on the harddrive, it comes equipped with various menu styles and themes and is a generally well-thought out tool. Windows DVD Maker is very easy to use and I can see how people would like using it. Ubuntu 8.10 comes without any such facility.

Movie editing

Another application included with Windows Vista, but missing from Ubuntu 8.10 is the ‘Windows Movie Maker’, it is a simple application but it is incredibly easy to use. Although it is a bit slow and a tad unstable it is miles better than what Ubuntu 8.10 comes with, which is nothing. For simple home-video editing Windows Movie Maker seems to be sufficient.

Graphics editing

Ubuntu 8.10 ships ‘Gimp’ or ‘The GNU Image Manipulation Program’, Windows Vista ships with paint. There is simply no comparing the two. The Gimp is a fully-fledged foto retoucher, image editor and comes with loads of plugins and effects, whereas Paint is hardly usable. Although, other than with the Gimp, it’s really easy to draw a circle in MS Paint

Games

Both Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows Vista come with a variety of games, it is hard to ‘compare’ these but both base installs come with enough games to waste many, many hours of the boss’s time.

Office productivity

There is no office productivity suite installed with Windows Vista, and it appears that it is always a separate download or purchase. Ubuntu 8.10 comes with the highly-regarded OpenOffice.org office suite which has a Word processor, Presentation, spreadsheet, vector drawing and a database program. It also comes equipped with import and export filters for all currently popular file formats such as OpenDocument and Microsoft Office.

Photo management

Comparing the Windows Photo Gallery and Ubuntu 8.10’s F-spot seems to lean slightly in favour of F-spot as it can save to multiple on-line galleries. Otherwise functionality of both programs appears pretty similar and I doubt any user of either program would have any problems switching between the two.

Conclusion

Windows Vista does come with a lot of programs installed, but a lot of them seem to be watered-down versions of what Ubuntu 8.10 has to offer. The lack of office-suite, decent webbrowser and mail client are very noteworthy. Whereas Ubuntu 8.10 has everything a casual computer user uses on a day-to-day basis Windows Vista seems to require installation of several third-party products to make it a fully complete desktop.

Comparing the price-tag of an Ubuntu 8.10 license (free) and Windows Vista Ultimate (270 euros) the ‘value for money’ for Windows Vista seems very poor. Even more so because every additional piece of software is likely to cost another substantial amount of money. It is of course possible to fill the gaps with OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird and Firefox for Windows but at that point installing Ubuntu 8.10 would have been less work.

The good

• Pretty decent multi-media offerings
• Ability to draw circles with Paint

The bad

• All other included tools are sub-par to their Ubuntu 8.10 counter-parts

The ugly

• No office suite in the default install, separate purchase or download
• Value for money is very bad compared to Ubuntu 8.10

Overall verdict

2/5

Most tools that are included are extremely basic or entirely missing. Adding other tools will either be expensive, or would be more work than installing Ubuntu 8.10

Over the course of the last two days there are a couple things that struck me, both positively and negatively. This is just a short post detailing them. I won’t be giving a ‘conclusion’ or a score in this post.

Overall look

The visual presentation of Windows Vista is a bit of a mixed bag, some of the applications really look quite nice such as Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, the file manager and the welcome center. Other bundled applications look entirely different and gives overall unpolished look. To illustrate this, I have made a screenshot of parts of the screens of (in my mind) the worst offenders (click to enlarge)

Here we see ‘Windows Mail’ with it’s blue toolbar, Wordpad with it’s windows 9x style toolbar, paint without any toolbar and Internet Explorer with… Something else, I believe that Internet Explorer is what Vista applications were supposed to look like.

Driver updating

I had some problems with some games (more on that later) and I was advised to update my drivers. I was kind of surprised that Windows Update does not update the drivers shipped with the OS. Upgrading the driver did help, by the way. But did not solve the stability issues I’m having with Aero (read below).

Security prompts

Although there’s a lot of bad press about the security prompts, I did not encounter TOO many of them this far and I don’t think they are all that annoying. They are, however, somewhat uninformative: some pages require plugins and just navigating to those pages will present the user with a security prompt which does not specify what plugin is about to be installed. I don’t see how this adds to security, as the user has no way of knowing what plugin the site requires or even what site is being navigated to.

One other thing that struck me as incredibly odd was that updating my Radeon drivers from the AMD setup did NOT require an UAC prompt other than the one asking me wether or not I wanted to start an application I downloaded.

Stability

Overall system stability has been good thus far, I have not experienced any complete OS meltdowns. Having said that, both switching Windows Media Player to fullscreen and back and UAC prompts causes my Aero interface to crash from time to time with no way to restart it. After a crash I get a balloon in the bottom right of my first screen that fades before I can read it, but I believe I could make out something about ’switching to basic mode’. Without Aero the 2D fillrate of my screen is absolutely abysmal and the only recourse is to either reboot or logout/login.

Copy/Pasting

Copy/paste in Ubuntu 8.10 is just a matter of selecting the text, and middle clicking in the control where you want the text pasted. In Windows Vista it is required to explicitly copy by pressing ‘Ctrl-C’ and pasting is done with ‘Ctrl-V’. I’m sure this is just a matter of what you’re used to, but for me this is a continuing annoyance.

Scrolling

The scrollwheel can only be used in applications that have keyboard focus, and will then only work in the part of the application that has keyboard focus. On Ubuntu 8.10 I am used that every application, and every part of every application will scroll when my mouse is over it. Switching focus is not required. This allows me to use one screen for reading and scrolling while simultaneously typing code/comments or chatting in another window.

Start menu

I find the Windows Vista start menu to be somewhat confusing, it is basically a file browser and finding the application I’m looking for often requires both clicking and scrolling. Sometimes it requires scrolling to even find the correct ‘folder’ in the start menu. This might be another ‘getting used to’ thing, but I find it to be fairly unintuitive and time-consuming to use.

Online movies

In my course of browsing around, I came across a post on Ted Haeger’s blog. This page has downloads for three movies in both mpg and ogg formats (linky). There also appears to be flash versions of these movies embedded, these did not work however. Internet Explorer also did not offer to download the required Flash player, it just displays the ‘broken image’ icon.

Because I am still a freedom lover at heart, I decided to first click the ‘.ogg’ links, this prompts Internet Explorer to ask me to either save the file, or find an application to open it with. I chose to find an application to open my movie with.

This directed me to a page on the Microsoft site in Dutch, while my operating system’s language is English, this must be very confusing for people who live in The Netherlands but don’t speak Dutch very well (yet), furthermore there is no link on this page to translate it into another language, but I digress.

The page says that the file type is ‘unknown’, but offers me to go and use Live search to find answers. Totem on Ubuntu 8.10 offers to download codecs automatically for whatever filetype I have thrown at it thus far, and this is a somewhat disappointing experience so far. I clicked the ‘Windows Live search’ button, this brings up a page with search results, the top result being http://filext.com/file-extension/OGG. This page has two related links:

• Windows Player Setup
• Directshow Filters for Ogg Vorbis

Since I don’t know what a ‘DirectShow’filter is, I decide to opt for the first option. This directed me to a page on vorbis.com that gives me an explanation of what ‘directshow filters’ are and apparently that IS what I want. So I download. Three confirmation dialogs, one UAC prompt and a setup later I have the ‘directshow’ filters installed. I try clicking on the .ogg file again, but I am presented by the same dialog. After clicking the .ogg link again, I chose to download the file and then press ‘open’ in Internet Explorer. Windows still does not know what to do with the file, so I decide to manually select ‘Windows Media Player’.

Windows Media Player prompts me for ‘initial settings’, I decide to go for the ‘recommended’ option. A player screen opens, and the media starts playing, well… the audio does anyway. I decide to give up and close Windows Media Player, this crashes it.

After this, I decide to give up (what I imagine any user would do) and select the ‘.mpg’ links. This immediately opened Windows Media Player and it started buffering “5%…10%…15%…8%…9%…20%…18%”. In other words, the progress indicator was somewhat less than impressive. During the movie I ‘maximized’ the Windows Media Player window and after it mysteriously started to buffer again I finished watching the movie ok. The movie was pretty funny, so I downloaded the second one. Windows Media Player opened again, maximized but this time the movie was only a small square in the middle of the player window, I un-maximized the window, buffering, then maximized the window again, buffering. The same thing happened for the third movie.

DVD Playback

Since I’m reviewing media, I can’t ignore DVD playing. After inserting one of my trusty “Sam and Max: Freelance Police” DVDs I was prompted for what I wanted to do with it, I selected ‘Play in Windows Media Player’ and the DVD started without any more fuss. This is an improvement over Ubuntu 8.10 where due to legal reasons it is required to run the script /usr/share/doc/libdvdread/dvdcss.sh before commercial DVDs will start playing.

The only downside appears to be that it is impossible to skip over the movies accusing me of piracy and other trailers, something that totem does allow. All in all this was a very positive experience.

 Conclusion

While eventually most media will play, it is hardly a smooth experience. The .ogg files were not recognized at all by Windows Vista, and the codecs that were available for download are somewhat less-than-stellar. Although I can’t really blame Microsoft for this, it is still not a very nice experience especially not since it would have costed Microsoft absolutely nothing to include these in the base install of Windows Vista. The shipped player (Windows Media Player) also appears to be somewhat unstable. Playing DVDs however was a breeze and I can’t see anyone having any trouble with this.

Overall: playing random media downloaded from the web is easier in Ubuntu 8.10, playing DVDs is harder.

The good

• Out-of-the-box DVD support
• Clean media player interface

The bad

• A bit unstable
• Opening a movie in a maximized window gives unexpected results
• Resizing an online movie results in rebuffering
• Unable to skip DVD trailers

The ugly

• No support for .ogg files
• Bad/no progress indication

Overall verdict

3/5

The media experience in Windows Vista is adequate, but somewhat less than I had expected of a self-proclaimed ‘media-centric OS’

Windows Vista ships with an email client aptly named ‘Windows Mail’, the email client I normally use is called ‘Evolution’ and comes standard with the Gnome desktop, and most distributions that come with a Gnome desktop installed.

Just as with Internet Explorer and Firefox, Evolution is the email client I have been using the last year or two and thus is the only client I can fairly compare Windows Mail to.

Some of the people I have told about Windows Mail all said I wasn’t supposed to actually USE it and install Outlook 2007. I shall do so this evening, but I can only agree with the assessment of even my Microsoft certified colleagues, the bundled mail application is absolutely pants.

After first starting the application, which is prominently displayed at the top of the Vista start menu, the first thing that I noticed was the complete lack of polish. Where Internet Explorer looked like it belonged on the Vista desktop, Windows Mail stuck out like a sore thumb. The ‘toolbar’ is dark blue, and it has a menubar, the rest of the application is NOT blue and it makes the whole thing look rather silly.

Now, looks aside, I run my own IMAP server that only accepts logons through SSL and refuses to authenticate any other way. In the default mail account setup started when first launched it is not possible to configure this. I was unaware of this limitation, imagining that ports/encryption would be confirmed in a later configuration step. I was wrong. After entering my server’s name, login and password Windows Mail immediately sent my password in plain-text unencrypted to my IMAP server, which loudly complained.

Now, for all the UAC prompts and other warnings I had to allow or deny so far, it didn’t occur to the developers of Windows Mail that sending unencrypted password BY DEFAULT is not a good idea? Let me repeat that there is NO WAY of configuring IMAPS or SMTPS from the mail account wizard, and that it will immediately send out your username/password unencrypted.

At any rate, I found an ‘accounts’ menu and configured Windows Mail to use IMAPS and SMTPS, although it did not know what port to use for SMTPS.

Windows Mail then proceeded to download the message headers from my IMAP server, it correctly identified all the folders I made (I use server-side filtering rules to organize my mail per mailing list so it is always consistent regardless of me using webmail or a fat client) and all looked well.

Until it decided to scan all my mail for ‘junk email’, at which point around 20% of all mail from all my folders were moved to ‘Junk mail’, and I got several popups warning me of phishing attempts. Although the explanation of what a ‘fishing attempt’ is was very good (and I must commend Microsoft on that) the Junk mail filter and Phishing filters are absolutely horrible, and actually harmful because I had literally HUNDREDS of false-positives in the first 5 minutes of using it. Note that this is enabled by default!

I now have to use another client to put my mails back in their respective mailing-list folders.

Windows Mail is also incapable of changing it’s ‘default folder names’, for instance, my IMAP server already has a ‘Junk’ folder, which both Evolution and my webmail client can use, because it is configurable. The same goes for a ‘Sent’ and ‘Drafts’ folder which I also share between my clients. I have found no way of configuring this in Windows Mail.

Conclusion

Windows Mail is a really bad email client, it eats mails, sends your password over the internet without warning and is generally hard to use and configure. Furthermore, it does not look like it belongs on the Vista desktop. The good thing about it is the way in which it informs users of the potential harm of ‘phishing’ (with a very nicely done illustration). I feel that documentation to inform the user of the potential hazards on the internet is something that is sub-par on the Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, and I really must commend Microsoft on their effort there. This surprised me, as it was in stark contrast with the way Windows Mail handles encryption by default.

The good

• Warning documentation
• Included with the OS

The bad

• Does not know the encrypted port-numbers of the mail services
• Does not fit in with the Vista desktop
• Unintelligible menu structure and toolbars

The ugly

• Sends unecrypted passwords without warning and per default
• Spam filter is horrid, and yet is still turned on by default
• Spam filter moves mail without asking the user
• Unable to configure existing folders for ’special use’

Overall verdict

0/5

A mail client that throws out 20% of my mail, and moves it, does not offer encryption and looks as bad as Windows Mail requires no further explaination.

There’s a delightful little tool included with Windows Vista called ’snipping tool’, I WAS looking for a screenshot tool and then I wondered what the ’snipping tool’ was, turns out it is a screenshot tool. Imagine that.

When you first start it, it asks to be placed in the quicklaunch area, a very useful question to ask for such a tool, it then opens a little window and colors the screen dark gray. The first second I thought it was another UAC prompt, to be honest.

You then select a region of the screen, the part of the screen you want to ’snip’ turns it’s normal colour and a ’snip’ is then presented in a separate window. It’s a very neat little tool that is very user friendly.

Conclusion

The ’snipping tool’, although somewhat unintuitively named, is an awesome little tool for making screenshots. I’d have included a screenshot, but the only application that it is incapable of ’snipping’ is itself

The good

• Does exactly what it’s supposed to do, no fuss
• Can save in PNG

The bad

• nothing that I could find

The ugly

• Well, it is a bit of an ugly app

Overall Verdict

  5/5

Great little tool, much nicer than the ‘gnome-screenshot tool’ included with Ubuntu 8.10

Windows Vista comes, rather unsurprisingly, with the ubiquitous Internet Explorer. Vista ships with version 7 of this browser. I personally got used to Firefox 3 as shipped with Ubuntu for quite some time. I had also upgraded my browser to firefox 3 sometime during the Ubuntu 7.04 cycle. It is only natural that this is the browser that I will be comparing Internet Explorer with, as it is the only browser I use on a day-to-day basis.

I am typing this blogpost using Internet Explorer, and I have been using it to browse my favorite newssites and other non-working sites

First of all, Internet explorer has a ‘fresh’ look that fits in very well with the rest of the Vista look although I wonder what happened to the menu bar, it doesn’t seem to be missed much. One odd thing is that on my 1680 pixels wide screen the internet explorer ‘toolbar’ still presents me with two “>>” signs that present a popup menu with just the ‘help’ option. It seems to me that a help icon would have taken up the same amount of space. This in itself is not really a big problem, but I felt obliged to click the symbol expecting the menu bar, or other options to appear. Not just a ‘help’ option. The buttons on the toolbar are somewhat cryptic and pressing them yields the same result as a menu-bar that everybody knows. I am not sure this is an improvement over the ‘old’ system. It feels a bit like the so called “mystery meat navigation“.

Otherwise, the web browser seems to browse fine, but appears to be miles behind Firefox in most respects, the font rendering isn’t as nice as Firefox’s, moving back and forth between tabs often results in one of the tabs getting corrupted until it is redrawn (either by scrolling or a reload).

Zoom deserves it’s own paragraph: Firefox has a feature called ‘full page zoom’ which intelligently zooms a page as far as you like, re-rendering the fonts and images. On Internet Explorer this is not quite the same, the page is actually ‘zoomed’ from an apparent bitmap, making the fonts look horrible and zooming in on a page always produces a scroll bar on the bottom of the screen, even when there’s nothing to scroll to. In my mind, on a wide-screen high-resolution monitor, zoom is an almost required feature to be able to comfortably read a website. Most sites these days only utilize a ‘narrow’ part of the screen, some are centered (The Register) and some are justified to the left (The Inquirer). And I don’t have big-ass screens so I have to squint to read my sites! Furthermore, the ‘zoom’ is per tab, so once a tab is zoomed it STAYS zoomed until the tab is closed, or otherwise manually zoomed. The zoom level per site is also not remembered, so it has to be done again for each visit. These are things that Firefox does ‘just right’ and it makes Internet Explorer fairly painful to use.

Internet Explorer’s address bar is just that, an address bar. The Firefox ‘Awesome Bar’ is indeed quite a bit more awesome, if I visit a site about ‘kittens’ and I forget the URL. I can just type ‘kittens’ in the awesome bar, and more than likely Firefox will have remembered the URL for me. Internet Explorer can only search in the URLS of the browser history.

Conclusion

Internet Explorer browses, but that’s about it. It’s got none of the advanced features that makes Firefox such a breeze to use. The only real reason to be using Internet Explorer would be because it is bundled with the operating system. I am sorry for this harsh verdict, but Internet Explorer really is sub-par in every way to my usual webbrowser.

The good

• Comes bundled with the OS

The bad

• Routinely corrupts tabs
• Routinely corrupts entire screen when switching applications
• Address bar is limited to searching for URLS only
• Font rendering not very good

The Ugly

• Page zoom is horrible
• Page zoom not remembered per website
• Page zoom sucks

Overall verdict

1/5

 It is without a doubt a browser, but that’s about it.

Out of the box experience

After installation most of my hardware seemed to work, but my dual-head setup was still in ‘clone mode’. The Welcome center is a nice touch and maybe Ubuntu could use an application like that. It was, however not immediately apparent how I could configure dual-head from the Welcome center. It turned out to be configurable from ‘Personalize windows’ and then ‘Display settings’

I was presented with a dialog which allowed me to ‘extend my desktop’ to my second head, which then subsequently turned off and wouldn’t work after putting it back into ‘clone mode’. After some digging it turned out that Windows had detected my second screen as having a resolution of 1920×1050 and not 1680×1050, which is a bit odd as both screens are identical and the first head was configured just fine. I then pulled the resolution slider of the second head one ‘notch’ to the left changing it to 1680×1050 and after hitting ‘apply’ the second head was functional. Oddly enough after this the 1920×1050 option had disappeared from the list of resolutions.

There was also no internet connection, Windows offered to ‘diagnose the problem’ and suggested that I do not have a wireless network adapter. While this is true, it’s hardly helpful. After several other dialog boxes which seemed to randomly link to eachother Windows concluded that I did not have any network adapter installed. I recalled a ‘hardware manager’ tied to ‘My computer’ from back in the days, and I found it. After confirming that I wanted access to this feature (it did not ask for a password though?) I found an ‘ethernet controller’ without drivers.

This struck me as incredibly strange as my network card has been auto-detected (and installed) by Ubuntu since version 7.10 (gutsy) which is well over a year old while the ISO of Windows was just downloaded one day ago from Microsoft’s MSDN site. It appears that Microsoft does not update it’s driver database between releases. It was also not possible to determine what brand and type my network card is from the hardware manger, it could only tell me that I had an unconfigured Ethernet controller. Even if Microsoft does not update drivers between releases, Service Pack 1 was released the 25th of April 2008 well after this motherboard was first shipped.

After digging out the driver CD of my motherboard (who’d have thought I still had that?) I got another popup for confirmation ‘An unidentified program wants access to your computer’. This turned out to be the Asus setup program which then opened in the middle of my two screens, something that I haven’t seen using Metacity for a long time. I selected the ‘Network driver’ and it installed without further fuss, it turns out it is an ‘Atheros L1′ ethernet controller.

After this all hardware appeared to work.

Conclusion

Most of the hardware worked out of the box, except for the dual-head and Network adapter. Considering the importance of a working network adapter to gain access to any other drivers that might be missing I think this is a fairly big problem. I am also somewhat surprised that the driver for the network card was not included in an ISO downloaded from Microsoft’s own site only one day ago. The problem with the dual-head was fairly easy to solve but it is still not clear to me why only one of the screens was detected properly. Multi-monitor support in Windows Vista appears to be less smooth than under Ubuntu as I had multiple popups and programs appearing in the center of the two screens.

These solutions are no-doubt very logical to long-term Windows users but the experience with the out-dated drivers and funky multi-monitor support will be unpleasant surprises for Ubuntu 8.10 users.

The good

• Slick first impression
• Welcome center

The bad

• Not immediately clear how to configure multi-head
• Second screen detected wrong
• Multi-monitor support not as slick as with Metacity

The ugly

• out-dated drivers
• No way of determining what hardware is in the box
• unclear warning dialogs asking for confirmation

Overall verdict:

3/5

Most hardware worked, but out-dated included drivers. The Welcome center is a nice touch, overall slick look and feel

Yesterday evening I installed Windows Vista ‘Ultimate’ on my trusty desktop, here’s an account of of the experience. Up front I have to say that the installation wasn’t at all bad, it has a slick look to it and it eventually works well. I’ll get back to the ‘eventually’ later :

Step one in installation of any modern OS would be booting the installation system, be it disk 1 of 47 or the DVD. Thankfully Microsoft offered a DVD download from the MSDN site.

Right after the initial boot I ran into something that appeared to be a problem, the installer gave me a nice looking background with a mouse pointer on it. And that was it, I could move the mouse but there was no harddrive or DVD activity and no progress indication of any sort. Right after I was about to give in, and reboot there was a trickle of harddrive activity so I decided to wait a bit longer. Around five minutes later I was presented with a language choice.

I dutifully typed my preferred language (English) and localization preferences (Dutch). This may seem like a small thing, but I could navigate to ‘dutch’ by pressing ‘D’ in the pull-down menu, this was a nice touch. Something that I could remember not working during previous versions of the Windows installation. I then got the option to ‘install now’ which I did.

Sadly, ‘now’ turned out to be ‘install in 5 minutes’, same thing as right after boot only this time with a ‘busy’ cursor. There was once again no progress indication and I was beginning to doubt the DVD I burned, but after the first time I decided to wait. The setup pulled through and provided me with a window to type my serial number and an option ‘Automatically activate windows when I’m online’ (checked by default). As I am not entirely sure what that is supposed to do I left it on.

Once again, a long wait for the next screen in the installation. I was beginning to get slightly annoyed, but pressed on. This wait was shorter than the last two, but still around a minute. Once again, no progress indication just a ‘waiting’ cursor.

Then I was presented with a EULA which I accepted (what’s the worst thing that could happen in one week?). Next the installer presented me with a window which gave me the option to do a ‘Custom (advanced)’ install or an ‘upgrade’. The ‘upgrade’ button was not available, so the only option I had was ‘Custom (advanced)’. There was no normal installation option.

Next I needed to partition my harddrives, the partitioner is a bit spartan, but it functions. I could not find any way of configuring software RAID in this installation step so I just installed on one harddrive. I am currently operating under the assumption that I can configure this later. I seem to recall a ’software RAID’ option in the windows NT4 disk manager.

The next screen basically started the installation. It was ‘copying files’ ‘extracting files’ ‘installing features’ ‘installing updates’ and ‘finishing installation’. There was once again a pretty long wait between each step without any apparent activity. This really is something that Microsoft should fix, there were various steps along the way where I thought that the installation had crashed or that there was something wrong with my media.

During the final step a reboot was required and the setup continued from my harddrive, the reboot was pretty fast. The same screen as in the last step of the DVD installation appeared and the setup continued with ‘Completing installation’. The screen flashed several times and around 5 minutes later the screen turned black and the setup rebooted without warning. Even though the setup mentions that there would be several reboots required, an unannounced spontaneous reboot always seems like there’s something wrong.

After the reboot I was presented with an option to create a user, the screen asked for a username and a password and then INSISTED upon a password hint. This I found uncool, password hints are generally really weak protection measures and I consider it pretty bad practice. I entered ‘None’ as my password hint.

The next screen asked for my PC name and gave me the option of selecting a background for my desktop. I found the last bit to be a nice touch of the installer although it’s a bit out-of-place in a dialog that asks for the PC name.

I was asked how I wanted to protect my ‘computer’ and I pressed the ‘recommended’ button. It was bigger and clearly… recommended After entering my date, time and timezone I was all done.

Conclusion

Overall the installer of Windows Vista is pretty slick, albeit a bit slow. The lack of progress indication(s) is also a bit of a problem as I thought at least 5 times that the installation had crashed. The installer also had no knowledge of other operating systems and did not offer to resize my existing partitions, and did not offer a dual-boot option with my existing Ubuntu installation. Something that the various Linux distributions I have used over the years have done for quite some time now.
There also appeared to be some pretty pointless screens such as the ‘upgrade’ screen with only one button activated and the ‘install now’ screen which offered no information as to what would happen next, especially since it wasn’t the ‘point of no return’ yet. It would have been more suited after the partitioner.
The installation itself is pretty user friendly, and anyone able to install Ubuntu should have little trouble with this installer, although compared to the 10 minutes it takes to install Ubuntu on my desktop the Windows installer really takes it’s time.

The good:
* Slick look
* Easy questions

The bad:
* Takes a long time
* Some pointless installation screens

The ugly:
* Long waits without progress indication
* No knowledge of existing other Operating Systems

Overall verdict:

3/5

Pretty easy to use, but slow. Will not play nice with existing operating systems.

After reading counteless reviews of Ubuntu or Fedora done by long-time Windows users, I have decided that it’s time for a long-time Linux user to review Windows in the same manner.

I am announcing this now in the hope that some of you come up with ideas of things that I should try and document while I’m on my week without my trusty Ubuntu 8.10 install.

My hardware

• Asus P5E-V HDMI
• Radeon X850XT Platinum (PCIE)
• 2x 500Gb Sata-2 hdds
• 2x 22″ LCD panels  (1680×1050)

I haven’t really used windows much since the windows 95-98 times when I moved over to greener pastures in the form of a Linux CD set by ‘walnut creek’ or somethin which had, I believe redhat 4.2 or 5.0 on it. I have had occasional contact with Windows systems in the course of my job, but not very much.

My job exclusively deals with Linux based systems, and the occasional Windows system I encounter is always managed by someone else. I have only very, very briefly seen Windows Vista on the laptop of a colleague.

Now, while I’m obviously biased towards open systems, and I am absolutely sure that I will migrate back to Ubuntu once this experiment is over, I would like to assure you that I will try to be as objective as possible. And refrain from comments such as ‘but I couldn’t fix it, because I couldn’t find a source download’ or something similar

The Vista license and most other stuff will be coming from my employer, but I will list costs of the software should I have had to buy it retail like normal people.

Suggestions, comments? place them at your own blogs or as a comment here I will try and work it in. (I have OpenID now ;))

For interested parties, the whole experience can be followed here