The editor in chief of PC Magazine announced his departure last week, coupled with an editorial on his turnaround of opinion on Windows Vista. A longtime friend of his told me (and publicly wrote the same) that this is a significant change of opinion -- that this editor had been in love with Windows since version 3.0, and it would take a lot to break that affection. I've been trying to find the brighter side of Vista since I first started testing it, but no matter how hard I try, I keep coming to the conclusion that Windows Vista just is not worth the money to buy, or the trouble to use.
I have to use Vista about once a week on average, almost always so that I can test some new desktop application. Lately it has been the new Adobe Creative Suite 3, so I've had more seat time with Vista lately than I've had since I wrote the Windows Vista review for Software in Review. Right now I'm working with the 64-bit edition to see if I can gain a better understanding of all of its problems in comparison to the trouble that Linux and BSD operating systems have in 64-bit mode. So far, my conclusion is that Vista has many more (and more visible) problems than any other 64-bit AMD64/EM64T operating system I have used recently. Vista is in the 64-bit stone age -- it has driver problems that BSD and Linux OSes have not had since the first generation of the Athlon 64 and Opteron were new. I have a Diamond sound card in the Vista test system that does not work under any conditions because Diamond won't write a Vista driver, and Microsoft doesn't have a generic sound driver that will work with it in 64-bit mode. Linux does. FreeBSD does. Heck, I think OpenBSD does too.
Every time I use it, I keep thinking that I'm going to like Vista this time, even though it's done nothing but frustrate me every other time I've used it. I think years of Linux and BSD customization has instilled in me the sentiment that if the software isn't working as intended, that it is probably my fault somehow. I haven't read the instructions, or I'm not changing the right options, or there is a problem in an area that I am not considering. This is how it was with DOS, and to a large extent Windows 95 and 98 (networking aside), but with Vista there is no longer enough room for user error to assume that you are the problem. Vista's design is such that if there is a problem with the way the system is operating, you are not empowered to find out what is causing the trouble, nor are you able to fix it. Instead you're trapped in a maze of automatic wizards with too few options, and nondescript warning messages that are unable to help you with anything.
My father's opinion mirrors mine. He bought a new laptop computer with Vista preloaded on it, and liked "that new Vista" at first. After a few weeks of frustration and neverending network problems, he called and asked how he could get rid of it and put XP on the machine. He, too, would like to switch to Linux, but he needs some really expensive proprietary hardware control programs that only work on Windows and don't operate correctly through a virtual machine. It really sucks when vendor lock-in extends well beyond the product a vendor sells.
The former PC Magazine editor's solution was to switch back to Windows XP and think about switching permanently to Linux. Going back to XP is a temporary necessity, but switching to Linux is a long-term necessity for any technically able user who needs more that just "Web and email" in his desktop computing life (proprietary industrial hardware control and analysis software aside). Windows Vista really is that awful that switching to a dramatically different operating environment is a serious consideration.
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