Last week I had a chance to make a test drive of Microsoft’s latest effort in Desktop OS development, Windows Vista. Actually, after reading numerous reviews and/or previews I had a mixed feeling about a need to look at it at all, but my designer’s curiosity has won. So, in short, what do we get on upgrading?
Pros:
- Vista Aero UI is pretty. Really pretty. Just as much as some people love Wincustomize stuff they would love Aero, especially its clean skin and small details like Window header blur or “file flare” animation on copy.
- Explorer is redesigned for good. Breadcrumb control (previously actively used by GNOME Nautilus) makes navigation more efficient and file thumbnails are more useful than before.
- Aero UI has finally got rid of this nasty “GUI art” (redraw problems) and thus looks a bit more pleasant.
- Gadgets and Desktop search are nice addons to old XP Desktop.
Cons:
- It’s damned slow! On a modern PC with an excellent video card, modern processor and 2 Gb of RAM it’s visibly slower than XP. The difference is subtle at first, but the more you work, the more you notice annoying control delays. Besides, “eating” half a gigabyte of RAMjust after start…
- Aero is annoying. In a few hours “wow” effects stops and you understand all its ugliness. All this sexy animation, stripes and highlight is very impractical and non-functional. The difference between active and background windows merely exists, soaped backgrounds make you mad, rolodex view is merely usable and taskbar hints are sometimes lost. You may return to the simplified non-transparent version of UI, but it’s times less eye candy and just ugly. Even with hardware acceleration minor graphical quirks exist, like windows, slowly restoring its content after minimizing…
- The new UI is very inconsistent. You’ll have to learn things anew and controls seem to be located in the most bizzare places…
Overall, it’s disappointing. After 5 years of development we come up with a merely usable product (software, unwilling to operate properly, “are you sure?” anti-user protection on each step, slow operation…) with very arguable advantages over XP. Do you really want Vista? Try Mac or Linux first… Seriously. Macs had most of this stuff in Tiger for years and they’re more functional. Linux offers a competing Desktop with a much less price. And what about Vista, I’m not even sure Microsoft would be able to fix all the quirks with its service packs, so we may probably have to wait for the upcoming Windows 2009 or whatever it delivers next.
