How about that...

$ uptime
 18:19:53 up 208 days,  2:51,  2 users,  load average: 0.32, 0.16, 0.10

Not bad for my old crappy desktop machine running on the floor in my apartment without any kind of backup power supply or anything. I run it with the case off all the time, and wires and components are spilled out all over the floor. It's a wonder I haven't crashed it yet just by stepping on it.

Every couple months I notice my machine is running slow and look at top and it turns out X or some stray KDE app is using half a GB of RAM or something, so I restart it and I'm back to normal. Takes a long time to get to that point though.

Weird thing is, this doesn't even impress me any longer. I just take it for granted that Linux works.

Meanwhile my Vista machine locks up constantly. How can anyone at Microsoft sleep at night? (Answer: On top of huge piles of ill-gotten money.)

Vista has this really cool feature. When I log in to work via VPN and then close my laptop's lid to put it to sleep, when I open the lid later, I get the CTRL+ALT+DEL login screen as normal, except that my mouse cursor is now invisible! If I can somehow manage to position the invisible mouse cursor over a button, let's say the one to shut the computer down, and I click it, Vista says something about not having enough memory to perform that operation, and crashes or hangs!

Oh wait, that's not a feature. That's a big hairy stinking bug. My mistake.

• My Westinghouse L2410NM LCD monitor arrived at Westinghouse's factory, according to UPS tracking, on Thursday at 10AM. Thus the clock starts. In one week I'll begin periodic phone calls to Westinghouse requesting updates on the status of my RMA. I know that every phone call you make to a call center costs the company money; it's in Westinghouse's best interests as well as my own to give me good information and satisfy my curiosity.

• Yet another reason Vista sucks: trying to get VPN to work. Took me a week and the help of many people from my company's IT dept. before I even got close. The Control Panel UI philosophy of Vista seems to have been to take the XP Control Panel and scatter the options to the four winds; then build an insultingly dumbed-down GUI that has lots and lots of links to all those scattered pieces. Any kind of network configuration takes twice as long and twice as much navigation through a maze of windows and tabs and icons and links than it did in XP. And XP wasn't all that great to begin with.

• My Ruby on Rails project for work is turning out well. Deploying Rails is a bit easier than the last time I had to do it over a year ago. Apache's mod_proxy + Mongrel makes things pretty easy. Getting it to work with SSL is also doable; as per these lengthy instructions you have to put

  RequestHeader set X_FORWARDED_PROTO 'https'

  in your Apache config (this line requires Apache's mod_headers).

• Ruby on Ubuntu / Debian still sucks. I don't like how they break standard Ruby up into many parts and different packages. You kind of expect Ruby to come with rdoc and ri, not to have to install them separately.

(Read the whole crappy story of Westinghouse's dishonesty and horrible customer service: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6, Update 7, Update 8, Update 9, VICTORY, aftermath.)

It took me a while to think of a good word to describe Vista in the title for this post. I went with offal because "the parts of a butchered animal removed in dressing; viscera; refuse; rubbish; garbage" at least approximates the smell of Vista somewhat accurately.

How can Microsoft so consistently make such garbage-quality software? It's not like I'm looking for things to hate. I really wanted Vista to be sort of good. Heck, I had to buy a copy of Vista for work, and I don't like thinking that I wasted my money. I'd love to love Vista. (If not for the fact that spending money on Windows helped me get jobs that more than made up for the price of it, I would definitely consider myself to have lost money.)

But no. Here are the things about Vista that annoyed me, JUST TODAY, during the two hours it took me to backup my files in preparation for installing a dual-boot of Ubuntu on it.

• The mouse speed when I use my trackpad in Vista is about 800% slower than when I use a USB mouse. I can't figure out why. This problem does not exist in Ubuntu, where both work fine and at the same speed.
• About once every second, Vista accesses my hard drive. I hear "click"... "click"... "click"... "click"... incessantly forever. I don't know what running process is doing this. I killed everything I could think of. I turned off indexing of my files. I thought it was the Sidebar for a while, but nope. Still it does this. Lo and behold, the laptop doesn't do this in Ubuntu. What the hell is Vista looking for on my hard drive all the time? How much has my HD's lifespan been reduced by this?
• I tried to burn a DVD to back up my files. A popup bubble near the taskbar told me I had files waiting to be burned. It's a good thing too, because the enormous freaking window where I was dragging and dropping files wasn't enough of a reminder. This reminder bubble kept appearing, disappearing, appearing, over and over and over. I don't know why. When I say "disappear", I don't mean instantly disappear. I mean a slow, sluggish, jittery, gratuitous fade-out animation which clearly left Vista out of breath due to the struggle of the demanding computational feat of displaying a 100x200 pixel transparent rounded window.
• Vista failed to burn the DVD, without giving any error message other than that "burning failed". Then it told me to insert a new disc. I did. It made some noises, spit it out, and said "No disk inserted, please insert a disc". I tried 3 blank DVDs and all were rejected. I used Roxio in Vista and it worked OK (on the first DVD I tried to begin with), though Roxio itself is trash and was filled with links to get me to "Upgrade" (probably spend money; I didn't click them). (It's been YEARS since I've had a problem burning a disc in K3B. I'm using Gentoo for God's sake. I compile my own kernels and have to pick my device drivers from big lists of things I don't even remotely recognize. Think of how many things I could've done wrong setting up Gentoo that would prevent my DVD burner from working. I'm practically BEGGING it not to work here, and yet it does.)
• Every time I rebooted, Vista reminded me again that I had files waiting to be burned, until I double clicked the DVD icon in Computer and deleted the ghost-files that appeared there in spite of there being no DVD in the drive. Once the last ghost file was gone, Vista immediately asked me to insert a DVD(????).
• I used Vista's built in sucky Disk Manager to resize my Vista NTFS partition to make room for Ubuntu. It would only let me reduce the size of a 100GB partition by 30GB, even though 80GB were free in that partition. Googling reveals that this is a well-known limitation of the Disk Manager. Because Vista is a well-known piece of feces. I am actually one of the lucky ones, apparently. For many people, Vista just flat out refuses to resize a partition at all, regardless of how much space is free. If not for the fact that Ubuntu only takes 2.5GB fully-installed (including my boot partition, OpenOffice, Firefox, Gimp, and TONS of needless packages Ubuntu provides by default) I might be in trouble.
• While trying to make a backup of my files, I noticed that one of my folders had a random empty My Music subfolder in it. This folder didn't appear when I looked in Explorer, but it appeared magically in certain other file selection dialogs. Apparently my laptop is haunted by evil spirit folders, attracted by the pure evil that Vista radiates in all directions.
• I tried deleting a folder full of music files. As always, this stretched out into a 10-minute operation. Eventually, Vista dramatically warned me about deleting desktop.ini because, as we all know, it's VITAL to the workings of my system. I told it to delete it. Then it warned me that some of my folders were too big to fit in the recycle bin and would have to be deleted immediately instead. Gasp. I told it OK. Then it told me that one of my music folders was shared, and deleting it would stop it from being shared. You don't say! How this folder became shared, I do not know; never have I accessed this folder from another computer. I told it to go ahead and delete it. Then it repeated this warning about sharing, for the next folder. And then again, FOR EVERY SINGLE FOLDER I WAS DELETING, one by one. This is all with User Account Control DISABLED. If I had it enabled I'd be sitting there clicking OK in prompt after prompt until tomorrow morning. Eventually I went to DOS and tried rmdir /s /q *. This didn't work, I believe because it couldn't find a folder called "*". So I had to rmdir /s /q each directory manually. Thankfully Vista's tab-completion is gimped enough to make even that more difficult than it should ever be.
• All the while, I experienced random lag and slowness and horrible pain. This is such a standard problem in Vista that it's almost possible to forget that the lag exists, until you boot into Linux and see how stupidly fast your computer runs in comparison.

My coworkers report that some people at work who got new laptops and requested Vista are having such problems that the laptops are almost unusable. Apparently 1GB of RAM isn't enough. If my computer is any testament, neither is 2GB.

When I got into Ubuntu for the first time, I immediately noticed that the latpop FLIES. Which is to be expected with a fairly new Core 2 Duo machine with a fairly nice video card etc. etc. Amazing. I even put big fat bloated Compiz on here running on top of big fat bloated Gnome, with all kinds of ridiculous desktop apps and file-indexers and God only knows what else Ubuntu is throwing at me, and it still runs perfectly. Only thing that didn't work out of the box was my wireless card, which took me 15 minutes of googling to find an easy solution for. (For googlers: Dell Vostro 1500 is my laptop. Ubuntu works on it perfectly well.)

In three years when Microsoft releases their next stinker OS, I'm probably going to be forced to buy that one too. The joys of a world where everyone uses Microschloft Office.

After moving recently 2,500 miles across the country, my Gentoo machine is on the east coast while I'm on the west coast. All I have with me is my laptop, which to my everlasting regret runs Vista.

Having been forced to use Vista exclusively for a week now, I find myself more and more wanting my precious Linux back. It's the little things, like wanting to fall to a command prompt to do something quickly but not being able to. I have cygwin on here, but it's not the same. And I want to play some MKV files, which either mplayer or VLC plays fine in Linux (I forget which) but which sucks in Windows, even VLC in Windows. The subtitles are screwed up no matter what I try. I found a player that works finally, but it's non-free (as in beer, speech, freedom, and everything else). I want to at least re-arrange the order of running programs in the task bar, if not have multiple desktops, but nope, the task bar is still as pathetic as Windows 95.

Today I wanted to fire up the Windows Photo Gallery program, so I opened the start menu, clicked in the search box, and typed "photo gallery". My single result was an entry labeled only "setup.ini". Note, Photo Gallery IS installed on my computer. Although to be honest, I had removed the Windows Photo Gallery from the TOP-LEVEL of my start menu, where MS and many other programs had spewed far too many icons that I have to continually scroll past. And when I put the icon back into my start menu (top-level), then a search for "photo gallery" gives me the launcher icon for the program as well as my good old random "setup.ini". But you'd think the search thing would index program names anyways, wouldn't you?

Many of my games aren't compatible with Vista, like ZSNES for example. Maple Story barely runs. "XP compatible mode" proves to be entirely useless, as I expected. Personally, I'm convinced "XP compatible mode" does absolutely nothing. Other programs, for no reason I can determine, cause Windows to bail out of Aero and drop back to some dumbed-down interface. Then when you close the program, Windows bumps back to Aero again. These aren't games or anything fancy; SPSS for example, a statistics program, causes this to happen. This is a feature of Vista, but one I can't explain.

I managed to go a week without disabling UAC, but I just broke down and killed it. A more stupid idea, I have never seen. When you show a user a box which says "Is this safe?" 1,000 times, and 999 of those times is for a safe operation, and 1 of those times is something manevolent, there's no chance in Hades that the user is going to get it right. Vista also retains the continual nagging about not running a firewall or anti-virus program that XP brought into the world.

Vista blue-screened on me yesterday too, which is great. Good old IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. I also love how my laptop loses my internet connection every time I put it to sleep (it always has a 30-second lag when I turn it back on where it THINKS it still has a connection, but then fails, just to make things extra special annoying). I very much love how the computer won't go to sleep at all or activate my screensaver if I have my USB mouse plugged in. And I love how unbelievably laggy simple file copy/move/delete operations are, for no reason I can determine. (Note: by "love", I mean "hate".)

Windows Vista: A polished turd.

I've installed XGL and compiz-quinnstorm again. I'm somewhat disappointed. I was looking forward to a night of hacking and tweaking and getting things to work. But the darn thing installed with no problems at all. :( Even on my AMD 64-bit dual core. I thought I'd have trouble getting it to compile for amd64, but nope.

emerge layman
layman -f
layman -a portage-xgl
emerge xgl compiz-quinnstorm gcompizthemer

That's about it. Though I had to unmask some packages and write a few shell scripts to make sure everything starts that needs to start. And now I have a bouncy, wobbly, semi-translucent desktop. mplayer works, zsnes works, and that's about all I care about. I'm using compiz in conjunction with KDE, and it works perfectly fine.

One great new thing about compiz is that you can use themes. There are already a huge amount of amazing themes made for it. Including the obligatory Mac and Vista ripoffs. I find it hilarious that I can use a Vista-themed 3d-accelerated Linux before Vista is actually released.

I find it interesting that Windows Vista needs 1 GB of RAM as a minimum requirement just to run a user interface that looks hardly better than OS X, and quite a lot suckier than what you can put together in Linux. And 15GB free hard drive space? My "good" computer couldn't run it. My only Windows XP partition (used for games every couple months) is 14GB TOTAL. 15GB FREE?

I wish I had a list of what all Vista is doing that requires that much hard drive space. Meanwhile there are complete operating systems that fit entirely on a single floppy disk. Does Vista really do 10,000 more than MenuetOS? Let's be generous and shave off an order of magnitude; does it really do 1,000 times more?

Another reason I will never buy Vista. As if I needed more reasons.

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03/vista-2007-fire-leadership-now.html

This is apparently a post full of MS employees discussing how terrible Vista is. Who could possibly say they're surprised? After the 20th MS product you use turns out to be a bug-ridden crash machine, it's hard to expect anything new not to be the same.

One day, after everyone buys new computers that come pre-installed with Vista enough that everyone HAS Vista, those of us who don't will be forced either to upgrade or live with a computer that can't talk to anyone. That's the thing that gets me. Even if you KNOW Windows is crap, your ability to make an informed consumer decision is grossly limited by the consumer decisions of everyone else.

httpundefined