Even I had a bit of faith that Microsoft might come to their senses and make Windows 7 more lean and mean, but frankly it's just a slightly more matured version of Vista with a new name.

I've been under the assumption that I'd finally trade XP for Windows 7 and just skip over Vista, but most likely I'll be sticking with XP for awhile still.

My PC blazes brightly enough, but I don't see much sense in trading framerate in games for slightly better shadows with DX10, especially at the tune of a couple hundred bucks for a new OS.

Marketing-wise (or should I say marketing machine-wise), Microsoft is going to do really well with this. Windows 7 will perform better simply because the average PC is catching up, although it'll still be a dog on most laptops. In other words, buy a new PC this year with Windows 7 and it will run faster than a PC from last year with Vista: The PC itself is faster.

I think Microsoft is doing their customers a disservice though, the minor tweaks and improvements just aren't much. A whole lot of current laptop owners will upgrade to (desperately?) push their performance a little bit more, no matter how small. And for some of them, it could be the threshold they need, although for many others they won't see much difference at all. Either way, the mainstream press has been run over by Microsoft's marketing steamroller.

Apple could have capitalized on this at MacWorld, but they're being dumbasses this season, going back to their old passive-aggressive nature instead of the simply aggressive stance they took against Vista. Oh I'm sure there will be a bit of rumblings, but it's after the fact at this point. It's like they're Microsoft customers themselves, playing wait-and-see. That'll be too late, Microsoft will win this round and it may be the end of Apple's recent upward curve unless they can leverage another iPhone-like device.

I was also a little delusional last year thinking I could maybe switch to Linux on my desktop once Wine catches up to DX10, but once again I overestimated desktop usage on Linux overall, I think it's almost moving backwards in usability while the geeks keep adding flashy gadgetry.

*sigh*

Update: If you want to try it for yourself, the Windows 7 Beta should be available (starting tomorrow afternoon) at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

Another Update: The Beta is available again after being offline for a day or so.

The Success

Earlier this month, I threw Ubuntu Linux on my roommate's PC and was astonished at how slick and painless it was. In some ways, the ease and simplicity surpassed Windows installations and even pre-installed Windows (which inevitably requires more tweaking and updating than it should). I hadn't even pre-planned the Ubuntu installation, it was on a whim, but I had it running Portal smoothly in no time at all.

That was just one installation, one machine. Just a snapshot of success.

The Quirks and Snags

On two other PCs, I had troubles with drivers. There are no workable Linux drivers for my Creative Labs X-Fi, not even for basic sound. Creative Labs themselves are the maintainer of OpenAL, one of the audio APIs on Linux, so that boggles me to say the least. But it doesn't really matter to me who's fault it is: if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Speaking of which, I couldn't get 5.1 surround sound upmixing for my music to work on any of the PCs. The entire interface for configuring audio on the Ubuntu desktop confounded me.

I soon ran into quirks, the kind that are fixable but the sort that I associate with the geek nature of a Linux Desktop. One example is the Numlock state, which is set to Off by default regardless of Bios settings and whether or not the light is on. Confusing to most people, but not hard to fix if you're okay with editing the right config file. My roommate thought Linux was just broken with the Numlock key and I can understand her assumption, you take it for granted with other OSes that it just works right.

I don't mean to Wine

I also had difficulty with Wine, probably because of the aforementioned driver issues. I know Wine isn't a standard feature for Ubuntu, but that's part of the point, running games is paramount as far as I'm concerned. For serious games on Linux, that means Wine. Native gaming on Linux is as abysmal as gaming on a Mac. What Linux really needs is another Loki to actively progress SDL, OpenGL and other game-related APIs and drivers.

My roommate is happier with Ubuntu, it runs smoother than Vista and most of the time Solitaire and Minesweeper will satisfy her. She is quite pleased with the selection of casual games that came with Ubuntu, but on the other hand she owns a few Popcap games and rebooting back to Windows for those is a pain.

Get it there

Linux has always been good at catering to geeks, it's the OS where any coder can add whatever features they want. But a distribution like Ubuntu, which focuses on usability, needs to address the quirks. And they need to approach major vendors like Creative Labs and get those drivers made, because properly functioning hardware is the core of usability.

Entertainment is an essential part of any desktop OS, whether it's listening to surround sound, watching movies, or playing games. Linux itself just needs better solutions in the media area, especially games where the real trick is catering to developers. Wine is impressive, but from an end-user's perspective it's very inconsistent. The native APIs and interfaces have to not only work, but they need to attract serious developers for games and applications.

So the answer from this gamer's perspective? The Linux desktop has jumped leaps and bounds in recent years, but it's still not there yet.

Edit: I've posted a followup to this article.
. . .

The push: Vista on a moderate machine

My roommate snagged herself a free Lenovo 3000 J115 PC via a DSL 2year contract: It's not a bad machine but it's seriously underpowered for Vista, which it came with pre-installed. Upgrading it to 2gigs of RAM helped a little, but as soon as she launched any games the machine would vibrate with hard drive activity as it chugged into virtual memory.

When she asked me to help tweak her PC into something usable, my initial thought was turn off the eyecandy and extra features of Vista, or just install XP. I know XP would fly on that PC.

On a whim, I installed gOS on a spare drive I had around. It had made some news recently and since I was going to be fiddling with dual-booting I figured I'd give it a try. Immediately it demonstrated some quirks and reconfirmed my beliefs that Linux isn't made for the desktop, but it was pretty enough to perk me onto Ubuntu. I decided to take the time for a full proper Ubuntu Linux install.

Ubuntu 7.10 first impressions

Within 45 minutes, I had Ubuntu up and running, installed Wine and the Valve Orange Box. Following some instructions plus a workaround, I was playing Portal in Linux with a much better framerate and resolution. I was shocked.

I've been using various forms of Un*x since the late 80's and I've regularly ran Linux as a server OS for nearly a decade. Every now and then I try X on the desktop, but I've always been disappointed. I've always encountered a large amount of inconsistency on Linux desktops, even with packaged distributions. It's a geek's OS and my opinion is that geeks fiddle with it so much that it takes a geek to run it. But Ubuntu had me falling out of my chair, it challenged my preconceptions.

My roommate is pleased so far, it's not perfect, but it's better than what she had. It's quite possible she may get me to install XP later, since Wine doesn't like her Popcap games much (geeks are more interested in getting Valve's games working, go figure), but for now she's having fun exploring something new on her desktop. She's not a geek by any stretch and she's just using it.

I'll followup

For me, Ubuntu's ease of getting a very workable desktop, complete with eyecandy (out of the box, or serious), stability and *gasp* consistency has me floored. I'm going to dual-boot it on my own PC and see how it goes. I'll update here with my experience as I go. The big question of course, will be getting games running (most likely via Wine).