My epiphany...

[aphex]

I realized tonight why it is that I love OSX and despise Vista.

With OSX, things just work... Rarely do I have to tinker with the OS, its all about the applications themselves. Things are consistent, boottimes never vary much, everything just usually works as its supposed to without any interference.

With Vista, I'm constantly tinkering to figure out what the next problem is. One time i'll boot, things will be fine, the next time, it takes 15 minutes to boot and I have to go dig around the OS to see whats going on, whats not working right, whats slowing down, why this or that won't load or is giving me an error, or a new popup in my system tray, etc... I spend far too much time troubleshooting and complaining about the OS, rather than just enjoying the applications.

I dunno, i just can't sleep right now and got to thinking....

 

[TheStu]

This is something that I discovered not too long after I got my MacBook. Although OS X does crash on occasion, and sometimes things don't just work, it bounces right back, and doesn't get bogged down by it. If iTunes crashes, nothing else does. The OS keeps going like nothing happened. OS X lets me actually use the computer without having to deal with the OS.

 

[Kadarin]

I agree. With my MacBook Pro, I don't worry about the OS, and just run the apps I want to run.

 

[DimZiE]

to be fair > tinkering with apple's live firmware is such a hassle compared to the BIOS on a PC
but i do agree that mac are more reliable..compared to Winx86 systems

 

[randomlinh]

as much crap as we might give microsoft, you gotta still hand it to them on what they have to get vista running on in the first place. Apple has the luxury of saying "we have this hardware floating around... that's it."

Microsoft just needs to kill it all and start from scratch. I do kinda like vista visually tho (vs XP), but hate how complicated it has become to get to some of the settings.

 

[TheStu]

Youre not wrong randomlinh, Microsoft definitely does have a tougher time than Apple, and I agree that they should just start over. It's great that they have 25 years of backwards compatibility, but if it comes at the cost of increased size for components that 95% of the public will never use, or decrease stability, then maybe it is time to start over.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: randomlinh
as much crap as we might give microsoft, you gotta still hand it to them on what they have to get vista running on in the first place. Apple has the luxury of saying "we have this hardware floating around... that's it."

Microsoft just needs to kill it all and start from scratch. I do kinda like vista visually tho (vs XP), but hate how complicated it has become to get to some of the settings.

I think that's a great idea! They should have something like Rosetta in the next version of Windows, so they can stay compatible with XP/Vista yet still have an entirely new system. XP is great imo, not as good as OS X but everyone knows how to use it and it's fairly stable with good drivers and SP2 installed. Microsoft has an enormous market out there - they're the standard for industry, education, and consumers - but their latest OS just stinks. They should take a cue from Adobe - Acrobat got bloated over time and now 8.1 has been trimmed down with the features you need and fast load times.

But until then, I've got my credit card ready for Leopard

 

[Nothinman]

Youre not wrong randomlinh, Microsoft definitely does have a tougher time than Apple, and I agree that they should just start over. It's great that they have 25 years of backwards compatibility, but if it comes at the cost of increased size for components that 95% of the public will never use, or decrease stability, then maybe it is time to start over.

There's no way they can start completely over, just look how long it took them to get Vista out of the door and that was with them starting with the XP as the base. I'd guess that your 95% is a huge overestimation, lots of corporation still run extremely old software because they can't afford to replace it, don't wan to replace it or can't find something that does the exact same thing. And hell, a lot of InstallShield's installers were 16-bit up until a few years ago and no one noticed until people started running XP64 since they wouldn't work.

They should take a cue from Adobe - Acrobat got bloated over time and now 8.1 has been trimmed down with the features you need and fast load times.

And how many times larger than Acrobat Reader is Windows? People write PDF software from scratch all of the time, I like evince more than acroread, but most people who start writing OSes from scratch don't usually last very long because even getting the thing to a point where it'll boot and be usable is a huge chore. Even Apple skipped that part when they switched to OS X and just decided to reuse NeXT and BSD stuff.

I'm not defending MS, I personally hate using their software, but there's no way they can ditch their existing code base and start over and still have a viable product. Well they might get away with it if they had some integrated virtualization and did something similar to Rosetta and whatever the embedded Classic stuff was in the original releases but that would take up a lot of resources since you'd essentially have 2 OSes running so people would cry about that. And people would cry about them integrating their own virtualization software since you know there wouldn't be an easy way to remove it and replace it with Xen, VMWare, etc.

 

[TheStu]

Maybe do it as a side project, salvage what code from Vista as is needed, but for the most part, deliver upon the features that they abandoned (most notably WinFS) and see what can be done to make the best Windows possible that isnt a total hog in terms of performance. I realize that it is daunting, but I think it would pay off for them.

And you're right, 95% is probably overestimated, but the shock value is nice non?

 

[Nothinman]

From the little information I can find XP is estimated to have around 40M SLOC in it and Vista likely has a lot more, especially if you count all of the extra userland crap they included which most people do since MS sells it all as one big bundle. How long do you think it would take to wade through that and decide what to keep and what to reimplement? Only after that's done can you begin the reimplementation of the missing pieces. And since you'll likely need compatibility in order to use the parts you decided to salvage you'll need to keep at least those APIs and ABIs the same.