| Vista SP1's delay is Desktop Linux's good news |
Aug. 30, 2007
Vista's been something of a flop. I know it. You know it. Even in Bill Gates' secret sanctum hidden underneath his mansion they know it. Businesses, in particular, aren't about to touch Vista for corporate desktops until they get SP1. Guess what? They're not going to be getting it anytime soon.
On Aug. 29 Microsoft finally admitted that they have been working on Vista SP1 over the summer. For some reason--perhaps they hoped people would buy an unfixed Vista?--Microsoft wouldn't fess up to getting SP1 ready even though secret beta copies of it had been floating around the Internet for several weeks.
Before Microsoft lovers start singing the praises of their corporate overlords, though they should know that they aren't going to be seeing fixes for Vista's multiple problems anytime soon.
Microsoft told Microsoft Watch top watcher Joe Wilcox that a limited release of the Vista beta will go out in a few weeks to Microsoft's friends and family. Then, maybe in 2007, it will go out to MSDN and TechNet members. After that it might be RTM (released to manufacturing) in the first quarter of 2008. Finally, sometime in 2008, you'll get a chance to upgrade to Vista SP1.
That, of course, presumes that Microsoft can hit a deadline. Let me put it this way. In baseball, there's this little thing called the Mendoza Line. If a position player is hitting .200 or above, he's said to be above the Mendoza Line and he may be in the lineup in some games. If you're a major leaguer and hitting below the Mendoza Line, get your bags packed, you'll soon be on your way back to the minor leagues. When it comes to Microsoft and delivery dates, Microsoft would still be struggling to get out of Single A ball.
You might not want to upgrade anyway. You see, Microsoft swears on a stack of Bibles that it won't foul up application compatibility. David Zipkin, senior product manager for Windows, said, "Microsoft is going to do its best to limit any impact on application compatibility with SP1 and plans to add some shims to improve this." Shims? Shims in software are little bits of code you stick into make it possible for a program or device to run with an operating system that it's not quite compatible with. Shims are proof positive of sloppy programming. They're also known for being very hard to maintain.
Zipkin also said that SP1 include a mandatory change to the way applications communicate with the Windows Security Center. This means that application developers will be forced to use a new set of APIs (application programming interfaces) to provide status updates to the Windows Security Center. The application must also include an application manifest and authenticode sign the reporting application.
And, Microsoft expects existing programs to run on Vista SP1!? What are they drinking up there in Redmond!? SP1 sounds like it's going to be a compatibility nightmare. Are we going to see Vista refusing to run applications because they can't past the new security tests the same way that Windows Genuine Advantage's recent failures shut down Vista computers?
Instead of going through all this crap, isn't it time to give the Linux desktop a try?
Seriously. You no longer have to install Linux. Dell will be happy to sell you an Ubuntu-powered desktop or laptop. Personally, I have my eye on one of Dell's Inspiron 1420 notebooks. These are sweet laptops at an even sweeter price.
On the other hand, I love IBM, excuse me, Lenovo ThinkPads. OK, so ThinkPads aren't cheap. So what. They're built like tanks and they're incredibly reliable. Desktop Linux, unlike Vista, which needs 2 gigabytes of RAM before it's even really usable, gets along just fine even in older computers.
Take, for example, DesktopLinux's favorite ThinkPad, a horribly out of date IBM ThinkPad 2662-35U, with a Pentium III 600MHz processor, 192MB of SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive. On this ThinkPad, we first tested seven, count 'em, seven Linux distributions. Since then we've run the newest Kubuntu desktop distribution on it.
My own personal ThinkPad, a T40 with a 1.5 GHz Pentium M processor, 512 MBs of RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive, is only five years old. It runs SimplyMEPIS 6 flawlessly.
As you can read in the above stories, we had very little trouble installing any of these modern Linuxes on the old laptops. But, hey, its 2007, you don't need to install anything to get Linux on a ThinkPad today. Lenovo will soon be shipping SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP 1 on brand new Lenovo ThinkPad laptops.
No installation, no fuss, no muss, and no Vista annoyances.
You know what, though? From what Microsoft is telling us about SP1, I foresee that installing SP1 on an existing Vista machine and getting your applications to work properly is going to be far more trouble than installing any contemporary Linux on a PC.
SLED, Mint, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, the always exceptional SimplyMEPIS--if you can put a disc in an optical drive, you can install Linux. Might you run into hardware or software problems? You might. Personally, though, and I've run every kind of operating system known to man, I think you're far more likely to run into that kind of trouble with Vista, SP1 or not, than desktop Linux.
Give it a try, folks. There are lots of Linux distributions out there now that will let you run them on your PC without installing them. Compare your experience with those with your experience with Vista. Give them both a fair shake, and I've little doubt that you're going to become a Linux desktop user.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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