My Thoughts on "Then and Now"

There's a meme appearing on Gnome Planet and Ubuntu Planet where people post their first Linux desktop and compare it to what they run now. I thought I'd put my two cents in. First, my first!

Red Hat 5.1, courtesy ToastyTech.com

It looks primitive, I agree, but let's compare it to what I was using before.

Windows 95, courtesy of AresLuna.org.

You know what? They weren't that different. Win95 had Plug'n'Play, but it worked so badkly that it shouldn't have been a feature of the OS. Memory was unprotected so the OS would hand for no reason whatsoever. Moving to RH5 seemed like a joy, once you got it set up. That was the painful part. Oh, and it supported like three pieces of consumer hardware, so I had to go out to buy a new, "real," modem. Netscape sucked, but so did IE.

Let's move forward to today, on my netbook:

There's a better theme, and the controls all moved (but that happened years ago with the move to GNOME 2). Still, there's not a lot different in the UI. It makes my point from last week -- don't change the UI. The core libraries, though are completely different. Applications can easily communicate, and there are standard libraries for things like communication, media, and document rendering. None of that was true of either RH5 or Win95.

Where's the competition?

Window 7, from blogcdn.com

Similar level of difference from Win95 to Win7 as from RH5 to Fedora 13, eh? (I thought about trying to get RHEL 5.5 and taking a screenshot just so I could say "From RH5 to RH5.5, but I didn't.") Again, there is some flash, and the internals have all been replaced (by NT!), but the basic UI isn't significantly different.

I thought we'd be further along by now. Where's my flying car? I guess I'll look to the smartphone market to see the changes I really want.

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Shock and Horror!

Shock and horror! Windows 7 sometimes misidentifies hardware and assigns generic drivers which don't unlock all the features of the hardware, leaving, for example, Ed Bott without a working microphone and no way to get mutli-touch, even with the correct drivers.

Ed Bott also doesn't like the new icon-only taskbar, so he re-enables text+icons.  It took him months to get used to the default icon combination strategy, instead of the "combine when taskbar is full" method he was used to from Vista.

What about the file manager? Well, it now has an "insistence on using namespaces that aren’t tied to a hierarchy with some sort of disk device at the top." Does that sound familiar to anyone? It replaces this with Libraries, making the sidebar look remarkably like another OS I know of. If you thought I meant Nautilus, I was actually talking about OS X, but either OS will work. Bott says that Windows users will need to be trained to use Libraries because they represent an "initial conceptual hurdle of understanding."

Some (very few, apparently) of your legacy programs may not run in Windows 7 so you'll need to use a virtual machine running XP with some shared folders in order to get around that. Luckily, it has seamless mode, also available in VirtualBox.

This may have sounded like a rant against Windows 7 or even Ed Bott. It was no such thing. In fact, I am going to praise Ed. His opinion of Windows 7 is that it could probably be released as ready right now. "From a features and capabilities point of view, Windows 7 is essentially done." His final judgement?

Overall, I’m impressed with how reliable this Windows release has been. It also seems more than adequate in terms of performance. I haven’t taken a stopwatch to measure speeds and feeds, but overall, every common operation in Windows 7 feels snappy and responsive, even on old hardware. I haven’t seen significant changes in startup and shutdown times over Windows Vista on the same hardware.

How did he come to this conclusion with so much that's different and so much that needed tweaking?

Instead of that conventional review approach, I want to share my experiences after six months of using Windows 7 full time. My attitude over that six months has been to keep an open mind, learn how the operating system works, and incorporate its features into my work style. If you’re planning to evaluate Windows 7, I urge you to try the same approach: Keep an open mind, try to figure out how it works, and see if maybe some small changes in old work habits can pay big dividends in productivity.

Thank you, Ed Bott, for taking the time to review an OS properly. I wish more reviewers did that.

W3C Stats, Linux, Mac, and Windows -- Relevant?

The above graph shows the OS stats for W3C since March, 2003. Side-stepping the debate over whether the stats are an accurate representation of the OS share, I'd like to look at the trends the graph shows (which I believe to be accurate) and what it means for Linux-based OSes.

The most obvious line on the graph is XP's. That's no surprise. It peaked at the beginning of 2007 and began a slow decline from there. Not coincidentally, Vista was released in early 2007. XP showed a later bump which some might attribute to Vista, but I believe those numbers came from the losses in Win2000. From that point on, Vista climbed while XP and 2000 fell off. I think most would agree that represents the reallity of the OS market.

More interesting stuff happens at the bottom of the graph. If you can tell, Linux ranks above Mac until 2006, when they each sit at about 3.5%. After 2006, both OSes grow steadily with OS X ending at 6% while Linux is at 4%. Clearly, OS X has the momentum.

What about Windows users as a whole? In 2003, the share was 93%, trending down to below 87% in 2008, then recovering to over 90% again. If I were able to get earlier numbers for Windows, I would guess that it would have sat at 97-98% during the late 90s. In other words, that line would keep its slope through the previous few years.

The enigmatic "Other" OS rose to over 5% during Windows' slump, then crashing to well under 1%. Although I can't accurately guess what the "Other" OS is made of (maybe smart phones?),  the 5% of its users fled and about half went to Windows , 30% to Mac, and 20% to Linux.

My analysis? Although you see a recent bump in the Windows numbers, that is probably due to a change in the way W3C categorizes "Other." Both Linux and Mac are moving slowly up the graph at the expense of Windows. My prediction? Mac will see another 2% growth year -- getting it over 8% -- while Linux will rise .25-.50% in 2009, leaving it sitting firmly in the over-4% range in 2010.

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