Comments on: Bad Vista

By: mike

mike — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:14:07 +0000

I have to wonder how that comparison would fare if it was Vista vs Linux? We bought a new HP Vista machine and converted an old WIn 2K based desktop to SUSE Linux – http://file.sh/SUSE+Linux+torrent.html . After 2 months the hassles with Linux are far fewer! There are hassles with both, but the Linux hassles are well documented and Novell ($60 SUSE Linux support) actually DOES provide solutions in real English! We are preparing to convert the new machine to Linux as well.

By: J.Goodwin

J.Goodwin — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:57:04 +0000

Alex St. John is an interesting duck. As mentioned before, WildTangent has a long history of bundling spy and ad ware in with their downloads.

What’s really interesting though is that he was one of the original guys at Microsoft who developed DirectX, which has essentially supplanted OpenGL (and actually supplanted it in Vista) in the Windows space, and therefore in the video acceleration hardware space.

He was also one of the early guys on the Xbox team. Like of a lot of the Xbox pioneers, he went on sabbatical and opted not to return after the project hand off to Allard.

He’s certainly not a strong advocate of free software or anything of the sort. Quite the opposite in fact. It’d be interesting to know what kind of bad blood is there.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 06:43:17 +0000

er, what about the speech recognition? That saves my RSI-injured wrists and tendonitis-riddled forearms a lot of effort. It’s better (yes, I’ve used both for over a year) than Dragon Naturally speaking. Is ubuntu usable primarily by speech recognition? That’s something vista and/or dragon naturally speaking give me.

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 01:08:02 +0000

I think the Gutmann article (linked from here) does a much better job of spelling out the issue. I agree that the rhetoric on the fsf site is not all that hot, but I think that it has value as a rallying point, and that just communicating the idea “There is a formalized group of people who are opposed to Windows Vista” is a good thing.

But yes, it could be a lot better.

By: Oluseyi

Oluseyi — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:56:52 +0000

Quote missing from the post above:
Microsoft Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall downgrade and regression. It is a ruse to compel the further transfer of control over peoples’ computers to an external and mysterious certification authority with peculiar standards of “genuine”. It is a ploy to artificially motivate the purchase of expensive, unnecessary hardware.

By: Oluseyi

Oluseyi — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 00:55:41 +0000

I’m not surprised Alex St. John opposes Vista. WildTangent software was, for a long time, regarded as a virus/worm of some sort because it had a habit of initiating an additional process and shipping out network data – without disclosing this fact to the end user. To this day, I refuse to install anything even tangentially related to WildTangent (and I wish they would stop sending me their newsletter, but I guess my affiliations in the game industry make that impossible).

The BadVista.org article you link is a bunch of fluff. I quote:

How’s about we just say in English what we think is wrong rather than all this “revolutionary” rhetoric? How’s about a simple, 5-step explanation of Why Vista Is Bad For You? How’s about the “What’s wrong with Microsoft Windows Vista?” page (http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista) actually having some content?

I would really like to see reasoned discourse, not FUD – the very tactics the FSF has always accused Microsoft of employing to discredit Free Software. Then again, I would really like a shiny new Ferrari in gunmetal grey…

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:01:34 +0000

It’s not quite as extreme as that… I have used Linux in one form or another for a long time (braid-game.com is a dedicated Red Hat server, and my first Linux distribution was Slackware 0.91 back in 1992 or something). But, ever since Windows 95 I have used Windows as my primary platform to get things done, partially because, hey, that’s where the people playing games are.

So now my determination is to use Ubuntu (or future Linux distributions) as the main platform I use to get things done… and to help out the platform, either via making applications for it or infrastructurally. I’d also like to turn my attention to other open platforms (I’d love to make an OLPC game as my next project).

By: Corvus

Corvus — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:18:42 +0000

Sweet! Welcome to the fold, brother! I’ve been using Linux exclusively for a few years now and I’ll never look back.

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 08:05:22 +0000

Addendum: Some other game developers are talking about the Vista issue, and switching to Linux, over on the Molly Rocket Forums. https://mollyrocket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=325