I liked it. It isn't mean at all. It's lighthearted and funny but it does address something I've thought about before. Perhaps Vista isn't as bad as most people think but it certainly does have problems. Instead earnestly promising to address any real issues Microsoft announced a $300m ad campaign to deal with it. MS could have earned a lot more credibility and respect by admitting to perhaps even a small sampling of complaints and issuing updates to deal with them - but they didn't. By trying to address these problems with a very expensive ad campaign MS effectively blames Vista users. This Apple ad captures that in a lighthearted and funny way. This ad makes me like Apple.
I'll try not to get mean - I'm a Mac user, and I know how much I hate it when Windows users get douchey - but I think that the biggest problem they'd need to fix is the ration of aesthetic to functionality. It's what pissed me off every day with Vista. Microsoft added features that look "Mac-like" but without the inherent usability.
For instance, that window display where they're all sideways and you can scroll through them. I'm certain that's a rip off of Expose on the Mac. The difference is that Expose provides a very quick-n-easy way to access your windows, whereas that display seemed like it didn't make things particularly easy. And I forget if I tested it, but I very much doubt that it was a spring-loaded view, either.
The Aero theme is another instance. Compare that to Leopard's Aqua. They're both attempts to look modern and beautiful, but Leopard goes about it my making all of its chrome minimal. The buttons are small, the borders on every last window are 1px. With Vista, you get bulk hanging off of every window and the buttons look cartoony.
I won't go into the OS operations, because - again - I think that anything that I say will only invite flaming on the other side, and frankly I'm sick and tired of Hacker News having the same fucking OS wars that every other social news site does, and I don't want to flame things. But OS X feels like a complete solution in a way. Every part of it has been lovingly slavered over to perfection. From the feel of the computers to small things like the message windows (there was an article here talking about on OS X message windows are more direct than their Win/Lin equivalents) things are polished to a fault. And that's something that Windows or Linux need to "fix" before they can really seem like a decent competitor in my eyes.
No. I've played with Ubuntu in each iteration, and its level of polish is on a magnitude below what Apple's doing. Compared to Windows, it's very nice: I'd pick Ubuntu over Vista at this point without hesitation. But OS X has polish to a level that's uncanny: it's the sort where I'm still finding out new things about my computer that make my life slightly easier every day. It's really beyond comparison to other operating systems as the other systems stand right now.
Still, what works for you works. If Ubuntu's doing the job for you, then congrats and have fun. Just don't make the mistake of comparing it to the Mac systems without spending a lot of time in each.
Ubuntu is not more polished than even Windows XP. The main things keeping me from switching my day-to-day work to my Ubuntu partition are (1) text rendering, (2) reliability, (3) battery life, and (4) Lenovo's Thinkvantage tools. Windows XP absolutely kills Ubuntu in these aspects.
1) That has changed recently with the addition of the Liberation fonts, but I agree - a few months back it was a hack
2) What? I don't think many people will agree with you on that aspect. The fact that most Linux crashes you can just reset X and be back at the login screen, where as a Windows crash needs a full reboot means that even if Linux did crash more often - which I don't think it does - you spend less time getting screwed
3) Really? I haven't found much of a difference on my Dell laptop.
1) No fonts for Linux compare with Microsoft's ClearType fonts (the C* fonts). And, Ubuntu's anti-aliasing still isn't nearly as good as Windows's or Mac OS X's, as of Ubuntu 8.
2) My Windows XP machine hasn't crashed once since I've had it (over two years). Ubuntu 6, 7, and 8 have all consistently crashed when resuming from hibernate on my laptop (Lenovo T60, one of the most common in the world).
3) Ubuntu 8 usually runs about 45 minutes to an hour less than Windows XP on my laptop's battery.
That's entirely possible. I've never used Ubuntu on a laptop setting.
From my experience with it, it works great if and only if you can find the right drivers. When it runs well, I like it more than Vista and most likely more than XP. But XP is certainly more supported overall, and that's another thing that's definitely worth considering.
You make some good points. However, I haven't noticed a lot of what you've said.
The keyboard on the newer computers is beautiful. I didn't like the old big keyboard: the new ones feel wonderfully responsive to me. The heat is a problem, but I guess I'm biased, because I rarely have my computer on my lap. I keep it on my desk or in my bed. And I use a fan program to speed up my fans when I need to, and it usually works.
The proprietary formats are a pain, yes, but that doesn't affect me very often. With iTunes, I get most of my music from other sources. I have perhaps 10 CDs that I got from iTunes, and that's mostly from Plus, so it's open enough to send to other people. Everything else is MP3 and MP4, which means - among other things - I can click and drag songs to iChat and it works.
The mail import took me a long time, for Gmail. But it imported my other emails first, and with Gmail it imported mostly the archived email, so I could use it right out of the box. I don't use Maildir, so mail works pretty much beautifully for me.
What does that optimization do for the fonts? Do you have an example? And either way, I'd take the Apple default fonts over anything else I've seen to date. I'd kill to keep Zapfino.
the optimization just gives you really nice smoothing (i wish i could upload pictures here). i currently use the android font on emacs 23 on a thinkpad (black on light blue) and i find it to be much easier on the eyes (the powerbook fuzziness gave me headaches)
anyhoo, enjoy. the hardware is indeed beautiful. and the new aluminum ones sure are tempting (but i'll wait until someone gets ubuntu working properly on them)
and not to beat a dead horse, i really tried _hard_ to get the powerbook to work for me. i was really determined to like it. but no dice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131930
Yeah, i've been using kubuntu since 7.04. Unfortunately kubuntu is less polished than the gnome version, but for the last year and a half it got better and better with every next release. Hopefully the next release will not be a disappointment because the still raw kde 4.
How about that it's much slower than it's predecessor, requires tons more hardware, and generally all around just kinda sucks. I've reverted to XP pro myself at the office, Vista's a piece of crap.
yup. that pretty much covers it. funny thing is that XP sucks too. it just looks soooo much better in comparison, that i began to actually like it a bit.
Compatibility. Nothing draws me to Windows other than the programs I NEED to run on it for work. For me, Solidworks 2007 is needed. It doesn't run on Vista/Linux/Mac, but it does run on XP. So I will never upgrade until we upgrade Solidworks versions (unlikely), or Microsoft or the vendor fixes compatibility issues (unlikely). If you want to talk about day to day use, Windows is far inferior.
