MS sees Windows 7 leap, but XP workhorse refuses to die Most Windows 7 customers are satisfied with the new operating system, according to tech analyst house Forrester Research, but many stick-in-the-mud types still see no reason to upgrade from the OS that refuses to die - Windows XP. Forrester published the results of its study (subscription required) about take-up of Microsoft’s …
Yup, it slows down after a few months. And it slows down if you leave it on for a few days - resorted to a USB key for the 'speedboost' feature to make it a 'bit' quicker.
And cost is a big factor - it just isn't worth it when you have XP... as mentioned above - bring back the pre-release pricing for good... or make it so cheap that buying it is a no brainer. Oh and bin the stupid versions - one version, one price.
People recoil in horror when they ask me to fix their computers and I say a reinstall is the quickest option and it turns out they don't have the disks so I tell them it will cost £x to buy a new copy of Windows - they just go out and buy a new PC 90% of the time...
I actually had Windows 7 on my new PC - I used it for over a month like that, but ultimately I wiped it and installed XP. There was nothing about 7 that XP didn't give me (though I'm at the max - 4 cores and 4GB of RAM, that XP will handle (OK, it won't even quite handle the 4GB, but I'm OK with that)).
The changes to Windows Explorer just drove me nuts, and for my way of working, were simply not as fast.
In the end, I sat down to list pros and cons, and the only thing Windows 7 had going for it were support for hardware that I didn't actually own, and dancing clowns (cosmetics).
There's nowt wrong with XP. It's a very stable OS (takes about a decade of fiddling with it for MS to achieve that), and it doesn't have to regularly report to its owner (MS) what the person who has installed it is doing.
It also helps that after a decade or so I too know the OS pretty intimately, and can generally persuade it to do things my way. What bugs me about later windows version is that they are dumbed-down for dummies and nanny users who don't need it.
If I had to, I'd switch to Ubuntu if my games would still run.
Windows 7 is great just because it's not Vista. The difference between the two in terms of performance is night and day. (And I'd know...I did an installation--primarily for humor value--on a Compaq Deskpro EN PIII 1GHz machine. Surprised the heck out of me at how usable it really was. It would have been perfectly fine for a lot of tasks.) On that basis alone, I can at least put up with Windows 7. And that's the best I can say for it.
But on the surface, Windows 7's UI is just a mess. I don't like the fixed toolbars with their fixed buttons. The new task bar is supremely annoying for the most part and way too big. Things that used to be quick and easy to do now take a ton of mouse clicks. Menu bars are under toolbars where they DO NOT belong. I don't need all that goofy UI "chrome" that does nothing but waste screen space. Navigating a lot of Windows 7 via the keyboard seems to be difficult, a notable exception from every prior release of Windows.
I'm still on Windows 2000 Professional SP4 for my primary computer. It leaves me wanting for nothing, it's paid for and I still say it's probably the best release of Windows that Microsoft ever managed. It's quite possible that I will end up finding just how far beyond its support expiration date Win2K will remain a feasible operating system.
All the while, I'm definitely keeping my ear to the ground on Linux, which I so want to like on the desktop (but it's not there yet), have seriously considered some sort of FreeBSD distribution and some Macintosh stuff has managed to sneak in. I don't know which way I will eventually go...but I am probably heading away from Windows...
@ The Unexpected Bill
I too agree 100% with your comments re Windows 7's messy UI. The Win-7 UI is so slipshod and illogical that it takes an inordinate amount of messing about to cut to the chase and get something done. This mollycoddling user interface may be OK for those with a room-temperature IQ but it's a pain in the A. for experienced users.
Why the hell can't it be turned off, or why didn't M$ allow the UI to be switched back to the XP UI? (As it is, I switch my XPs to the Windows 2000 UI as I reckon it's better than XP's default. Thus, as far as I'm concerned, Vista and Win 7 UI usability is somewhere off in cloud-cuckoo land.)
Frankly, I'm damn tired of these authoritarian 'social engineers' in M$ who keep making we users the centre of UI usability experiments (and pawns of the marketing department). The Common User Access (CUA) standard was worked out as far back as 1987 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access) and every time M$ comes out with a new O/S they deviate even further from the standard. Vista and Win 7 are now at a point where the CUA standard is almost unrecognizable.
(I wish the El Reg editors and others would point out that every time MS makes changes to the UI it costs users, industry--everyone--money for unnecessary retraining. It's expensive junk retraining for something that shouldn't need relearning and it benefits no one except Microsoft. Economically, it does not make sense.)
Why has MS done this, and to what end or purpose? None as far as I can see--other than marketing, which has obviously failed. (It's turned me and my company off for starters, we won't touch Vista or Win 7 with a bargepole). Moreover, why has M$ forbidden users to switch back to an earlier UI?
Microsoft has to learn that its obsession with the corporate image of its products--that is Microsoft only allows strictly limited changes of O/S's UI and themes--is turning off customers big-time.
I see absolutely no reason to upgrade just for fashion's sake (sorry Win-7ers, you should be worrying about your work rather than the addictive M$ eye candy.) Win 7 offers me absolutely nothing new that I can use. Essentially, it's a repackaged XP with limitations, moreover, it dials 'home' and screws with my privacy--not for my benefit but that of Microsoft.
Finally, Microsoft FAILED TO DELIVER with Win 7:
- the Win FS filing system (a database-filing system, promised with Vista, which is an absolute necessity with large terabyte drives).
- Any improvement to the antiquated file structure (files still do not automatically come with encapsulation, authentication and meta-data structures). After all this time why not?
- A Chinese wall (firewall like) separation between user data, program files, and Windows system files. For instance, anyone can copy anything into the Windows system directory and or alter most of the files therein. It's no wonder MS products are riddled with security holes when such fundamental flaws remain. XP was and is a security problem and Vista and Win 7 are just more of the same, they are all environments that allow viruses and malware roam at will. Now, two versions on from XP, and there's still no fundamental change to the security architecture of Win 7.
For us, it's seemingly the end of the road as far as MS operating systems goes. We will continue to use XP until 2014 when the support stops. In the meantime, we've four years to switch to Linux. It's a highly annoying decision to have to make but Microsoft has left us no other choice.
I've been wondering whether to make the switch from XP Pro SP3 to Win7.
I'm sure Win 7 will be able to run fine on my gaming/media computer (AMD Phenom 2 x2 550 BE with hidden cores unlocked on GA-MA770-UD3 m'brd, ATI HD 4850, 2GB RAM, SATA HDDs).
It may even run better than XP since Win7's CPU scheduler is more efficient (doesn't keep switching between cores all the time) and natively supports AHCI.
Now that i've read your post about how messy and sloppy Win 7's UI is, I think I will stick with XP.
XP does everything I need it to do at the moment and I don't want to have to use more clicks to get to the same thing(s).
Also, when Microsoft ends support for XP in 2014, why should that even matter?
After nearly 10 years of XP there are plenty of other 3rd party websites (and some are better than MS's own site) out there that have solutions to any potential problems you might have.
The only use I have for the OS is to run applications that work on Windows. I don't really care about the frills of the OS. So long as it works reliably, and for me XP does.
If I get a new PC I'll be fine with Win 7, but I just don't need one. I'm even still running a near 10 year old (overclocked and tricked out with speedy discs) PC with XP that's very speedy in general desktop functions. Faster in fact than other PCs I'm using that have Core 2 Duo and all that! That's the key thing for me. The speed of the desktop experience. I don't care how sexy it looks, so long as it works fast opening apps and the day to day desktop stuff. At work I need processing power for development, but I don't need Win7 for that either. Corporate policy is for XP and they're happy with that.
I might upgrade from Windows 2000 at home sometime soon (possibly when CCP say Eve Online won't run on 2K) but it'll probably be to XP not to Win7.
We recently (4 months ago) upgraded from 2K to XP at work, and it's not too bad once you get rid of all the guff and make it look like proper Windows again (blue background, classic start menu, classic folders, classic control panel, etc) and it does actually provide a little bit more memory for our DOS based accounts system than 2K did.
> DOS based accounts system than 2K did.
Jesus mate, sounds like you're letting the bloody bean counters decide IT strategy, get another job quick would be my advice !
I say this as a qualified accountant (originally)
PS i think Win7 rocks, just wait until you try XP on new HW where the XP drivers are written by the new PFY - let's check back then as to how you think that is still a good idea ;)
Actually I have a boss who decides IT policy. The only reason we upgraded to XP was so we could move from DOS Sage to Windows Sage and Sage don't support 2K any more. As it was, despite spending loads of money on bespoking Sage 200, we couldn't get it anywhere near as productive as the heavily bespoked DOS version we already had, so for the moment we have stuck with the DOS version, which we've had since 1995.
BTW, the XP upgrade included brand new hardware, so we now run DOS Sage, Outlook and Office 2007 on dual core 2.6Ghz E5300 machines with 4Gb RAM and a gigabit network. Sage runs a bit faster than on our old 2.4Ghz Celeron machines with 512Mb and a 100meg network.
Right. Functionally, Windows 2000 is the best O/S Microsoft ever produced. It was clean, efficient and fast.
I still use W2K on some machines but I had to go to XP on this one because of driver issues.
I'm damn pissed off that W2K has been made obsolete because the need to keep Microsoft financial.
Ultimately, this is the main reason for going to open systems such as Linux. Open systems have considerable problems but at least they don't have the imperative of having to be made obsolete every few years. As such, they have the potential to develop over many years into very mature products and yet still have an excellent functional life ahead of them.
I thought more people would note that every task you do(including opening notepad) is beamed back to the mother ship Redmond. The final tally of "phone-home" triggers topped 40, wow! Why does MS need to know if I'm using Notepad or Wordpad???
Add to the list the lame network/sharing center, the 20 or so folders in My Documents(if not My anymore, who's? MS's?), libraries and indexing/searching confound the simple in the spirit of "easier". To transfer files on my LAN, sneakernet+usb2 flash drive <b>is</b> faster than copy&paste to mapped drive on anything over 10-20MB b/c Se7en takes more time indexing/tabulating than it does transferring.
Sorry, the few useful features(which are covers of pre-existing apps, which 3rd party vendors do better) are over-shadowed by the un-useful, un-exceptionable, un-deniable hand of MS's over-specialization. Hopefully by Vista SP8 we can have their "security" features as an optional download just like the other useless crap... dead mail, messenger, etc.
Well I am surprised really that I am not the only one who thinks that file management under Windows 7 is a nightmare. The Folder Tree looks like Dolphin for heavens' sake and is anything but informative. There are symbolic folders all over the place; it is impossible to navigate because the layout makes no sense; the Status Bar continues to atrophy, at this point giving almost no useful information; there are many new point-and-click and drag-n-drop behaviours throughout Win7 and I can not think of a single one that makes my life easier... Their point-n-click interface has turned into a "point-n-wait" interface, which is maddening! In the week I used Win 7, I was too irritated to even begin to understand the changes that they made to mouse clicks on the desktop. The new behaviour of pasting a few files into a folder and having them IMMEDIATELY sorted with the files already there is a terrible nuisance. Search is also pretty bad: it searches for filenames and file contents, instead of letting you choose one of the other, which makes it unusable unless you have time to waste and something to occupy your attention. Nice how they got rid of the classic Start Menu and gave us a new one, that consists of a small window in the corner of the screen, so that you can see a small section of the apps you have installed at any one time, and preventing you from seeing exactly where in the folder hierarchy you are. Do they think that if they are so miserisly in their attempts to conserve screen space, that there will somehow be more screen space available for something else?
I would have been happier with a slavish clone of XP Windows Explorer, even though it was far from perfect. But as I told all my friends, if you need to do a lot of file management, then Win 7 is NOT the OS for you.
I began hoping that Windows 8 will be a good release for users like me because Win7 certainly is not.
I'm with you 100% on that. Windows explorer is a pain in the arse compared to XP's and so are the Start menu and the Control Panel. On the other hand I like having DirectX 10 and 11.
I find I don't have to deal with most of 7's annoying behavior if I just create a desktop folder that has shortcuts to all my games in it so I can get to them easily. That way I hardly ever have to click anywhere else.
What, you didn't think I was going to put Windows on a machine I used for anything serious, did you? It's on my gaming PC, and that's all. Anything else is done on one of the several Linux boxen on the network.
At work corporate policy is still to use XP, and that isn't going to be changing for a year or several.
@ Turtle
You're absolutely so right about Win 7 Explorer being a sick dog.
Being in IT and having worked with many users who use Win 7, it is obvious to me that those who actually praise Win 7's UI and it's mongrel Explorer are those who you wouldn't call power users.
Instead, I classify those who praise it as 'procedural' PC users, they primarily come in three species:
- Neophytes and timid computer users.
- Those who have very fixed routines (and surprisingly these can be advanced programmers too). They've set themselves up with strict daily work procedures and they've adapted to those routines.
- Those flighty types who love eye candy over function (you know the types--those who change their fashion jeans every season).
- There is of course the fourth type--the true Microsoft believers. They love it because doctrine dictates it so. 'Nuff said. (For any objective analysis of the Win 7 usability problem they should be equated out of the equation.)
The main haters of Win 7 UI/Explorer are power users who use their PCs for a wide range of different functions and whose daily work routine varies greatly. They do not have to be IT types although they often are. These are the people who expect much from their PCs, they're the ones who are hot swapping drives, moving files from one to PC to the next etc.
Watching these power users work with Win 7 is both painful and instructive. One's repertoire of highly descriptive adjectives is vastly expanded not to mention learning new and imaginative ways of concatenating these words into long strings.
I recommend Win7 when possible and Windows XP when required.
It's easy to tell if you 'require' Windows XP. Your hardware might not be upgradeable and you want to use the system resources for applications vs. the operating system.
For home PCs, Windows XP Media Centers are still running fine with hardware replacements. For some people, this is their TIVO, so they really don't want to mess with it when it's working.
At some point they might want HD, or they get Windows 7 on a notebook and are ready to upgrade to Windows 7 on their home server/TIVO system.
Anytime Microsoft or other parties (like commenters) start getting pushy, it's because they want to sell more product. Makes sense, but it's a buyer's market right now.
I happily left windows last year in favour of Ubuntu as my main OS. It has all the features win7 likes to crow about except they run in an OS that doesn't cost hundreds of pounds and then treats you like a criminal while you get raped by malware .
Luckily I don't have to suffer windows in the workplace either (it's Linux too). Makes everything much less of a headache.
" and businesses still can't guarantee all their business critical applications will run perfectly in Windows 7 due to the large changes in technology between the two versions
that will be a business with out any sort of BC or DR plan then?"
No, that'll be a customer that does the Return on Investment analysis before spending significant amounts of money, a customer that therefore buys business-class PCs from a vendor like Compaq or Dell or other vendor that understands the business value of having a stable underlying hardware platform that will run the stable OS the customer wants (Windows XP, maybe occasionally even Win2K) rather than whatever hip trendy new OS that MS and its hangers-on would prefer the customer to buy (but MS has forgotten how to motivate business customers to get their wallets out).
Microsoft need to learn this.
They simply cannot expect businesses to continue doing forklift upgrades* on their computers just because it suits Microsofts business model. That may have been OK in the past when OS and software tech was a rapidly changing and little understood beast but things have moved beyond that stage.
What we need now is more modular software that changes incrementally as needed. When new features or updates are needed, IT departments can apply them in a sandboxed environment and then roll out the changes to their production machines.
At the moment, the Windows guys in my office are all preparing for the Big Change to Windows2K8 and Win7 (as if it were inevitable) and bandying about 6 figure numbers just for the licensing costs alone. On top of that there are the endless meetings about how to do the migration without fucking up the entire goddam network and all the associated costs to do with updating of ancillary services such as anti-virus and the proprietary web and mail filtering crap they use.
It's absolutely astounding that people are still prepared to manage IT departments in 2010 in this fashion. It's like we are stuck in the 1990's and I see no sign of us ever escaping.
* A metaphor for "wipe clean and reinstall" but also applies to requiring them to purchase new PC's just so the latest and greatest OS will work.
If, when TV was invented, people had to go out and buy a new TV every 3 years because the TV stations kept changing the PAL / NTSC format they were broadcasting in then there wouldn't be a TV in every home today, because people would have just given up on it after a while. Technology becomes established because a particular standard is set, so that once you've learned to use it you don't need to learn all over again. When a technology achieves its optimal form there's no further need to change it. Why else has (for example) the means of controlling a car always been a steering wheel and stop-go pedals? Because that's how everybody learns to drive.
My Windows XP desktop is set up in Classic configuration with exactly the same layout and colour scheme as I had in Windows 95 12 years ago. In fact it's not substantively different from the layout I was using on my Amiga 20 years ago. It works for me, it's what I'm used to; just a plain, simple, point-and-click GUI. Now by all accounts you don't get this option in Windows 7 - apparently you can't set it to plain classic look and layout. Which for me is reason enough not to upgrade. The desktop is a launch platform for applications - nothing more.
I got Win7 64 for £30 on the student deal a while ago and put it on my games machine (since XP needed a reinstall anyway. Works very well, is shiny, pretty much as good as my Mac Mini. Adequate for that price.
A while ago (2 years?) I got Vista Ultimate 64 on the same deal, put it on my 'messing about' PC (retired games machine). Works OK, not quite as shiny, spat it's dummy out regarding graphics cards, some wierd stuttery behaviour now and again, but not too bad. Again, adequate for the price.
In both cases the experience of actually getting the OS installed and working was on a par with breaking a bone or coming down with a serious (but not life-threatening) gastro-intestinal disease. Maybe I'm just unlucky but given that every single problem I ran into was resolved by googling up other people's fixes for the same problem, I'm certainly not alone. All that rubbish and paying full retail too? I don't think so.
Fun fun fun: If Win7 repeatedly hangs on 'completing installation' and the problem can't be fixed by feeding it the correct WHQL SATA drivers, you can work round it by installing to an IDE drive, using a LiveCD to clone that working install onto your SATA drive, rebuild the MBR, disk IDs etc. Then you boot up off the SATA drive and everything works flawlessly.
I'm a PC and I have a high pain threshold.
Microsoft may be one of the richest software companies on the planet.
It has done this by throwing out software with many vulnerabilities and faults without sufficient negative testing before release.
I am an XP user and have spent many hundreds of hours patching and rebooting over the years with all the fixes and updates provided - has any body counted but it must by now be many hundreds or even thousand plus.
I now find that my PC and Laptop now run with very few incidences of lockups, crashes etc and with a suitable AV find it is well protected from intrusion attempts.
The essence of all this work is to be satisfied that my equipment runs as reliable as is practical to expect.
When I looked at Vista it was fraught with issues and driver non availability and that some software suites did not work without upgrading them as well. Besides that my laptop would require both a memory and disc upgrade to cope with the bloated installation. The cost on was uneconomical so did not install. Now Windows 7 is around.
I am not about to throw all that effort away and start on the roundabout of Win 7 patching and updating for the next few years just to join Microsoft business model,let alone potentially go out and buy new equipment whilst my present kit is fully functional.
Quite frankly I do not trust Microsoft to get it substantially right first time where installation into a current system provides error free and operation and is free from major vulnerabilities.
I ditched XP in early 2007 and haven't looked back since. XP was fugly, insecure and unusable. On the other hand, Windows 7 is beautiful, secure and productive. I love the Windows 7 UI and search features especially. XP UI and Search suck balls. In fact, almost everything about XP sucks big time. Only Luddites who are stuck in the past are still on XP. Within the next couple of years XP will be dead as a dodo, as both home and business users move on to Windows 7.
Text analysis of you shill shows that the the main thing you like about 7 is it's 'Beauty'. Followed by security and search.
If you are willing to spend real money just for the look of the thing fine, but remember beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Personally I think 7 looks like shit. As for security, you still need third party security software and you still have to be careful what you click on so what's the difference in the real world? Searches? Maybe, still a lot of money through.
Those arguments sound just as stupid here as they do in the Windows 7 brochure.
"XP was fugly"
The Windows classic theme is functional, familiar and it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and no flashy bullshit. It might not look nice in the conventional sense but if that's how you judge your software you need to either buy a Mac or get over yourself.
"insecure"
I'll grant you that, but the experienced user need spend no more time keeping XP secure than they spend on Vista or 7.
"unusable"
It needs a healthy sprinkling of third part apps before it becomes truly productive, but you can't exactly call it unusable.
"XP UI and Search suck balls."
You do know that the latest version of Window's Search can be installed on XP retrospectively right? (And for free... lmao @ the thought of you paying £££ for a fucking search feature)
"both home and business users move on to Windows 7."
In your imagination.
I've been running 7 on my two main systems since last August. Whilst there a fair bit I like about the OS, and find XP to feel 'old' when I go back to it (kept the dual boot just in case ;-), Windows 7 *is* flaky - I've had to rebuild the laptop once, and intend to do the same with the desktop soon, for shutdown hangs and/or bluescreens.
Of course XP has had years of service packs and patches to get to it's level of stability, but until Win7 is similar I can see a lot of businesses giving it a wide berth.
Greetings Anon.Co,
I must be a Luddite .
My car is 19 years young, and goes well, paint is still very good,is reliable and economic to use,so I don't see any reason to change.
I do have XP on a drive in my computer, but only there for use if my big drive with Ubuntu on it can.t do what I require.
That is not very often, as for the past 3 years I have been a Linux fan.
The probability of me buying another MSOS is hovering on zero
However I can get an Upgraded OS in a couple of weeks that will be free, free and not subject to Root bots and all those other things that come to visit when you are on MS..
Mandatory driver signing (costing $100's per driver) means I will not use or recommend Windows 7 to anybody. I should be able to decide what goes on my computer and I shouldn't need Microsoft's blessing to install anything. Heck, if I wanted that big-brother nanny-state hand-holding I'd buy Apple products.
My computer now runs Linux. Development is done with Python, wxWidgets and C/C++ and I'm just as productive - if not more so - than I used to be with Microsoft only tools.
Xp - stable but old, 7 - love the way it works the speed although i do question most of the "selling points". However anyone picked up on kb 971033 discription for windows 7. see for a little more info http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000681.html. i've purchased a copy of windows 7 and for now thankfully it's an optional update. whilst i understand the desire to check the validity of the software i think it may be overstepping the mark a little.
I have an odd collection of hardware here, serial adapters, one for my telescope, one for my RF scanner, both serial adapters, usb and express card, u usb microscope, chip programmers etc etc, so far ALL of em work. Had to do a bit of digging for drivers but im well happy with win7.
Vista on the other hand is shite!
Had a few issues with software and the new start menu is bollocks and what the fuck are MS doing moving the show desktop button and then making it nigh on impossible to change back to a classic start menu.
So, 8/10 for win 7, 5/10 for the new UI.
Shamne you dont have a ambivalence icon...
I haven't tried Windows 7... I hear good things about it... but I use Windows so rarely, I see no viable reason to update. (Note I say up*date*... updates are not necessary upgrades... e.g. XP->Vista.)
My main workhorse is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook computer -- sporting a 64-bit RISC CPU (ST Micro Loongson 2F to be exact) -- and is designed to run Linux. The machine I use at work is a P4-class laptop running Windows XP ... with all the visual effects turned off and the classic UI enabled.
My work involves embedded software development, these days on ARM (Luminary Micro Stellaris), but also MCS51, MSP430 and TMS320C2000. The latter two require software that only runs on Windows (to my knowledge). The former two are easily programmed using free software. (I have hand-compiled a version of CodeSourcery ARM-EABI for Stellaris, for MCS51 I use SDCC.)
I find KDE's desktop allows me to get a lot more done than anything Microsoft has offered. It's got a little bit of eye-candy... if you want it, you can enable it, but it's optional. The big feature for me is the ability to customise the keystrokes. I can for instance, move windows around, switch desktops, move windows between desktops, close, maximise and minimise windows ... etc... all without touching the mouse. FVWM is also good for this. I'm sorry, I don't go for this "standardisation" thing necessarily... it's *my* computer, I'll have it work the way I want, the way that suits *me*.
Microsoft didn't offer this in Windows 3.1, and still doesn't offer it in Vista... don't know if Windows 7 offers it, but it's too late for them to start now.
Windows 2000 & Windows ME both changed the way networking operated with the shift from the classical "Network Neighbourhood" system in Windows 95/98 (which was a big improvement from the mess of Windows 3.1), to the "My Network Places" mess in later releases.
The former was good because you could go to one place, and see all your local systems... if you knew where to find something, you could get there quickly. Now, one must go "My Network Places" -> "Entire Network" -> "Microsoft Windows Network" -> "Workgroup"... to bring up the same list (meaning you must know the name of your workgroup). If you didn't know where something was kept, neither interface is particularly useful IMO.
An operating system should sit in the background and keep out of the user's way. Microsoft and Apple both insist that their OSes are the centrepiece of computing -- it's not... they're really just a collection of hardware access libraries that allow an application to get about its business.
Linux does this nicely... This is by no means the only option, just the one I've chosen for my needs. At the end of the day, once the operating system is configured for the hardware in use, the OS fades into the background and the user focusses on the work at hand.
It should not matter what the underlying software and hardware is; so long as the work needed can be achieved with a minimum of fuss. This is going to mandate a different hardware/software stack for different people -- that's a fact of life. I can (and do) get to and from work (about a 160km round trip) purely by public transport -- but this is not an option for someone who may need to take a large amount of items with them, or need to travel at odd hours. Just as much as we use different modes of transport to suit our needs, we will also use different computing solutions to suit our needs.
This will ultimately require a move to open and royalty-free standards ... we've seen the benefits of this with the Internet and TCP/IP... now we need to move higher up the stack and target our file formats. The sooner we move to truly open standards, the sooner the OS debate will fade into the background, and the sooner we can get on with what we want to do, rather than battle a system that really doesn't suit us.
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