Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I got the computer that will be my wife’s laptop in a rush because I need VisualStudio.NET for a class next week. Sadly, I find that VisualStudio 2005 and its installer have incompatibility problems with Vista. Great. My whole reason for spending money from savings now instead of after four or five more months of saving up, and it’s going to be a time-consuming ordeal.

The first VS.NET installer work-around is in progress now, where I have to copy the installer disks to my local drive (2nd disk first) and run it from there. In vista, the installer won’t run from the CD drive.

The first major annoyance with windows Vista is that everything confronts you with an EULA acceptance screen, and all the license agreements are monstrous tomes. The idea of all my software uses being hedged in by lawsuits is a little troubling. I’m not sure what I’ve agreed to, and I don’t know how I’ll ensure that all my family uses the software in strict compliance. Does that make your skin crawl?

Second disk copied. Copying the first. I’m grateful for xcopy still being a windows feature. It’s been a long time since I have had to use backslashes for command lines. It works fine, though.

The second annoyance is that the Vista UI is clunky, in that the things you want to do are usually a few cascading menus away. If it weren’t for Win-R/cmd it would have been far worse.

The mouse controls won’t put enough acceleration on my touchpad, so I have to make multiple swipes to get from one corner (say the start button) to the other (say the close X button on a full-screen program). It takes three left-to-right swipes to move a half-screen window from the left side of the screen to the right, regardless of mouse speed. Likewise, it takes two swipes to get from starting a program to the “Cancel or Continue” dialog’s “ok” button. Maybe inconvenience is the new usability. When you have to do a lot of seeking and clicking, this touchpad sensitivity limit is not your best friend. That might be my computer more & driver and not Vista. Is it like that for everyone?

Another windows annoyance is the reboots. Not only do you have to do them often when installing software, but they take forever to complete. I have much faster times from all-the-way off to fully-logged in on my Linux machines including my laptop. I never have to reboot unless I upgrade the kernel. I suspect vista doesn’t really draw a distinction, or perhaps it’s because open files can’t be moved, renamed, or deleted in Vista.

Ah, first disk is copied now. Starting the installer.

People say Vista is pretty, but I can haver nicer compositing and better UI choices and tweaks with Beryl. Or to Mac OS/X. Vista has only one real look-and-feel choice. You can tweak colors and some trivial settings, and that’s about it. I can’t even change the location of window buttons to get the X away from the minimize/maximize buttons. It’s Vista’s computer, I just live here.

The desktop comes pre-cluttered with third party icons. All these trial offer icons need deleted. I also need to get rid of the IE and Outlook buttons. I don’t want to invite all the web’s viruses into my wife’s machines. It’s Firefox and Thunderbird for us.

It troubles me that windows doesn’t respect my browser choice like Linux does. When I set firefox as my default in Ubuntu, everything starts firefox for web browsing. In windows I set firefox as the default, and Microsoft programs still launch the internet exploder. Another reminder that Vista owns this box, not me.

The lack of a package manager is a real problem. Every software title you might want, you must first find online, and then download and run the author’s installer. Chasing down all my software seems a waste of time. Of course, each program you run, including installers, has a permit or deny dialog, and may also have a “Cancel or Continue” dialog later on. I’m going to have to find out when there are updates, and then I’m going to have to repeat this process. Debian APT will fetch upgrades for all your software. It’s a single command, can be done with a GUI, and (in Ubuntu) is done periodically by the “update manager”. Not just your operating system… your compilers and office software and games and database servers… the whole shebang.

Oh, look, only one desktop. How quaint. How do you windows manage with all their running programs cluttered up in one screen? I immediately download VirtuaWin, but I can’t install it because another installer is running. In Debian Linux I can likewise only run one copy of APT at one time, but I don’t notice so much because it can install all my apps at once. Here I can do one at a time, and only one installer at a time. This will take a while.

Everything is downloaded to the desktop by default. I guess that’s almost convenient, but the desktop (as I mentioned) is cluttered to begin with. I’ll have to delete all the installers once I get the software loaded.

The two advantages so far are 1) that we were able to reformat my wifes iPod to use vfat, so we can load songs and podcasts from our Linux machines, and 2) that (after web searches and incompatibility work-arounds) I was able to finally install my copy of Visual Studio 2005.

So far the only thing I like about vista is that I can use programs whose authors decided to support *only* windows. Linux people get used to proprietary developers ignoring them, and tend to work-around problems (or wait for some other open-source group to work around it for them), that’s the only thing I *don’t* like about Linux.

Ah. Now I need to download patches to try to solve the incompatibility problem for VisualStudio.NET 2005. I download the patch for vista first, and it dies saying that the program it’s looking for is not installed. I later download it again and it works (for about 1/2 an hour it keeps working and working… followed by a reboot). Oh, but then it didn’t really work. After the reboot, I’m told to get and run the patch again.

I’ve spent the whole morning trying to install visual studio on vista. I installed Mono and MonoDevelop and some additional tools in Ubuntu Linux, and it maybe took me 4 minutes. And I never had to reboot. Three or four hours with Vista and I’m not even installing Resharper yet. Sigh. I was really hoping to work through some of the examples my colleague will be leading Monday using the Visual Studio environment. I guess I better not plan on sleeping much tonight.

BTW: after I got done giving permissions for it to run, reshaper installed very quickly.

Another service pack. “A program needs your permission to continue.” Sigh. I’m twenty minutes into the service pack and still waiting for it to finish.

Okay, it looks like I can run my applications. It’s now 2:00 in the afternoon, and I started before 9:00. I took a break for a sandwich and 1/2 hour to go get my rental car, but otherwise its been all sitting here on the laptop, swapping disks, searching the web for work-arounds, blogging, and waiting for things to finish.

Enough angst for one day. But basically if you want to know what it’s like for a Linux or Mac guy to run vista, it’s easy: tape two fingers of your left hand together, put a sock over your right, randomly remove or disable 1/2 your programs, ad then try to do some work. It’s a lot like that.