Windows 7: The almost-there operating system | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7: The almost-there operating system

blog.szynalski.com

45 pointstszyn43 comments

Windows 7 might be ok for some users, but I don't think it's ready for the desktop.

I'm curious; what do you think is the OS that's ready for the desktop? By the high score of your comment, I'm guessing a lot of people agree with your sentiment, and I don't understand your distinction between what is "ok for some users" and "ready for the desktop."

I don't know the original quote, but it's often repeated that Linux is "not ready for the desktop." So, irony.

Snow Leopard: The "there" operating system.

As someone who recently moved from XP to 7, my review can be summed up as "it works".

Feels just as fast as XP, and the new UI is a neutral/positive change. The best feature is the configurable systray settings (always show, always hide, hide but show notifications).

Admittedly, I use my desktop for video games and internet, and 7 seems to work great for that (as opposed to the launch version of Vista).

edit Forgot to say that "good enough" may not be good enough to restore faith in Windows for those burned by the Vista launch, but if you bought a new computer and it had 7 no tears would be shed. That alone might be enough to keep users.

Having moved by work laptop to 7 from Vista and my sons laptop from Vista to XP I can say that both are upgrades - with my own preference being for 7.

I would pay about 500 USD for having the XP interface on Windows 7.

And for what it's worth, XP has configurable systray settings. They are "Always show", "Always hide" and "Hide when inactive".

The biggest features I miss, in order, are:

(1) The XP start menu - I had it organized just perfectly for muscle memory. If I want to start apps by typing I can use the console, thanks. Start Menu Search is just fine, but I don't use it.

(2) Windows Explorer. I have my toolbar / menu / location bar in Explorer in XP tuned for maximum vertical space. The folder treeview in XP works correctly, unlike the buggy one in Win7. Here's a demo for you: open up Explorer with the treeview visible. Select a folder that has subfolders. Then expand the subfolders by clicking on the little nub next to it. Observe that the treeview scroll position jumps so that the expanded node's children are aligned to the bottom of the visible area. This drives me up the walls. Other things include the giant file drag icons, the all or nothing approach to thumbnails, the file locks held on Thumbs.db on folders across the network (prevents deletion from Explorer itself!), the weird listview selection semantics, the lack of a Favorites menu, the way the treeview disappears when the Control Panel is selected, the lack of a selectable Network Connections submenu / subfolder in the Control Panel shell namespace, etc. I could go on.

(3) User colour preferences are not respected. I like my sky blue window background, and in XP it is correctly used for the treeview and listview in Windows Explorer. Not in Win7 - no, it's glaring white everywhere. It's interesting to see how inconsistently the user preference for window background colour is applied. Lots of text areas sometimes show white, sometimes the user colour, depending on their focus state, the application, etc. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It scans like a shoddy joke.

I guess I should clarify one thing: the XP interface I use is not the Fisher Price one that it comes with out of the box, but rather the Win2000-alike one but that still has the XP start menu and other XP-level accoutrements .

> the XP interface I use is not the Fisher Price one that it comes with out of the box, but rather the Win2000-alike one but that still has the XP start menu and other XP-level accoutrements.

Amen to this. I am still running XP on the Windows box that I have, so can't speak to the Vista or 7 experiences; but I know that the first thing I did when I upgraded from 95 to 98, and then from 98 to XP, was to hunt for a way to disable as much of the eye candy as possible and just get a familiar start menu.

Check out classic shell:

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

It gives you back your start menu, and can fix windows explorer if you want it to.

However, certainly the best version of Windows so far. The MathML you can understand - MS wants to sell Word 2007 to lots of student's who don't want to "bother" learning LaTeX.

Students should be using TeXmacs, not LaTeX/TeX nor Word.

TeXmacs keeps crashing for me! At least LaTeX and Word are stable.

Which version of TeXmacs did you try and on what platform?

Maybe they had to temporarily remove MathML from newer versions of Word because of the recent xml lawsuit? Just guessing.

I think you've got it backwards.

This feature supports ONLY MathML, and thus the only app that it's able to work with is Word. So it's Word (and only Word of popular apps, according to the OP) that has the MathML support.

So if they removed MathML, it would be nothing.

OK, I don't know what versions of Word exist, thought the only one that still works is an older one.

The official rationale is that it is not the firewall’s job to block malicious applications from accessing the network

Then what is it?

Make applications on your machine comply to whatever network policy you have? I honestly don't want to have to whitelist every single one program I run to be able to do access the network. Do you?

I'm also pretty sure changing firewall-rules requires administrator priveledges, and hence it's no different than it is on Linux. Except ofcourse on Linux, the firewall isn't application-aware, so you can't even control which processes are allowed to open inbound communication.

This really is a lot of noise over nothing.

> I honestly don't want to have to whitelist every single one program I run to be able to do access the network. Do you?

Yes. How many programs do you have accessing the internet? I don't think that I've used, total, more than 10 or 11 programs that need internet access (and it's probably more like 3 or 4 for any given year or so); and I can live with that kind of one-time bother in exchange for knowing that other processes aren't chatting about me without my knowledge.

> Except of course on Linux, the firewall isn't application-aware, so you can't even control which processes are allowed to open inbound communication.

You certainly can set application-level network privileges, and Red Hat derived distros do by default. For example, to list all the applications that are allowed to bind to port 80:

  [sweeks@kweh ~]$ sudo sesearch --allow -t http_port_t -p name_bind
  Found 15 semantic av rules:
     allow httpd_t http_port_t : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ; 
     allow kerneloops_t http_port_t : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ; 
     allow varnishd_t http_port_t : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ; 
     allow dnsmasq_t port_type : udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind } ; 
     allow svirt_t port_type : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ; 
     allow svirt_t port_type : udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind } ; 
     allow squid_t http_port_t : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ; 
     allow corenet_unconfined_type port_type : tcp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind name_connect } ; 
     allow portreserve_t port_type : tcp_socket name_bind ; 
     allow corenet_unconfined_type port_type : udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind } ; 
     allow portreserve_t port_type : udp_socket name_bind ; 
     allow varnishd_t port_type : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ; 
     allow qemu_t port_type : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ; 
     allow qemu_t port_type : udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind } ; 
     allow squid_t port_type : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;

Any processes running under other domains won't be allowed to bind to port 80.

To prevent incoming connections you don't want.

I would say that most people would have this handled at the hardware router level. Users who have a wireless LAN already have a firewall for incoming connections (unless they have DMZ enabled). Software firewalls are useful when you want to control what connects to the Internet and when.

If someone else on your LAN gets infected because they opened an email virus, your router isn't going to help you.

Windows 7 backup is horrible. I tried to backup my 200 GB of data to a NAS drive. After 5 hours (35%) it just stopped. No reason. No explanation.

I've had good experiences with DeltaCopy. It's an open source rsync-based backup solution. Saved my data when one of my drives died last year.

http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

Dang, when the thing people complain about in an OS is the "math input panel" and the "sticky notes" apps, I'd say the OS must be pretty freaking perfect.

I can't believe you couldn't think of anything more substantive to mention.

Having skipped from XP to OSX (skipping Vista completely), I dropped using my Mac almost as soon as I got Windows 7. It has so many little convenience features, that even the trouble of learning the new ins and outs of the OS was so much smoother than learning the similar ins and outs on my Mac, and the results were so much more productive. All of the major OS interactions are pretty much amazing.

On my Mac I kept going "oh, so that's how you do that" when getting to know it while transitioning from XP.

On my Windows 7 PC I kept going "Oh! that's such a much better way".

It also doesn't try to overwhelm with glossy shininess, it just does stuff that's natural and intuitive. The new taskbar is pretty much magic in code.

Natural and intuitive is a loaded phrase. It's natural and intuitive because you have prior experience with the prior offerings from one vendor. People going from OSX 10.4 to windows 7 to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard are going to be parroting your comments just in the other direction.

I personally think that OSX has more in common with XP than 7 does with XP or OSX.

Isn't the reason why Microsoft's OS is always "almost-there" the fact that they have the US government (and every tech competitor) looking over their shoulder every second, analyzing every new feature to make sure it doesn't sqaush some poor helpless competitor?

It's the reason we went 5+ years without any browser innovation, and it's probably the reason why we don't have a good built in Firewall, Anti-Virus or even paint application. Some of it might be MS protecting their software partners (which is ok in my book) but if I had big brother analyzing every move I made, I wouldn't spend millions building something only to have it excluded because some whiny EU/US politician think it's unfair.

I don't think it's fair to criticize MS for half-baked features when you realize that they need software makers to stay happy, and they need big brother to keep their nose out of their tech.

MS doesn't release it's own PC (ala Apple) because they can't or don't know how, they don't because it would piss off Dell/HP and the politicians who represent the districts where those companies reside.

Microsoft's been quite willing to play hard-ball and jump into areas where they can attempt to aggresively compete and hopefully squash competitors. Look at Zune, Silverlight, Windows Mobile, XBox. The trouble is, they've largely failed in the marketplace, with the XBox as the only success.

Blaming this failure on 'the politicians' is unconvincing, to say the least.

If they had added a working backup solution everyone would be up in arms accusing them of anti-competitive behavior.

It would only be anti-competitive if they made it difficult for users to choose a 3rd party solution, or made it difficult for 3rd parties to achieve the same levels of integration. Just including a "good" feature isn't anti-competive on its own right.

It has never been difficult to use another browser on Windows.

Unless you want to use windows update, or activex content, or integrate with windows explorer, or...

Is 35 hours to back up 500GB over USB actually unreasonable?

Yes. It should be more in the order of 3 hours.

Presuming the data is being backed up at the block level on the disk, so that no random seeking is involved. If it's on a filesystem basis, involves many small files, and we're talking spinning hunks of rust, 3 hours is a ludicrously optimistic estimate.

Time Machine can do it on a full 500GB filesystem in a little over 5 hours, in my experience. YMMV.

Is that an incremental backup, or the full backup? I would expect a full filesystem backup to be easier to do in block mode for large parts than only part of the filesystem, while incremental backups could be made much easier with filesystem support, such as what ZFS can do with the increment from one snapshot to another.

Actually, since modern NCQ is pretty good, as long as the software issuing the read commands is smart and fills the queue, seeks are not going to slow you down that much. Naive implementation that only does serial IO and waits for last request to complete before issuing a new one will suffer brutally, though.

Getting all the pieces in the abstraction stack to work in the same direction with respect to I/O queuing is key, indeed. For example, does the NCQ work well with the USB mass storage device stack? I haven't looked into the moving parts in detail, but it's easy to see that the maximum speed is limited to the slowest and dumbest link in the chain.

Former XP user who upgraded to Windows 7 here. I am hugely impressed with Windows 7 and the annoyances listed here are valid complaints, but on the whole extremely minor.

My big complaints are: 1. Upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 is a horrible experience if you made the mistake of buying an upgrade license. 2. Windows 7, presumably borrowing from Mac, does a lot more to hide details about errors from the user. Maybe this makes the computer less scary (questionable IMO, but at least arguable), but it /definitely/ makes it more frustrating to diagnose and fix problems.

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