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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Because it only offers a marginal improvement of XP. It is the same thing as DVD vs Blu Ray. To a videophile, the difference is obvious. To a normal person, the difference is noticeable, but irrelevant.

Vista is blu ray and I suspect that windows 7 will be as well. I honestly think we've reached a point in desktop OS development where the average user simply does not care anymore. Things are moving onto the web now. People care about facebook doing a redesign, they do not really care what their desktop looks like beyond "does it work?".

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Agree. For most people todays OS is 20 years ago's BIOS boot code.

20 years ago the BIOS was there to startup the OS so we could run all our desktop apps.

Now, the OS is there to start the browser so we can get to all our websites/apps.

This is precisely why the desktop OS market represents a huge opportunity right now. If not an opportunity for startups then for significant innovation by the existing players. Our usage has changed so much that the standard patterns implemented by all popular desktop OSes don't even come close to meeting users' needs any more.

I blogged about this recently (http://shoptalkapp.com/blog/2009/10/15/the-real-web-os), but I really hope that OS vendors are coming to the same realization. Creating an OS that is only useful for firing up a browser, which basically cripples the applications that run inside it, is pretty obviously a broken model. Yet that seems to be exactly what Google is working on with Chrome OS (admittedly, no one knows for sure what Chrome OS will look like at this point).

If I had the resources to make an OS that actually embraced the web, I would totally do it... hmm YC application time?

I'm not sure what you have in mind, and why you think a browser based OS is an broken model. Most people simply don't need an OS in the current form. They just need something light that can run a browser and handle the hardware.

For me, it seems pretty likely that the OS will continue to diminish in importance to the point that some machines just bootup into a browser and don't have any other capability.

The advantages for users are large - no virus issues, no resource hungry desktop apps, no issues if the computer breaks/hdd fails.

I can't see why/how the OS has a long term future in desktop computing for the common man.

And from a business perspective, I don't think there's much opportunity there.

I disagree.

Unless by OS you mean OSX/ARM, Android, WM7, etc

I see there being 3 computer systems people will use in the future. The small screen / communication device (Think iPhone/Android. fine for email, facebook, communication) The Big screen device. PVR/Set-top box/xbox/Apple TV. Consuming major media content/games/video The workstation. This is for content creation. Writing essays. Editing Videos. Recording Music. Photoshop. etc.

Number 1 and 2 run OS's - but you don't really see them. Number 3 is the computer as we know it - but most people don't need that! I think the computer market / OS's will exist - but they will/are declining in popularity. I don't see them being taken over by webOS etc, because I don't need a computer for that - I need an iphone.

A while back my wife bought a cheap Lenovo. They pre-installed a lot of crappy software and Vista. It ran painfully slow.

I formatted it and installed Ubuntu 9 and she's been computing happily ever since. Here's what she cares about:

1) Does it run relatively fast? Is it stable? Is there a noticeable delay because I am waiting for some unnecessary GUI special effects?

2) Does it run Firefox? Can I read reddit, watch videos on YouTube/Hulu, and check my email?

shrug

I'm using Vista as a Media Center PC on an ancient T43 Thinkpad maxed out to a whopping 1.5G RAM. With all the GUI nonsense effects turned off, it runs just fine. Seems about the same as XP. And the Media Center is quite good. (Myth wasn't an option since there were no Linux drivers for my capture card, but I like the Media Center interface better anyway)

"Seems about the same as XP."

Not exactly a great reason to upgrade.

Agreed. The Media Center is a lot better. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.

This is the big part of Microsoft's Vista problem: without software which uses the many system-level improvements, users don't see a benefit. As long as developers are targeting XP that's not going to change - it'd probably be worth it for them simply to give away free 7 upgrades at this point just to boost demand.

Does flash run well on 32-bit Ubuntu nowadays? I have a hard time with it on my 64-bit PC. Ubuntu and Hulu didn't play nice last I checked.

It works fine on firefox with 32bit ubuntu.

I've not had a problem with Flash on Linux in the past 6 years or so.

Yea, same here until I did this:

http://riteshm.blogspot.com/2009/05/fullscreen-flash-problem...

[edit: specifically it jerked in fullscreen]

How does it handle printer, camera, other devices requiring drivers?

Ubuntu handles older devices better than Vista, for the most part.

Most newer ones are fine, too. I installed Ubuntu on my mother's laptop and she's been very happy. Her camera works fine, just plug it in and it works. I've not had any issues installing printers.

They had a GPS device they wanted to use, and that didn't work since the driver is very specific and it's not very common. For most purposes, though, it's quite easy to set up.

Even though it's gotten a little better in recent years (presumably because more vendors are releasing Linux drivers), the trick is really to make sure whatever device you want to use is Linux-compatible before you get it.

Following that rule, I haven't had any problems recently, running Linux on a machine that doesn't come with it pre-installed.

That's very true. And here I am, such a dunce for buying a scanner without checking for compatibility.

I figured Canon would be up to speed by now, but unfortunately not so. Fortunately scanners are cheap. No more Canon for me.

I think this is it. Up until Windows 2K and XP the OS upgrades were marked improvements over previous versions. Not just that but hardware usually improved considerably from windows OS to windows OS. But XP finally was an extremely stable platform (finally).

Now you have large swathes of corporate users that can use older (2-5 year old) PCs that run XP well enough for their purposes. I used a 4 year old Dell Latitude with XP for years and it served its purpose fine with nothing more then a RAM upgrade. Prior to that I needed a new computer almost every 2 years.

There's no longer the same urgency to upgrade to newer HW and software for IT departments to justify upgrading computers with the same frequency. There still isn't really a good reason to upgrade until MS pulls support for XP.

You could even say that people are downgrading their hardware to run XP with the advent of netbooks.

Because it only offers a marginal improvement of XP

Contrast this with Apple. They seem to have realized this and they have been putting things in recent OS releases that are truly useful and nifty. (Spotlight, Time Machine, Quick Look, to name a few.)

The brilliant part of Apple's strategy is that they control the hardware, so they can afford to do a maintenance/64-bit prep release like Snow Leopard that's light on new features because there's no bargain basement Mac clone shop to eat into their sales if the new OS release requires less hardware.

With Microsoft there's a perverse incentive to keep upping the system requirements. I'm not saying they do it consciously, but if this theory of why no one upgraded is correct then it puts MS in a very difficult position.

offers a marginal improvement of XP

I have to disagree. I think that computer users have become progressively more savvy over the years. I think users would certainly welcome an OS that was a small but notable improvement over the fairly good XP. The reason that Vista failed was it was noticeably worse than XP. Not a small improvement, not any improvement. Worse.

A notable disfunction among Vista's many disfunctions is the sensation that you are not in charge of the computer. The computer brings up all sort of things in an opaque fashion and this entirely annoying to anyone who expects to use the computer to accomplish a task since you don't know what roadblock will appear in your way.

There is a certain school of interface double speak which constantly bleats "Of course an experienced user might be bother by feature X but this is actually comforting to an average user (who is a combination moron, chump and victim, it seems)."

Vista was one place where the majority of computer users gratifyingly refused be this "average user". I hope this portends well for the future.

First, I agree with you on the Vista argument. I never upgraded to Vista because there are absolutely ZERO reasons why I need anything more than XP. Most of what I do is in the browser, and my apps are running fine. I have ZERO reasons to upgrade to 7 as well.

However, you lost me on the Blu Ray argument. If you have a 19" TV, no, you are not going to notice, or care, if you are watching a movie in HD or not. But on 50"+, it's so awful watching a regular DVD it completely ruins the experience.

So, back to your response, if you have a small PC with basic needs like coding, website updates, browsing the web, email, upgrading the OS is a waste of time and money. But, if you have a big PC and big needs from your apps, you may have a reason to upgrade.

I'm going to politely disagree. I have been lucky enough to be able to afford a pretty sweet home theater setup. The screen is ~8ft (I don't know the exact size, sorry) and while I might care about the difference between DVD and Blu Ray on it, most people really just don't.

Once the "omg that is cool!" affect wears off, people forget about it. They certainly don't care enough to spend the thousands of dollars it takes to upgrade their theater systems to it. I suspect that they also won't want to spend the hundreds of dollars to upgrade their computing equipment.

The sad thing I have seen many times is when people buy a new HDTV, but don't bother to buy a progressive upscaling DVD player. They watch their dvd's with their old dvd players that output ntsc resolution. DVD's already come in a resolution that is higher then their tv (720x480) so having a player that can upscale or even just send the 720x480 to their htdv rather than sending a downscaled ntsc signal will give them the "wow" they can show their friends without having to spend money on a BluRay player and disks.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you fall in the "videophile" category. My wife doesn't usually notice the difference between fuzzy broadcast SD and 1080 HD unless I point it out -- let alone the difference between upconverted DVD and blu-ray.

> But, if you have a big PC and big needs from your apps, you may have a reason to upgrade.

I upgraded to Vista on my old laptop because I wanted the new Media Center, however my work PC qualifies as a "big PC with big needs" and it's doing just fine on XP.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you fall in the "videophile" category.

Maybe. I'm not a videophile, but watching Football in HD is amazing to the point that I think anyone who likes sports with large fields and/or small balls would appreciate it. With movies and television I don't think it's nearly so important.

I agree, sports in HD is nice but I find it acceptable on standard. For movies or anything else, it doesn't matter. VHS tapes are good enough for me, and in fact preferable because they are so much more user friendly than DVDs.

> Because it only offers a marginal improvement of XP.

I get your point here and I agree, but... in many ways, it was not only not much better than XP, but quite a bit worse. It took more memory, it crashed more often, it didn't run with (whatever peripheral you have that worked fine before), it was slower, it moved things into other places you couldn't find them, etc.

With that going against you, you have to REALLY step up other areas to compensate, and as you say, Vista simply didn't.

Or, it was to reset the bar so low that Win 7 could do almost anything to be considered "great"... =) (No, I don't believe that.)

Or for some people a significant degradation in the quality of the user exepience, combined with a significant increase in the cost of the hardware required. And what benefit does the latter give the ordinary user? Nothing, that I can tell. I have Win XP running on a 4-year old laptop and it's fine. My mom bought a new laptop with Vista about a year ago, and it's horrible. So horrible it literally makes me yell when I'm forced to help her with it. It is so bad I can't help but think that whoever made it does not "eat their own dog food". Apple eats their own dog food. That is probably why their user experience rocks.

Because of the above, I will be getting her onto a Mac laptop as soon as I can.

we've reached a point in desktop OS development where the average user simply does not care anymore.

It's very true. Even the browser is not a matter anymore. That is because computers became mainstream long ago, and an average user of internet nowadays is hardly able to read English (think about all development countries). So, simplicity with minimalism and some visual effects (Chrome, iPhone) is all what they needed.

Ask people around the world what is computer and internet? The answers would be - email (gmail, hotmail, yahoo) and google and facebook, hi5, and regional (Chinese, Japanese, Russian) social networks. What OS you're talking about?!

People rush to upgrade macos the day it is released. Upgrade is cheap for em too. Oh and no need to format (yea beat that microsoft)

Trying a mac os upgrade is not a big deal, you can rollback and all works fine. Do that with windows let me know how ot goes. I never upgraded because I didn't feel like formatting I'm just lazy and if I don't like it I gota spend another day installing xp? Aaaagh.

I used it a bit it is actually quite an improvement on xp in terms of simple administration like setting up wifi and getting meaningful error messages. Not a big fan of the new start menu. Performance on 1gb of ram is attrocious. Why would they even sell it that way?

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