This wibble is only loosely related to gaming, but as it concerns what our PCs will be like in a couple of years’ time, hopefully it’s of some interest to those who haven’t yet heard about Windows 7. If not, sorry. I’ll put my fun-hat back on tomorrow, promise.
Upgraded to Vista yet? Well, of course you have. All those wonderful platform-exclusive games, those high-end graphical effects not possible on XP, all that added stability, security and speed… Irresistible, non?
[Cough]. My other life as a tech reviewer/upgrade obsessive means I do run Vista as my primary operating system, and I can honestly say that, the odd olden game incompatibility aside, I don’t suffer any more trauma from it than I did from XP. However, its unfavourable position on the delayed launch/sluggish performance/cynical Directx10 exclusivity Venn diagram hasn’t made fans of many gamers. Even the most fair-weather of PC gamers I encounter seem brimful of somewhat excessive Vista bile. Still, there was a ton of grumbling about XP to start with, but eventually it pretty much proved itself; Windows 98 and 2000 gamers are relatively rare creatures these days (though they’re most certainly not extinct). Maybe we can expect the same from Vista after a couple of years.
Or maybe not. “Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version [of Windows]“, Bill Gates told the Inter-American Development Bank last week. Now, we’d already heard that Windows 7, as it’s code-named (and should probably stay named, as a relief from focus group bullshit like ‘XP’ and ‘Vista’), was due by 2010, and presumably that’s still on-track. Gates was, it soon transpired, referring to a demonstrable early build within the year, not to a full release. Still, it’s one more reason for those who haven’t yet gone Vista to hang on for another couple of years. With DirectX 10 gaming still very much an unproven eye-delight, XP gamers can hardly be said to be feeling the upgrade burn. So, why not just hang on until Windows 7?
On the other hand, a three-year development timeframe is how Windowses used to be (while the Apple and Linux camps update still more quickly than that), so this isn’t anything out of the ordinary. Moreover, Microsoft’s officially keeping shtum about what Windows 7 actually involves so it doesn’t trip up Vista’s marketing, which might imply we can expect more DX10-exclusive games and another Service Pack or two yet.
Redmond hints suggest Win7’s focus may be on web-centric applications – logging into your desktop/preferred programs from a variety of devices. It’s the kind of thing that Microsoft’s already toying around with in its Live services (including, to a point, the vile Games For Windows Live flavour, and its remotely-stored user profiles), with strong competition from Google Documents et al. Which is only barely relevant to gaming, I realise, aside from the as-yet unmentioned possibility of savegames or even games themselves being accessible from any web-enabled PC. However, there’s talk of Windows 7 being a slimmer OS (thanks to the cutely-named new ‘MinWin’ kernel) that eats up less system resources, which could in turn mean a performance boost for our pretend-man-shoots.
In case you’re interested, leaked screenshots of a supposed internal build do look worryingly straight outta Vista, but the GUI has been described as a placeholder for now.
Meanwhile, what about ol’ faithful XP? It’s to be withdrawn from sale with most new PCs in June, though will continue to be available with ‘ultra-low cost PCs’. So, hang on to that old XP product key. You’re gonna need it if you want a low-fat OS on your next uber-PC.
(Incidentally, I would love for another PC OS to take advantage of the massive chink Vista’s left in Microsoft’s armour and become a viable gaming platform for Johnny Average. My marriage to Windows is strictly one of convenience. Convincing the entire games industry to play along is what’ll likely mean that doesn’t happen, sadly.)
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I actually bought with money Windows XP x64 Professional.. possibly the worse version of windows ever made, I’ll never buy windows again…I tired vista i did try but hell its awful. Windows 7 will be more of the same bullshit, but you’ll need a trideca-core cell enabled machine with 7teras of ram and a dedicated planet to store all its bullshit drivers and puffed up applications on.
Linux is the way forward and I wish more ‘indy’ devs made linux exclusive games. All linux lacks is development support from games companies it has it from all the big players elsewhere.
Also I disagree strongly that all windows applications are better than Linux ones. All windows applications LOOK better than Linux ones but underneath the hood the Linux ones are far superior.
A few things you should note about Vista. Most people who have problems with it have 1 of 2 things (maybe both) going on. My casual observation:
A: Preinstalled Copy of Vista from Dell or BestBuy or whoever. 99% of the time those PCs are loaded with crapware. 5 30day antivirus trials, AOL, and in general crap you don’t need or will ever use. This stuff slows your PC to a crawl.
B. Dual booting Vista with >insert OS< Vista doesn’t like to share. Strongly advise a Vista Only PC.
2gigs of decent RAM is all you should ever need to play any game under Vista. My system idle is lower then my XP machine.
As for “cracked” games under Vista I’ve had no issues. COD4 and SupCom (expansion) both run great. I’ve sinced purchased both as my “free trial” convinced me. COD4 online…it’s no TF2 but still good.
Someone mentioned Icewind Dale not working. It was tricky but it does work! Icewind Dale 2 as well. Classic :) I still loathe that black fog of war crap though.
Um, most Gnome applications are not available for Windows.
The KDE just get ported. XFCE applications not available for Windows. I would say that not even 10% of the GUI applications are available for the Windows platform.
There are only a few Linux applications for Windows, but then, I’m not sure if Linux would be their native platform.
Gimp, Pidgin, Inkscape, Abiword, GNU applications like Emacs and their compilers, but well, I can’t remember more.
And Transmission (http://www.transmissionbt.com/download.php) is the best BitTorrent client I used on any system so far. Not available on Windows.
Sure, there are some areas where Linux is still lacking, like image manipulation software (Gimp has a terrible user interface as well know, but Krita is a really well-designed and capable program, though not terribly feature-rich, but also no feature-bloat), financial management software (GNU Cash, but I guess this isn’t enough) and……ah yes, the games.
Can’t think of more, though.
Really, it’s amazing how fast Linux has come in the last three years, it gets noticeably better every new month.
How has a dual-boot option impact on Vista’s performance?
This makes no sense!
Because VISTA can’t figure out partitions correctly so it screws up its disk caching apparently.
Alarik:
‘Major’ *nix applications… Apache?
Thats interesting, it almost sounds as though Vista was designed to ‘accidentally’ make it hard to setup a dual OS setup… I call shenanigans!
Then that’s just an additional reason why Vista is worse than XP.
Is that one of your own screenshots in the header?
If so, congrats on having Dungeon Keeper in there… but extra EXTRA points for having Anachronox as well :)
Hey, does Vista still screw up LAN throughput when playing audio files?
It’s not just bloatware: allowing Intel to sell its 945 chipset as “Vista-ready” also screwed the OS’s reputation.
Bloatware means that, if you buy a computer with an OS already installed, to make it work right, you’ll need to wipe the HDD and reinstall the OS. At that point, you just made your OS more difficult to use than Linux.
I use Linux in three places: in my router, in my NAS and in my pants.
And I only have 2 gigs of memory, not 4.
@Dinger – I haven’t had any issues with my LAN while playing audio files. In fact the GF (who also has Vista on her desktop) plays my music on her PC over the LAN from my PC. Vista shares that stuff really well.
AbyssUK is right, vista has issues with partitions with other OS’s. That may have gotten better with recent patches (SP1?). I don’t dualboot so that kind of info floats past me.
I think Vista is a great OS. Yes it has a few issues (so did XP back in the day). There are a few cool perk things. Performance tab in the task manager is one that comes to mind. Check it out if you’re running Vista. The problem is Vista has a tarnished rep partially from Intel saying “Vista ready”. nVidia also failed miserably with driver support early on (MUCH better now). My GeForce 8800 640mb GTS works great :)
I think slashdot had a article recently saying 30% of Vista crashes early on were from nVidia failing to deliver quality drivers. ATI had something like 9%.
@malkav11: Wine Is Not an Emulator! :p
@Max: It is eating. I’m on a laptop; ideally I’d like as little RAM/processing power etc used as possible… And what if Vista is trying to cache, well, whatever and then the next thing I load isn’t it? And the thing I load is very intensive? It leads to bad performance, not made up from the potential gains.
As for the GIMP with its most recent release it’s become a lot better. Personally I’m very impressed. I feel that things have got a lot better recently; using Compiz Fusion (at much lower memory than Vista but looking much better) with Emerald can give me a Vista-like look. And possibly with more recent developments it will be an entirely Vista look (If you’re into that sort of thing).
Another issue that has just occurred to me (possibly the most important one) is that of the ideas behind the software; obviously GNU/Linux is free, open-source software. Should I wish to change the window manager to better suit my twisted Vista needs I could (if I had the necessary skills); maybe I want to pare it down such that everything is optimized for high performance to get the best for my gaming needs. I don’t change these things but that’s not the point; maybe one day I’ll be in a position where I can. GNU/Linux is customisable to a level which Windows will never be.
It has to be said that wine is doing really well nowadays. Wine 1.0 is round the corner, and although games are not a major focus for that version, it does very well with many of them.
Also of note for linux gamers, codeweavers has just released crossover games, which is basically the latest version of wine + installers for games so that they just work (so no looking around on the net to find out what you have to tweak). The steam install was amazing, just press “install steam” and click next a few times, and in 10 mins I was playing Team Fortress 2 in Linux. Although it isn’t perfect yet (I had a few texture issues), it’s great to see how close it’s getting. I’m still rebooting back to windows for proper TF2 sessions, but if I just want a quick game of Audiosurf, then it’s a click away, no reboot into OS of pain required :)
Wine isn’t an emulator, but DOSBox sure is.
Weren’t the Vista only games cracked to work on XP? Thus proving that..uh.. there was no reason for them to be Vista only like we all knew anyway?
Seeing how other kind folks have already turned this thread into a drive-by Linux evangelism love fest, I just wanted to point out that the new version of Ubuntu is coming soon, and anyone who’s interested can try it out with no hassle or danger by downloading a live CD:
http://www.ubuntu.com/
What with installing drivers, patches and mods, most PC gamers are already technically literate enough to handle a modern Linux distro just fine, they just don’t know it yet.
Vista with Service Pack 1 is not bad at all. Don’t hate it just becasue you read on the internet that you should hate it.
I meant to post this when the topic first opened… I switched from win2k to xp64 four months ago. There are several Linux flavours on each of my dual-doot drives since last year, and the patience just isn’t in me to make them work. I’m versed in the Mac as much as I can be, as a graphic designer, and gaming on a Mac seems a joke to me. Windows would be my only choice, except….
Gametap mocks my 64 bits. I can’t play a game over their service that I can buy (and play) for 5 dollars at my local big box store. XP64 refuses to run all matter of mod-installers for games/apps I’ve purchased… unless I turn to the hackmasters that only a quiet population of enthusiasts have learned of.
I learned about computers by getting games to run. I… saw X-Wing at about .4 FPS. Never actually played it, of course. But it RAN. It was made to run. Incidentally, while I can plug my old Sidewinder into my computer now, it just cyan’ be recognized. I can’t even play some classics on modern tech.
Take what you will from it – I’m an aged gamer, apparently nt so aged that it’s not a desired demographic, and yet, the only OS I can choose denies me. More and more , these days…
XP64 is the worst windows ever. Seriously its terrible.. XP32 even with 64bit hardware is leaps and bounds better. I strongly recommend you ‘downgrade’ to 32 bit XP. (unless you have over 4gigs of ram)
I had countless problems with XP64 with games and devices etc.. firstly because no bugger supports it and secondly if they do support it they do it half assed. The built in 32bit>64bit (WOW) layers in XP64 are terrible really.. at least Vista 64 improved on this.
Also if i was going for a linux build i’d also still keep to 32bits (unless you have 4gig+ ram). There really is no performance increase going to 64bit, unless your a crazy chemist attempting to simulate the random motion of an entire moles worth of molecules.
I think we’re all missing the most important point. Vista comes with graphical updates to Solitare and the sainted Minesweeper. Suck that Linux boys.
Also GiGo. If you’re savvy enough to install a whole new operating system, then to dual boot it, then to find and install the drivers needed, then set up an emulator to run a program then you’re probably savvy enough not to screw up your system. The vast majority of problems in any OS is you’re own damn fault. Thats why Linux users boast better stability, they’re more likely to know what they’re doing because they did their home work first. Meanwhile, most windows users just take it for granted.
Also the GUI was stolen by Microsoft from Apple. But Apple had stolen it from IBM’s paperless office. Just throwing that out there.