On 1/7/08, William Chops Westfield wrote: > > On Jan 5, 2008, at 3:54 PM, Herbert Graf wrote: > > > Feature wise, XP is 6 years old, it's missing most of the features > > real modern OSs have, and I'm not talking about the eye candy of > > Vista. > > I didn't really want to extend what is probably a religious debate, > but what ARE you talking about? What important features have been > added to "modern OSes" in the last six years? And are they in Vista, > or is this just a linux vs windows rant? I mean, you've got 64bit, > multiple cpus, and more than 4G of physical memory, but what else is > there (and which of those aren't in XP?) There's a slew of features > not in XP that one might complain about, but most of them aren't > NEW. I don't know that I've seen much in a new OS other than eye > candy in quite a long time (and indeed one of my complaints against > linux these days is that "they" have spent too much time trying to > duplicate the level of candy-ness in windows (or MacOS) rather than > maintaining any of the traditional unix "lean-ness." (sigh.) > Many of the features in Vista are not in XP. Some of them are eye candies. Some of them are more fundamental. You may be right that they are not that NEW in terms of technology development but they are at least new for Microsoft. Example: wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista Under the hood, there are many kernel level new features. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/vista/kernel-en.mspx For example, every new version of Windows bring more platform support for hardware technology. For example, Vista comes with better USB IAD support and better audio support. User Mode Driver is a good development as well. Driver signing for Vista 64 is a good thing IMHO -- better control of kernel driver quality. Unfortunately not many drivers are available for Vista 64. You are right that many Linux review priminently advertise the beta quality Compiz stuff and they are a bad thing. But you have the choice to turn off the eye candy if you do not like it. For one I turned them off in Ubuntu 7.10. And here you are talking about distros. The Linux kernel people are bring new technology in the kernel space. On the server side there are also quite some relative new technology which was last time only available for higher end Unix or mainframe. You can still run the lean Linux without X or with the lean desktop like XFCE (not that lean any more) or the others. But most of the people will use KDE/Gnome and they are good with modern hardware. Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist