I often require to open a file in one viewer or another for example, in this case I wanted to open a VMware configuration file in an editor to change a setting. Previously in Windows XP, even in Windows 98, when you used to select the "Open With" option you used to see a number of programs to choose from, and if it was a configuration file, a unix one, I simply selected Wordpad, since Notepad didn't interpret the newline characters correctly, and life was easy!

In Windows 98:

But no longer in Windows Vista! When going to the open with option, I was greeted with the following dialog:

The only program to choose from is the officially associated program. I went on to click "Browse", and I was greeted with the following window, where I had to manually search for Wordpad to open the configuration file! Leading to wastage of seconds from my life, just because Microsoft changed something that didn't need any change at all.

I came across this story running on MacWorld, claiming that the user interface in Vista is slower and hence a step back from Windows XP. Because of the latency the researchers say that Windows Vista interface is where Windows 98 was!

To quote from the article:

""Menu latency is the time it takes an operating system to display a menu,” said Pfeiffer. “In Windows, it’s not immediate. That’s not a speed or performance issue, but a design choice.”

The new UIF data put Windows Vista, and its Aero graphical interface, behind Windows XP, which had showed improvement over earlier Microsoft operating systems. Menu latency, Pfeiffer said, remains a major problem in Vista, which scored 20 percent slower than XP. “Windows XP was a major step forward from Windows 98, but Vista is back to where 98 was,” Pfeiffer said."

First I wondered, after having used Vista myself I found no discernable difference between either Windows XP or Vista operating system. I investigated in which workstations the tests were conducted, according to the full PDF report, the following systems were used:

The Dual 2.8Ghz Dell Dimension, I googled for it and came acroos this: The Dell Dimension 9150 a 2.8 Ghz Dual Core machine, according to the official Dell website at here, this is a Vista Capable machine, which according to here in the Dell website means: Can Boot the OS but without running any applications or game! (see this). So hardly a system which would run Windows Vista at its optimum speed.

The Dell XPS 3.2 Ghz Machine however, is an optimum Windows XP machine: With 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM (in standard configuration). I dont know about the Mac workstations so no comment about them.

So this hardly looks like a fair comparison, I would like to see a test where all operating systems are run on optimum performance.

So back to Vista, what were my experiences from a week of testing: Excellent Graphics and UI, but weak everywhere else!

So these are my reasons why the World is not yet ready for Vista

1. You require new hardware and 2: No geniune innovation: This is a major sticking point for me. I don't want to get a new hardware for an OS that doesn't allow me to do anything which my current OS don't allow me to. In All the 4 days of Vista testing, I have not seen anything that is a geniune innovation and makes me crave for it! No, the post here, the blogger identifies some things which Vista can do and Windows XP can't:

"Can I change the volume on a per-application basis in Windows XP? Do I have integrated system-wide search in Windows XP? Can I set the language on a per-user basis in Windows XP? Does Windows XP have per-file emails and contacts?"

First of all the first thing he highlights, is a completely redundant feature: Why would I want to set multiple volume for specific applications, given that I'm listening to only one at any one time! The Integrated System Search in Windows Vista, is better than the pathetic search in Windows XP, however it still doesnt beat Google Desktop Search for me! Again, I assume that you speak only one language or your family members or co-workers do the same, so I can hardly think of a scenario where people speaking different languages share the same computer, or how often does that occur?

The hardware support in Windows Vista is pathetic! When Windows XP came out, it supported all major hardware of its time. However Windows Vista doesn't. I tested on a PC with the Intel D865GBF Motherboard, and it didn't detect any hardware in it, neither are audio drivers for the said platform available for Windows Vista.

3: Not enough applications, in a recent talk, Bill Gates said "The strength of the windows platform comes from the ecosystem around it". And that is the exact reason for Windows dominance in the Desktop. Microsoft has provided EXCELLENT development environment in terms of the Visual Studio, and APIs to facilitate development of all sorts of application. Millions of ISVs around the world are busy churning out Windows specific software. The title of this blog post is "Top 5 Reasons one should NOT get Vista, just yet!". "Just yet", because right now there are very few application which take advantage of the .NET 3.0 framework, or any of Vistas GUI features. Eventually they will, once we start seeing those applications then the adoption of Vista may rise, but we are not there yet! Also, there are very few games which take advantage of DirectX X, again once those games start appearing then Windows Vista may appeal to gamers.

The application which Windows Vista ships with it, are pathetic! For example look at MS Paint, couldn't they replace it with Paint.NET.

4: Security: Although security in Vista is considerably better, however I still don't want to rely on MS security tools, and tried installing third party security tools, and guess what: Vista won't let me install them. I really love, Sygate Professional, it is one of the best firewalls I've ever come across, however in Vista it seems to be blocked or something for "known compatibility issues".

5: DRM: Enough said about it in a lot of places elsewhere, I don't think I need to go over it again

So in conclusion: If you absolutely have to get Windows, don't get Windows Vista just yet, wait for the applications ie. The geniune innovation, if they are appealing enough then make the switch.

Windows Vista is a step back! I remember when Windows XP was released, it supported all hardware at that time, and I remember that I tested Windows XP on a Gigabyte motherboard running on the AMD K6-2 processor, and I was amazed and thought that Windows XP pushed back Linux Desktop penetration for a few years. With Vista I think it makes the case for a Linux migration even stronger! After all who will expend his resources on buying new hardware for an OS which actually doesn't feature any real innovation or any productivity enhancements, as I see it so far Vista is all eye-candy!

So I bought myself a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate and setup a machine with it. In the coming days I will post my experiences with Windows Vista and will be in a better position to objectively answer the advantages of Windows Vista compared to Linux.

My initial experiences in installing Windows Vista have been pretty good. Windows Vista has the simplest installer of any Windows version. However, its not the simplest installer I've ever seen. The Installer of OpenSUSE 10.2 most notably stands out. I especially like the way the OpenSUSE 10.2 installer makes decisions on your behalf, like partitioning schemes etc. Where-as partitioning and disk selection is still manual in Windows Vista.

Once Vista completed installing, I was not at all amazed by the eye candy. The transition in user interface design from Windows XP to Windows 9x was huge, and less so with Windows XP to Windows Vista. Infact there are softwares which change the look and feel og Windows XP to that of Windows Vista.

There was much ado about the resource requirements of Windows Vista, and how it will force people to upgrade their hardware. I'm running Windows Vista on a Pentium 2.8 Ghz HT, 80 GB SATA, 512MB+256MB RAM, and a Radeon 9600 (which is now considered legacy), and I'm getting smooth performance. However a true picture of performance requirements will emerge once some software is installed in it.

Vista looks 'visibly' more secure. That is there are popups asking you that some certain application is about to execute, there are popups for messages from applications. Sometimes it can be annoying thats why I may disable User Account Control. I've disabled the standard Windows Firewall, and tried installing Sygate Professional, one of my favorite firewall for Windows, however due to compatability problems it wont install.

The start menu has been redesigned, and to be honest, I think the Windows XP one was better. Recently a new design of the 'K Menu was added to OpenSuse 10.2, and I like the way its structured and its really easy to access applications, however in the Windows Vista menu, its not easy because all applications are displayed as a single list. See the screenshots to see what I mean.

And Compare this to the OpenSUSE 10.2 menu

And while I was taking the first screenshot, I came across the first user interface bug, I have seen it being reported somewhere while Vista was till beta, but its still not fixed in the final release. As you can see when I go about saving the image and click on the drop down button instead of seeing a hiearchical list of the file system, I see a list of recent websites visited!

So my verdict about Vista in the first day is, that its not a definite improvement over previous Windows versions, most notable Windows XP, and surely not against other Operating Systems. Upto now I have not seen anything that is a geniune innovation. Microsoft trumpeted a lot about translucent windows and security in their add campaign, sure security is better now, but they can not claim it to be the 'most secure system ever', and translucent windows have been in MacOSX for years.

However I have come across a problem which has been purely setup by open source "fundamentalists"! As soon as I installed VMWare I tried out various hardware including USB flash drives and USB camera, but they won't work? And upon investigation it was revealed that this was due to a method for accessing the USB port, which was claimed to be insecure, hence support for it was discontinued in openSUSE 10.2, in a heated discussion in the forums, it was very clear who was behind all this, a respected kernel hacker. Greg KH recently jumped the canon and was the one who posted a patch to the LKML, for eliminating binary drivers. I respect him; however he does not seem to have any for users. In a post he said:

"We are not supporting VMWare, because it is closed source and proprietary"

It indeed is, but is there any other open source solution that beats it? Xen requires kernel modification and hence does not work with Windows, the only solution to virtualize windows on Linux computer right now (KVM may change that in future, however it is in the initial stages of development, and runs only on the latest processors) is to use VMWare. In effect VMware is doing us a favour by porting VMWare to Linux at all! I'm 100% certain that the openSuse 10.2 kernel team is doing the right thing by closing a potential exploitable thing, however the approach they have adopted is completely unacceptable! If the concerned methods is indeed exploitable, it is only in the application developers own interest to adopt a more secure method for accessing USB ports, however why can't all Linux distributions follow the same standard then? I can well imagine why VMWare didn't use the openSuse method of 'securely' accessing USB ports, because it would conflict with other popular distributions and if they try to support each method, would result in excessive workload to the company. The best method in this case would be to use something like the OSDL (what's the job of OSDL anyway?) to provide recommendations to the linux distributions in order to standardize kernel level interfaces, so that application developers do not end up supporting dozens of methods for a trivial task as accessing a USB port.

For the time being while Windows runs on more than 90% of the worlds desktops, and is a lucrative market for Independent Software Vendors, we can not ignore users who have applications which are Windows dependant; there are 1,000 times more such applications than Linux dependant apps. And the only way to allows users to run those applications on Linux for the time being is to use virtualization (WINE in my opinion, is progressing nicely, but still has some way to go).

PS. Instead of just ranting here, I will be releasing an openSUSE default kernel with the USB access feature turned on, so that people who need it now can use it

Are there any features which you would like to see in this download manager, for now I'm calling it Py/Downloader?

KDE just got 10 years old! The K Desktop Environment, is "one of" the best (the "one of" was put in order to stop a flame war in my blog) desktop environments for Linux. KDE has been crucial in introducing Linux to the Desktop, true a GNOME based distribution, Ubuntu has the taken the reign now (I believe this was due to marketing and hype), but KDE based distributions, Fedora, Kubuntu etc are not too far behind. Its been now 5 years that I've been using Linux, my first distribution was Redhat 7.2, which was running GNOME; KDE, due to Redhat's modifications had a similar look and feel in Redhat. So I couldn't get excited about Linux at all, it was a very boring interface for me. But in a random surfing session I came across screen shots of Slackware, which of course ships with unmodified sources, and the screen shots really appealed to me, I downloaded Slackware, and from that moment I've never looked to any other distribution, and use Slackware with KDE exclusively. So what is it that I really like KDE?

1. KDE look and feel

I really like KDE themes Plastik and Keramik. There are numerous innovations in KDE, for example the KMenu applets, which provides fast access to numerous highly useful features, like weather reports, dictionary, direct access to storage media (one click mount), information about my local wireless network etc..

Apart form the KMenu there is another toolbar which I really use a lot, the KasBar, its a toolbar which shows thumbnail views of opened windows, it helps my productivity especially during programming when I have multiple windows open, the IDE, the debugger, Mysql administrator, Mysql query browser, etc. Having thumbnail views allows me to navigate to the required window a lot faster.

KDE Icons look very very clean and well designed. KDE's file browser, Konqueror, in my opinion is the best one around. I've used GNOME's nautilus, and I cant figure out, why they have not included a "open terminal here" options in the popup menu, in any Linux system you have to turn to the command line frequently, because there are some tasks which are more suitably done in the commandline than in a GUI file browser.

2. KDE has tons of freebies!

KDE ships with tons of applications, many for similar purposes, all in all the bundled application mostly fill nearly all my needs, and very few extra software have to be installed, such as OpenOffice, GIMP, Firefox etc.

KDE's own webbrowser, although for a very long time couldn't even open Gmail, has come a long way, and often I prefer Konqueror over Firefox, because it is lightweight. But Konqueror has still some way to go to challenge Firefox on KDE desktops, because it doesn't support some AJAX functionality for example, in Konqueror I can't see the GMail integrated Gtalk client.

There are tons of KDE application which are not shipped along with KDE, but you can get them from here.

3. KDE application development is easy!

KDE is based on Qt/C++, which is one of the best GUI development toolkits for Linux and others. Its innovative 'signal and slots' based event abstraction makes development of GUI application very easy. KDE Desktop Communication Protocol (DCOP), allows KDE application to talk to each other. I really wished that there would be something similar in Windows (maybe COM, but majority of windows application are NOT COM enabled), because allowing application to application communication allows a developer to reuse the functionality of existing software. Then there is KParts, which is analogous to COM, which allows the developer to encapsulate a component which does some specific thing, and then reuse that component in other applications.

KDE comes bundled with some of the finest development tools around. KDevelop, is a very feature rich development environment, which allows you to do development of every type of application from simple BASH shell scripts to complex Kernel modules.

Quanta is an excellent web development environment, its hard to ignore when I'm doing php programming. I use it to complement Zend, a commercial php IDE I use, which lacks in website design capabilities.

If you want to learn Qt, you can consult this book its the best book I've come across, and covers a wide range of topics which help you to get productive with Qt quickly.

So these are my top 3 reasons why I prefer KDE, I'm very excited about KDE 4, and can't await its release, the screen-shots I've seen have been marvelous.

I would like to know from my readers what they like or dislike about KDE?

In 1998 Linux made it's debut in the Top500 List, an authoritative list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
After 1998, it took Linux 7 years to break the magical 50% mark. As of November 2004, it ran on 60.2% of the top 500 supercomputers, in 2006 it nearly reached the 75% mark. I believe that Linux will go all the way to completely take over Unix's user base. Both OS's run on about 94.4% of the top 500 supercomputers.

The rise of Linux has come largely at the cost of Unix. Which is discernible from the fact that both operating systems are very similar in nature, and they both are operated the same way, thus the cost of switching is minimal. Linux is an open source, stable, secure, multi-user and multitasking operating system all these factors make it ideal for a supercomputer. Supercomputer manufacturers can modify the kernel source to suite their hardware. The kernel is monolithic but has elements of microkernels in that it allows kernel modules, which make kernel development very simple.

Contrasting open source Linux with closed source Unix leads to a major observation: A lot of money is flowing into Linux these days, and Linux has a large active community which contributes to it, enhancing and making the OS better. Whereas the money flowing into Unix is stagnant. After the commercialization of Unix, the operating system has been largely in decline, I expect the decline to continue and see it as irreversible. All these factors conspired to erode Unix market share in the supercomputing world.

Linux has made remarkable progress from a hobbyists project in 1991, to the leading OS in supercomputers and server systems. Linux also has made inroads into the embedded market. Motorola has been very successful marketing Linux based smartphones, like the e680i which I personally use, and have no regrets about buying it.

One area where Linux lacks is the desktop market. Which of course Microsoft rules. There are many things which conspired to make Linux entry into the Desktop difficult! For starters: Weak GUI(KDE is great, but in my opinion increasingly getting bloated), focus on command-line based user interface(no matter how good the GUI is you always have to go back to the command-line at some stage), difficulty of managing and installing Open source software (dependency hell! Gentoo's emerge, yum, conary do a great job at resolving that). But two hurdles I think have been overlooked, that is software piracy and lack of support for Open Source! The most natural user base of an Open Source operating system would be in the Third World. Countries which can not pay for basic amenities for their populations hardly can be expected to purchase proprietary software from multi-billion dollar companies. So open source software provides them a platform with which they can compete with the developed nations. However if I look around in my own country, Pakistan, I hardly see any Linux deployments around. The Government uses MS software in its offices, businesses use MS software, the people use MS software at their homes! MS Office is taught has part of the curriculum at high school. Most of the software is of course pirated, costing about half a dollar per CD (Windows is 1 CD). Because of software piracy MS Windows and related software are ubiquitous in Pakistan. Software Piracy helps proprietary software companies more than it hurts them! Precisely it makes people dependant on their technology! No-one I know is even considering of switching to Linux because they see Windows everywhere around them, they believe using Linux would put them at a disadvantage, so they better stick to Windows, no matter how many virii they get!

Not long ago I had an instructor at university, who was a senior officer in the Pakistan Armed Forces, he happened to be the director of the Army's directorate which was responsible for the IT policy. He was a complete "Microsoft Guy". He never considered any software solution which was not from Microsoft! I once had a discussion about why his directorate was making the Army dependent on Microsoft software, and not take up the initiative of making them "independent" by indigenously customizing open source software to suit their purposes. He replied this was impossible in the current scenario! There are no companies in Pakistan which provide support for Open Source software, and the Army required heavy-duty support, which to them was only being provided by Microsoft. Indeed in Pakistan there are virtually no companies which provide support for open source software. Most universities in Pakistan are busy at churning out software professionals which are adept at Microsoft technologies, and open source figures low on their curriculum. With no support companies it is very unlikely that any enterprise will take the risk to switch to Linux.

But of course I didn’t return to the proprietary world, and stayed and investigated abit more, I came across writings of Micheal Tiemann, Doc Searls and the renowned work "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which cleared most of my doubts.

The Open Source economic model is the EXACT opposite of the proprietary model! Proprietary companies provide software at a substantial price, which includes support services. Open Source provides free software, but with paid support! So its like Retail vs Services for commodities model.

Open Source model allows various software companies to provide support for software which might have been developed by someone else, and it doesn’t lead to a saturated support services market! Because only the best companies survive. Whereas the Proprietary model naturally gives the software developer an advantage. I would call companies such as McAfee and Symantec "support companies" as they are providing solutions which keep your Windows installation running and remove malicious software. But they are providing support for a software which's source they do not have limited access to. The recent move by Microsoft to disallow access to the Windows Vista internals, should be a wakeup call for all support companies targetting non-open source software. In a proprietary world support companies are effectively second class citizens, and can be ditched by their "masters".

Making the source available and charging for support services, also leads to great software! A proprietary company can have a few great developers, some excellent quality assurance experts, an army of beta testers and provide software which is good. After release only two groups of people will actually see the code: The company's developers, and crackers/hackers! If the company's developer finds them, its a patch! If a cracker finds it; it’s a malware or a new virus, and users are exposed until the company patches the flaw. In the Open Source world, because the source code is freely available a lot more people have access to the source and ability to study it, find bugs fix it or exploit it. But the incentives in the open source world to exploit are less than in the proprietary world. Because the effect will be limited, mainly due to the enhanced security of most Linux deployments. Software such as IpTables, SELinux, LIDS etc. Make Linux so much more secure than any operating system I've used.

However "support" is not the only thing Open Source enables you to do. LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP/Perl/python) provides a great platform to innovate on and provide innovative services to people. Just Look around the Internet, and the quality of services is just amazing!

I (as many other people now think) conjecture that future software companies will be increasing support/services driven not based on the model of existing proprietary companies (eg. Microsoft). Google, the multi-billions dollar company, which made its wealth not from selling software like Microsoft, but from providing a service to its users, that is context sensitive ads, bases its software infrastructure mainly on Linux and Open Source software.