Carping about Vista Crap

Vista has been good generally, but I have noticed a few things that had me blowing a gasket, at least early on when I didn't understand what caused the odd behavior.

This might not be a Vista thing per se, but the touch pad scrolling doesn't seem to work reliably. Especially when running applications with elevated privileges ("as administrator"). E.g if the task manager is started with "normal" user privileges (UAC is enabled, of course), the touchpad scrolling works. However, when "view processes from all users" is enabled, the touchpad scrolling stops working. A similar difference in behavior is observed when regedit is started with / without elevated privileges. This leads me to believe that this might have something to do how mouse event messages are received by "elevated" applications.

I doubt, though, that this is a Vista thing because mousewheel scroll seems to work in the same situtation (when using a discrete USB mouse instead of the trackpad). So my blame right now lays with Synaptic.

Second, i see Vista BSOD fairly consistently when I use VPN. After I Idle on VPN for a while (haven't measured exactly how much time), I get a BSOD. I haven't had pause yet to analyze the error code and determine if this is due to a driver or some arcane interaction between Vista and its driver and its power management.

Ubuntu gripes

I have had a long running argument with a few friends about the utility of Ubuntu. I started out as a Linux believer / fanatic when in school. I drank hook line and sinker the "academia" spiel about Linux being a better and more productive operating system than WinBlows to end. Till I met a few high respected practising academics and professionals who championed otherwise. Thus I decided to be a good engineer and become OS agnostic. I chose to create, in my head, a wet-ware database about what was good about each OS and use it for that purpose.

But the number of exceptions and uses has become far too much for me to bear and I must purge my knowledge in the pensieve of this blog, so that at a later date, I might refer to it without having to relearn history or reinvent the wheel. Hopefully others can use my experiences as well and make better informed and wiser decisions.

Things I do like about Ubuntu Linux:
1.

Things I don't like about Ubuntu LinSux:

1. Laptops aren't supported very well (I understand there is proprietary support required, but that doesn't mean I have to like shoddy things. I would love it if all hardware manufacturers got their act together and supported Linux all out, but then where's the monetary incentive?)

2. It seems to have an increase load of crapware or malformed experimentware. Take tracerd for instance: it is supposed to be a indexer tool to enhance searches. Nice and fine, except that it sucks. No I mean literally. It sucks all available memory and processing power away from the machine even while it is in use. At least windows products are mature enough to not do that. They may have a whole bunch of other things wrong with them (mem leaks for one, zombied processes etc.) but they tend to not cripple you while you work. Not so trackerd. It happily sucks the life of your hard drive and processing cycles from your tasks while it runs.

3. Hibernation doesn't work right. Now I'd like to accept the Ubuntu apologizer's claim "it's because of the broken M$ ACPI model", but I just can't get myself to do that. Each time the machine resumes from hibernation in windows, stuff comes back normal: the screen works, the sound works yada yada. Not so with Gutsy. NetworkManager is not going to work, in addition to sucking all processing cycles (something that isn't supposed to happen in Linux because of its excellent scheduler and extreme advantages against a micro-kernel architecture). Good luck if sound works right. Oh yeah and keep 'em fingers crossed or else the display might not come on right (though mostly, it does). Somehow ACPI under windows seems to be free from these afflictions.

4. sound card doesn't work right. In Winblows Vastage, when you connect a headphone jack, the audio in the speakers is killed (as expected). In Gutsy Linsux, connected a headphone gives you audio in two places! two for the price of one! so if you wanted to hear some music without disturbing those around you, fat chance! Also audio has never dealt very well with hibernation (see 3 above). Btw, FYI, I am currently using Gutsy as I type and I tend to do a lot of my non-work development in Gutsy.

5. Screen brightness goes to eye burning max each time the system resumes from suspend / hibernation. Have to go to Preferences | Power Management each time and jiggle screen brightness around to reduce it to comfortable levels.

6. (07/07/2008) More hibernation quirks: system resumes fine from suspend when idle, but then immediately hibernates. More here and here

7. Can't join the same wireless network after suspend / hibernate. There is an open bug on this.

8. Using Photoshop under Wine initially had the issue that the clone tool (Alt + Click) wouldn't work because it would always try to move the window. Figured out that this was because of Ubuntu's window manager (Gnome). Easily remedied in this case by changing System | Preferences | Windows | used Super "windows logo" plus click for move.



Things I do like about Windows Vista:

Things I don't like about Winblows WasteYa: