With my latest foray into Windows 7 build 7100 (official Release Candidate from MS Technet) I was experiencing largely the same errors/issues/bad performance as I had on the unofficial 7057 and 7077 wherein everyone replied “Hold your horses”
One of my test systems, this Athlon64 3200+ with 2 gigs of RAM and a Geforce 7650 GS was to see how 7 performed on hardware that was reasonable 3-4 years ago, and overall it failed terribly.
The requirements for 7 are the same as Vista, because it more or less is Vista, and its slow boot up, sluggish response, and overall poor user experience at some times even makes Vista look downright speedy/stable. Even Windows fans have nothing new in Windows 7 of any substance that hasn’t been or won’t be ported back to Vista, or in a couple cases XP. (IE 8)
But where Vista7 brings these systems to their knees with their overall top heaviness and their DRM systems that do things like poll my hardware every 30ms to make sure I haven’t attached any “piracy devices” or intentionally crash the system if the driver reports any odd voltage fluctuations, Mandriva basically brings this system back from the dead and manages to bring most of Vista7’s killer features and a lot more that Vista7 still can’t do.
Note: I am mainly talking about GNOME, because I use GNOME, some or all of this may not apply to KDE, don’t ask because I probably won’t know.
Boot Time:
This is something Microsoft says they’ve improved, and it takes over a full minute to boot both Vista and 7 on reasonable hardware like my newer Core 2 Duo machine and about 1:30 to 1:45 on this older system before I can log in. As far as I can tell, Vista7 actually makes no improvements over Vista in this area.
Bootchart on Mandriva is kind of flaky as it doesn’t seem to have properly timed Mandriva’s new SpeedBoot in 2009 Spring, but Mandriva 2009 Spring got my old Athlon64 system from power on to log in screen in 15-18 seconds using the same “stopwatch” method as I used on Vista7. (Boot a few times and report the range).
File System:
Ext4 is available, I don’t know if it is the default since I never use defaults, I’ve been playing around with it though and I have to say that disk performance is extremely fast.
Users of Ext3 should format the volume and make an Ext4 one in its place, it’s worth the inconvenience of backing up files.
(NTFS even on Vista7 becomes fragmented, Microsoft just adds another background task to defrag it and spin up your hard drive late at night, assuming the thing is even on.)
Audio stack:
One of Vista7’s main features over XP is timer-based audio scheduling, per application volume control, and better device selection.
Pulseaudio on Linux has technically provided this for some time, but I believe that Mandriva is the first to actually get it right. Those who have tried to use all the features I’ve mentioned in other Linux systems know that it tended to be temperamental at best, but with the new timer-based approach and the per-device and per-application controls in the mixer applet, I’m happy to report that Mandriva is on par or ahead of the curve set by Mac OS X and Vista7.
Users of laptops should perhaps even notice some extra battery life (We’re probably talking a few minutes at best, but it is a nice side effect of timer scheduling).
Compositing effects:
Vista7 of course have Aero Glass which is nice, but really can’t be customized past what color you want, and still can’t give you proper management of multiple monitors or virtual desktops.
X and Compiz can do both this and more, and you can make them look like exactly whatever you want if you use Emerald themes (I’ve even seen a few Aero Glass themes that look eerily accurate).
Mandriva includes the latest Compiz Fusion 0.8.2, which fixes some particularly annoying bugs that could crop up from time to time and increases the smoothness of the various effects. The shoddy video cards list has been updated, so users should never run into a situation where Compiz starts up, kills the titlebars, and then bombs out, no matter how bad their video card is. (It works on all Nvidia cards past Geforce 6 that I’ve tried *shrugs*, not so much with my older ATI cards)
Desktop Cube and Window Picker and Minimize/Maximize plugins by default, whatever you like if you use CompizConfig Settings Manager (I recommend the simple-ccsm).
Miscellaneous other mentions:
Mandriva 2009 Spring has everything you’ll expect in a modern desktop operating system, and if it’s not there (codecs and such in the Free edition), you can get it from your repository in Mandriva Control Center, or after adding Easy URPMI’s Penguin Liberation Front repository.
Desktop Search is provided by the latest version of Beagle, and users of Vista Search (or the ones that disabled it for being a resource hog) should be pleasantly surprised by Beagle, it indexes your home folder (Documents and Music and Pictures and such) so your search results tend to come up immediately.
If you have a monstrously powerful rig, you can also set Beagle to index your email, your instant messaging conversations (through Pidgin), your Firefox history, etc.
Overall:
Mandriva 2009 Spring seems to have all the features one would want from Vista7 without the sucky undertaste of DRM, while managing to take up 5-6 times less hard drive space, a third the memory, and managing to work exceptionally well even on XP-era hardware that Microsoft abandoned long ago.
Mandriva 2009 Spring also clearly one-ups Ubuntu, especially in the area of Pulseaudio (which is often buggy and unreliable in Ubuntu Jaunty), users that this affects should move to Mandriva immediately.
PS: Don’t forget to have some Wine with your cheese. :)
