And yes, I believe GNOME looks and works infinitely better than Vista (especially with XGL enabled) for common, everyday tasks. — Chris Pirillo

That’s Chris Pirillo (From TechTV), one of the most die-hard Windows guys ever. He’s leaning hard toward OS X now. And if he is thinking this way then you can be sure that there are other Windows elites doing the same. Let’s review:

Apple OS X > Gnome/Linux > Windows Vista

Yes, prepare for big changes in 2007.

VIDEO: The Future Of The Linux Desktop

I just realized something today — the majority of my time in Windows is spent waiting for the OS to reboot after doing updates.

It seems whenever I log in for the first time in a few days, or, increasingly a couple of weeks, I tend to be forced into the following drill:

• Log in.
• Open programs to be used.
• Start updates.
• Start working (barely).
• Get prompted for a reboot.
• Close everything I’ve opened and reboot.
• Wait for the system to restart.
• Log in.
• Start up my apps and try to start working again.
• Check for additional updates.
• Download and install them.
• Get prompted for a another reboot.
• Realize I never should have opened any apps at all.

That was painful to write, and it’s a hundred times worse to actually go through. It’s sickening, really. Windows to me has essentially become a gaping wound that needs constant attention. I can’t just log in and work — not unless I want to ignore the latest slew of highly critical updates. Baahh.

Anyway, just wanted to vent.

Yes, that’s the prediction I’ve had for quite some time: the single biggest factor in peoples’ decision to move to OS X is going to be the fact that Vista is going to bomb. When I say bomb, I mean an utter failure. Here’s a quote from Paul Thurrott — a consumate Windows guru:

“Since the euphoria of PDC 2003, Microsoft’s handling of Windows Vista has been abysmal. Promises have been made and forgotten, again and again. Features have come and gone. Heck, the entire project was literally restarted from scratch after it became obvious that the initial code base was a teetering, technological house of cards. Windows Vista, in other words, has been an utter disaster. And it’s not even out yet. What the heck went wrong?”

Uh, yeah…

The latest issue he wrote about is Microsoft’s attempt to mimic the Unix model of limiting user access to the system, i.e. making sure people can’t tear up their own machines as easily as they can in older versions of Windows.

Well, as some expected, Microsoft’s attempt to do this is an utter joke. Again from Paul’s piece:

“The bad news, then, is that UAP is a sad, sad joke. It’s the most annoying feature that Microsoft has ever added to any software product, and yes, that includes that ridiculous Clippy character from older Office versions. The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for the same action would be comical if it weren’t so amazingly frustrating. It would be hilarious if it weren’t going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness.”

It’s April, folks. April. This far in and they are still grappling with major design issues? It’s like these people are lost somewhere with no leader. Microsoft is full of awesome programmers, so why can’t they make things the way Apple or Google does? I don’t get it.

Anyway, regardless of the reason, they are in major trouble. I think Vista is going to be the single biggest reason for people moving to OS X and Linux. People are going to be somewhat hesitant, yet excited to some degree about the release, but once they see it — and see how many issues there are with it — their loyalty to Windows will suddenly turn into anger.

Basically, it’s not Leopard that Microsoft has to worry about — it’s Vista. It’s the reason people are going to leave them in droves, not the competition’s offerings. If both Vista and Leopard were great, but Leopard was a little better, most would stay. But Leopard is going to be revolutionary, and Vista is basically going to limp onto the scene. Microsoft is going to have to hire a slew of people just to do public damage control for how much it sucks — a fact that’s no doubt going to make Jobs laugh uncontrollably.

Some predictions are too grand to make, but I’ll make one anyway. This is the beginning of the end for Microsoft’s dominance of the home market. Apple is surging faster that most people relalize, and if Microsoft doesn’t do something soon they’re going to be tired and stale within a couple of years.

Thoughts?

So I got another phone — well, a Windows device (not quite the same thing exactly). It’s heresy, to be sure; going from a Blackberry to a Windows Mobile device is akin to Satanic worship in many circles.

As it stands, though, there was some functionality missing from the Blackberry that suddenly became very necessary — namely Bluetooth. I recently purchased a new BMW 325i, a new MacBookPro, and a while back I bought a TomTom. All three of these toys have the ability to do cool things with Bluetooth, and the Blackberry devices don’t cut it in this regard. For some reason RIM has ensured that their implementation of Bluetooth doesn’t play nice with others.

So that brings me to the next best thing — that does Bluetooth — Windows Mobile 5.0. The other thing that drew me to this was the fact that I really did need a solid Exchange integration solution, and my company wasn’t about to spring for a BES server.

Anyway, I now have the thing doing basic functions: integration with work’s Exchange server, browsing the web, etc. Oh, and talking and stuff. It’s only hung once so far (in two days), so that’s decent for a Windows box. On the old systems you were basically thankful for uptime rather than upset about downtime.

I’m having some trouble figuring out how I should do my personal mail on the box, though. On my Blackberry I had my dmiessler.com mail coming to it directly, and it was push, so it was like instantaneous. On the Windows device I don’t know how I’m going to emmulate that functionality. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Other than that it’s a new device, so that’s always fun. If you guys know of some mandatory stuff I need to be doing with this thing, do drop me a line.

Many are debating the question of how vulnerable Apple’s OS X operating system is relative to Windows. You essentially have two sides — one saying that it’s inherently more secure (and hence less successfully attacked), and the other side saying that it’s only because of marketshare that there haven’t been more issues.

A Model

Well, I think I have a model for explaining the interaction between these two theories. Essentially, OS X has issues just like FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or any other OS does; the issues just haven’t surfaced yet because of the lack of interest in exploiting such a small userbase. Where people go wrong, however, is assuming that it’s going to get as bad as Windows has been. It’s not.

Conceptualize this as if there are two ratings — one is the potential for attack, and the second is the degree to which the potential has been actualized.

Well, let us say that Windows has a 90% potential with an 80% actualized. In other words it’s highly vulnerable and has been and is being exploited nearly to that potential. OS X, on the other hand, has a much lower potential — say in the 50% range — but it’s seen virtually no exposure due to the lack of interest from attackers (due to limited marketshare). I’d say it’s actualized rating is around 5%.

The Future

What this means is that over the next year or so you’re going to see a massive increase in the flaws found in OS X due to the exponential increase in its popularity. Notice that using my model and numbers this means that OS X has 45% of its vulnerability potential untapped, whereas Windows only has 10%.

This doesn’t mean it’s more vulnerable — only that more of its vulnerability is yet undiscovered and unexploited.

So, all the Mac zealots who think their platform is invulnerable are in for a violent awakening. On the flip side, all the Microsoft disciples who think OS X is about to be rocked the same degree that Windows has been are equally off track.

As with most debates, the extremes seem to have major issues with their arguments. The truth always ends up incorporating elements from both sides and falling somewhere in the middle.

Is it just me or does the feature list for Windows Vista sound like that of Windows 95 with some extra stuff? Better search capabilities? Better Graphics? Come on. How hard is that to do comsidering where they’re coming from? The OS is fundamentally the same OS that came out in 95. It’s much more stable and much faster, but there haven’t been any breakthroughs — nothing remotely comparable to the difference between OS9 and OSX.

Look, I’m not saying Vista is going to suck. Hell, XP doesn’t suck; it’s a decent OS, all joking aside. But how does Microsoft hope to compete with likes of Apple when their brand spankin’ new flagship OS is essentially a reskinned Windows 95/98/2000/XP? I don’t think they can. I think they are going to flop big time on this one. Why on this one in particular? Because this time someone is waiting in the wings with an alternative.

I think 2006 is going to be the year of the Apple. Between the new Macs that just came out and the non-event that the Vista release is going to be, I’d say Microsoft is going to enter 2007 seriously back on its heels. Once people start seeing OSX en masse, and get the news that the hardware is no longer alien, I think people are going to start flocking to Apple. That’s not to mention the iPod effect.

Anyway, we’ll see. My prediction is like 15% marketshare by 2008.

So it appears that the new Intel-based Macs are going to run Windows. That means that they’re going to run Linux too. :) That means it will likely be possible, in the very near future, to triple-boot a Mac with OS, Linux, and Windows.

Not something I’m going to do, but cool nonetheless.

… inside a Linux-hosted VMWare session.

(Sad, but true.)

Monad is the new command-line tool from Microsoft, and supposedly it is it’s going to be highly cool. Unfortunately, for the time being, I’m not going to touch it.

Why? Well, as strange as it sounds, I’m afraid I’ll like it. The simple reality is that I’m not going to go back to Windows as my main computing platform regardless of how cool it is. And if it were to have some cool features that my shell in Linux or OS X doesn’t have, well…that would just be bad.

I mean, I already use SFU to emulate my *nix environments, and I’m pretty happy with having roughly the same set of commands when I go from platform to platform.

I think it really boils down to something simple, though — I am deathly afraid of facing a situation in which I’m on a Linux box and go to try something I can do in MSH, only to realize that I can’t.