To be honest, I don’t really understand why MS is pushing 7 so hard.
VISTA might not be the revolution some expected, but it’s a decent OS. There are quite a lot improvements in here and there, nothing revolutionary, but solid. There is much VISTA “bashing” of XP-users, trying to justify why they don’t switch.
Don’T know what MS expected, but I think they were naive, if they thought that everybody would jump on VISTA, and they are too ,if they think it’s goin to be different with Windows 7! From my point of view, the times where a new OS would change the way of computing (remember Windows 95???) are over. And this is good! I’m with duryodhan here. Office 2007 ROCKS! And it’s a much more important piece of innovation than VISTA or Win 7 will ever be.

Who are the other vendors? Apple? I’m curious about all these other OS vendors you speak of that spend too much time on eye candy. Do you not like eye candy?

Almost every requirement you list is currently available by default with Linux. The rest requires you to install additional software (it’s like freeware…but different).

And Thinker, what is “unusable” in the home about Linux? I’ve had just the opposite experience with XP and Vista. For example, I’ve had to go out a buy additional software to make XP “usable” [err...safe] on the Internet. I’ve had to buy additional software to watch my movie collection. And Vista thinks my 8 year-old laser printer is a 128MB storage device. Not very usable. Fortunately I’m a live CD away from fixing these problems.

I do look forward to the next offering from MS though. It’s makes for good fodder.

Also, as long as MS keeps building on the old NT core, they are limited to what they can change. They need to start from zero and build a whole new base.

I’d like to see:
- A TRUE multi-user system where all users have an entirely separate copy of ALL files. As it stands now, Windows isn’t true multiple user. All users share the same core libraries and OS files.

- Windows OS needs to be completely separate from the user application side. Application programs SHOULD NOT be able to store into Windows libraries. This would be easy to do by simply creating a new file construct called maybe \Windows\..\user which would be the user extension area for driver and application files.

- Recognition that with the huge new hard drives available that users are partitioning their drives into smaller logical drives. Everything no longer revolves around a single C: drive. Allow user settings to be installed on any logical drive easily.

- More control & visibility of the start-up process from boot. Also, related, the ability to better control the start-up process & prevent programs form inserting themselves into this process in native windows (some of us do this with add-on programs now).

- A new file system that plays off of today’s technology.

- Built-in imaging backup

- It shouldn’t take me 3-4 minutes to start-up Windows (until everything is ready to run).

- Trap & save BSOD info for the user through some kind of hypervisor. Right now, you have to hand copy it or take a photo of the screen. Makes it difficult to track incidents.

As for Ubuntu or some Linux variant replacing Windows, that is not going to happen until there is one Linux release instead of hundreds of variants, all different in many ways.

See:
http://www.technoledge.com.au/pdfs/linux_desktop.pdf
http://www.appscout.com/2007/10/from_windows_to_ubuntu_and_bac_1.php
-

Yeah, maybe vista didn’t work out, but office 2k7 kicks ass.

And I am a serious linux user (Slackware!) so I can assure you I am not a fanboy , but I know what I am talking about.

But tinkering with Linux beats shelling out $200 for an equally broken operating system.

Rick:
So use DOS. Would be better for you than Windows. It looks more professional. Maybe you would impress your girlfriend. But nowadays, in 2008 classic style is sh*t. I hate overweighted Windows and applications, but windows xp styles are super lightweight, so why not use them, if they make windows looks BETTER?

And to say a word about Windows 7:
Vista has a lot of inconveniences. The most one is speed and resources consumption. The VERY BEST choice for MS IMHO would be to improve significantly XP. At first should go drivers support. If Windows freezes it’s in 90% caused by bad drivers or other low level software. Also good choice would be if they make “Windows distributions”, like linux ones. For example one may want to distribute windows with Media player classic w/ realmedia/quicktime support, firefox, thunderbird and bunch of other free software. That would be a revolution.

You might be interested to know that Infoworld is running a “save XP” petition at http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp. They aim to ask Microsoft to continue selling and supporting XP indefinitely instead of stopping it soon.

These are my expectations of a new operating system from Microsoft. They should be pretty lean by now. Right?

I’m with Alan – Ubuntu and derivatives represent the end of Microsoft on the desktop. Thinking long term, though, there will be fewer C programmers (ones willing to donate time) and it will be harder to innovate with Linux. So in the end, we’re all going to pay again. That’s the real Linux challenge… how to sustain Linux after the hackers all pass on.

Hey maybe Sun will buy Linux too!