[gnurant]

What I meant was that my friends pc still does everything he needs and has no compulsion to upgrade to windows 7.

Stability aside (which I think is a good thing) all that I can see that is different in windows is a bit of eye candy. Big wow.

OSX and iPhoneOS is infinitely more intuitive than windows. And there lies it's strength. Linux sadly just imitates where it should be innovating on the desktop.

I can understand though the desire not to confuse the users by radically making a design change. And quite frankly the security model on windows has been a joke.

[sid0]

> Stability aside (which I think is a good thing) all that I can see that is different in windows is a bit of eye candy. Big wow.

But that's wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista alone is huge.

> OSX and iPhoneOS is infinitely more intuitive than windows.

I haven't used the iPhone OS, but I think OS X is significantly less intuitive than Windows. Enter renames a file?!

> And quite frankly the security model on windows has been a joke.

The security model of Windows NT has never been a joke -- it's always been more flexible than the standard Unix model (e.g. full ACLs instead of nine bits for permissions). The security of Windows XP, prior to Service Pack 2, was indeed a joke because MS wasn't too serious about security vulnerabilities then. Vista is a different story though.

[gnurant]

Agree ACLs great idea; in practice - buggy as hell; but I left windows, so they might have changed things.

What I was getting at was, that despite the added features to each incarnation; the average Joe might not notice that much has changed. They just want to do what they want to do easily.

My Dad happily got the job done in word perfect and i comfortably used a browser (until the os crashed) on Windows 3.1.

I agree with you on Finder's irritations. Gnome's nautilous puts finder and explorer to shame in my opinion. But it has little irritations of it's own. I did notice recently that in Windows7 explorer would carry on copying files rather than terminating on error; about time!

It's been said; that Windows omitted the security model in earlier pc's as they didn't forsee home pcs connecting the web. Hardware and cost also must have also been a limitation for earlier os's.

I used to do sys admin, and I was forever trying to lock down windows, i.e limited accounts, but it would break the apps or make them error or buggy. That's not really Microsoft's problem; unless they didn't provide adequate documentation. It's poor implementation. Likewise I've seen printers not working under limited accounts; I even saw a hilarious fix: make the whole system dir totally read/writable! To cut a long story short it riled me so much; I left windows.

People went from no security to a locked down system; that they found plain irritating. Whereas in OSX there is one simple system preferences panel, that asks for your password if you do anything that requires root privileges. Windows config is nasty until you learn it. Then they change it in each incarnation with the eventual itteration resembling a turd. Don't start me on Linux desktop implementations.

Also the security model on Windows feels the wrong way around. It should be locked down and slowly opened to trusted apps. But as you say perhaps that's finally been overhauled.

My mate uses win98 as he can get his job done easily. He can reset his os in seconds as it is so small. I wouldn't use it, but it's fine for him. About the only reason he might shift is for firefox, but he recently said he's found some compatibility layer that let's him run some modern apps. Hilarious. I don't know how he copes without a command line, but he does.

Don't get me wrong, there have been some leaps and bounds, but from my perspective, I'd rather a simple system; that works; that I can tweak if i want, that is portable, interoperable, that is fast and intuitive to use rather than a machine with oodles of power just to watch a high def movie or provide a transparent window, with drop shadows.

[gnurant]

Aware that I have just started to moan. An OS in so intrinsic to using a computer, I wish they'd get the basics sorted. A bit of competition is good, but the Microsoft stranglehold on the OS hasn't been healthy.

I fear the whole thirst for profit and protecting intellectual property is just dangerous here.

Innovation and ease of use should be rolled into an uberOS.

Open protocols and filesystems should be at there.