I have access to the Vista betas via my company's MSDN subscription. I've played with some of the previous betas and pretty much came to the same conclusion as Chris.
First off, the system requirements are a joke. One of the nice things about previous versions of Windows is that they would run (slowly, perhaps) on systems with low amounts of RAM. I once had Windows 2000 Server running on a P2-300 with 128MB of RAM, running as an Active Directory domain controller in a production environment. Vista requires 512MB of RAM as a minimum. Areoglass's requirements are also a joke. I'm sorry, but I shouldn't need to have a dedicated graphics controller with 128mb of RAM just to get transparencies, the weird ALT-TAB replacement, etc. I'm running on a 6 month old Dell Inspiron 700m laptop with an Intel 850 graphics chipset. Granted, it's not the best, but I'm sorry, it should be enough to run Vista with at least some of the 3D effects. The UI changes are extremely frustrating. The stanard File - Edit - View menus on explorer windows are gone. You have to dig through some menus to enable them. The new start menu is pretty bad as well. I didn't really look into Device Manager at all, as the system supported all of my hardware right out of the box. I also didn't care about encrypting my file system, so I can't comment about any of Chris's experiences there. XP, I believe, is pretty much the pinnacle of Windows development. Vista is mostly XP with some eyecandy, IE7, and a lot of frustrating usability changes. I don't think people are going to rush out and say "HEY I GOT TO UPGRADE TO VISTA" like we saw with Win95 (or even to an extent with XP.) Vista will move units only because OEM's will preload it. Playing with Vista has made me more interested in desktop Linux. I'm typing this in Thunderbird from SuSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 10 RC1. It's actually the first Linux I can say that I have played with that things mostly "just work." Novell has invested a LOT of R&D into making Desktop Linux much, much better. I think SLED 10 would be great on a lot of corporate desktops. Maybe in 2-3 more releases it may be ready for Joe Consumer. Unlike Vista, I can actually *USE* the 3D desktop effects (XGL). I'm just afraid of having to support Vista when it comes out. It will be the first version of Windows that I won't know inside and out. -ben
