DirectX 10 NOT backwards compatible

How is this going to affect Blitz3D????

http://news.softpedia.com/news/DirectX-10-and-so-it-ends-7762.shtml

you will probaly be able to have other DX's installed as well. Heard about this somtime ago.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25902

...But it's still early anyone's guess what will be the actual case when DX10/Vista finally ships next year or after... also do note that most current PCs won't even be able to INSTALL the thing; and if you can't do that you can (have to) use XP and DX9.

So DX 9 and earlier will be subjected to the same crap software layer as OpenGL?

Good to know.

on the bright side, if you have an old game that uses clock speed for timing, this will slow it down to a nicer pace for you :)

stinks but predictable and should pave the way for better games.

How do you figure that?

Vista needs outrageous hardware anyway, so any dx9 game should still run well under emulation.

Oh well. That's kinda annoying, but to be expected.

What I meant was if DX10 doesn't have to be backwards compatible the .dlls should be more optimised for modern video cards etc, you would hope... it's what I'd do anyway.

@Perturbatio you mean my copy of Terminal Velocity will finally slow down some? hahaha... That game is so old that my old 400mhz PC would run the game at crazy fast speeds... I couldn't get it to run under XP... I miss that game....

So, the facts so far (not gossip) are, Vista when it arrives will require a beafy CPU, a decent video card and oodles of RAM. Games not specifically written for DX10 will run slower. OpenGL apps and games will also run slower due to a software layer. Most people with *average* PC's will not get the full benefit from Vista's abilities and they'll have to upgrade just to get their current games working at the same speed as on XP. Great :/ Of course a year after it's released we'll all be saying it was a good move MS have made... maybe.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see what the real effect on older DX / OpenGL stuff turns out to be. It could turn out to be a whole load of hooey like the activation in XP caused before its release.

I'm all for it myself. Can't keep holding onto the same crap. Backwards compatibility is what has held back PC's for as long as I've been using them.

I bet BlitzMax could turn a few heads by having the first 'easy-to-use' DX10 engine ;)

when is all this supposed to be available...

--Mike

I agree. Computers these days are so rediculously fast they should easily be able to emulate legacy stuff in software.

the latest incarnation of dx9 just cme out not too long ago... and already it's "legacy stuff"...

... my word, we do live in a time warp nowadays.

but hey... i agree... lets move on...

to the future!!!

VR headsets and tactile gloves for everyone!!!!!!!!


--Mike

Cedega on Linux does a fairly decent job of converting DirectX stuff into OpenGL/ALSA/OSS stuff, so a software layer isn't going to be as awful as you'd expect.

What I find most amusing is that after all the whinging from people about OpenGL being supported under a wrapper on Vista, the same thing is happening to DirectX.

Vista will do as well as XP did - either OEM with new systems or upgraded to by those who like to spend loads on their PC hardware anyway. There's still no compelling reason for the rest of us to upgrade from 2000 or XP that I can see.

About time, well done Microsoft.

Their implementation of backwards compatability in DirectX has been completely ludicrous since they started. The whole way that API routines were called was flawed by design.

Anyone remember their Amiga? DirectX is much like a library on the Amiga. You could chop and change library versions and all the programs that relied on it still worked perfectly. When a library function was updated, the Amiga programmer didn't have to call a new function. With DirectX you had to call SomeDirectXFunction6 or SomeDirectXFunction7 etc etc depending on the DirectX version you wished to use.

So, DirectX9 contains all the functions for 9, 8, 7 and probably previous ones as well even though they mostly do the same thing. If the number of arguments for a DirectX function changed between versions, you had to have a new function name.

Why not use extendable structures to pass arguments? We managed it on the Amiga and we didn't see any speed penalties on our 7MHz CPU's.

I'm glad Microsoft have sorted DirectX out. Sure, it's going to be a real pain in the proverbial for the changeover period but it had to be done sooner or later. It should have happened between DirectX 7 and 8, but I guess the infamous Microsoft Coder Laziness manifested once more.

.

How come like a word processor on an Amiga with a Hard Drive was perfectly good and now you need 4GHz, 2GB RAM and VISA just to type a letter? hunh.

oh comeoonnnnnnnnnn... stop whining... that's progress dudes...

embrace the new order... resistance is futile... and punishable by banishment...

besides, soon, you will come to love vista... yes, love vista...

and vista will love you...

peace and prosperity to you all, in this new dawning of the great new vision...

... err, i mean great new vista :)


--Mike

.

OH NO!

You all won't be able to get your unfinished, non existent games with one sprite on the screen running higher than 500fps!

SAVE US!

The analogy that this causes the same stir as XP activation is ludicrous; not because it's not true, but because it's actually happenning that way. XP Activation is -still- a bitch. But this 'oh no my OGL/old DX games are going to run 10FPS slower' lark is just silly. Who cares. Stay with XP. MS won't be ditching it for another 9 years. If in 9 years you are still using the same old hardware then for gods sake!!! Just die. You've been living miserably anyway!

On the other hand, reports on Vista beta 1 gaming is that it actually runs stuff faster than XP. So, come final Vista release, turn off all the fancy services that make your desktop look great and spin around 360 degrees on every angle and you'll be back to a similar standing point anyway. Also the whole 'software emulation layer' is not going to be nearly as major as the OGL clan especially are making it out to be. It will, as it always has been and always will be, up to the graphics card maufacturers to provide the appropriate drivers for OpenGL (and probably now legacy DX).


... crap, crap, crap. I'm sorry, but everything you said in that paragraph was in fact gossip.

the software portion is probably just a set of wrapped function calls mapping DXn to DX10. Probably minimal speed hit as well in most cases?

The actual rendering I've no doubt, will still be hardware accelerated...

Crap, crap, crap. I'm sorry, but talk to the beta testers who've done extensive testing of whats currently available then :)


LOL, that cracked me up.

On the GL V's DX9 thing, one thing I know is that 3dsmax runs more than 2x faster than GL on my 6600GT particularly noticeable in scenes with a lot of wireframes and bounding boxes being drawn.

And only DX9 does WYSIWYG pixel shaders in 3dsmax too. I really don't think I'll be missing GL all that much as far as visuals go.

DX is M$ own stuff so why would they care about OGL? I wouldn't. If you want OGL, use Linux or something... and no one HAS to upgrade to Vista, like no one HAS to buy XBOX360 if they have old XBOX. Yet they all do that.

I still get surprised when I answer tech support from users that are trying to run Windows XP, Office 2003 and games, with only 128MB of RAM. "I had this system when I was running Windows 95 and it should be good enough to run XP with all my stuff on it!"

If you want the latest OS, expect to have the latest PC to run it. After a year or so, the hardware spec of average and then budget PCs will catch up anyway.

The DX vs OGL thing has already been discussed over and over... I agree with One Eyed Jack, probably that 'software layer' isn't so complex that it'll make run at half fps, but just some fps drop.

One thing I'm sure of is I won't upgrade my machine just because of Vista. I can't stick to one MS OS only because there are lots of different things I do with my pc, and no single OS fits all perfectly. Currently I use W98, W2K and WXP and about to install linux again (all in the same pc). Maybe Vista will find its space in my hard disk, maybe not :)

Boycott Vista.

I'll buy it actually. Thanks.

So will everyone else.

we'll have to, new standard and all that.

New standard?

I've been browsing this website in Win3.1 ;)

nah, really?

Anyone who thinks windows is bad now should go back and have a play with 3.1 - godawful. :P

a friend of mine has Windows 2.0 in his old 286. You should see that. Not much more than old dosshell.exe.
(By the way - Paint hasn't changed almost a bit from Win2.0 to WinXP)

Anyone got to see 1.0?

What new standard is that, and it being a standard, what's stopping someone from making a WinXP version? Isn't that the lovely thing about standards? That they aren't tied into a specific manufacturer or product?

There wasn't one. Not one that worked, anyhow. Except perhaps the Macintosh OS, but let's not get into that story.

.

Believe it or not WinXP runs most office stuff IE6, Office2003 etc better on My Pentium 2 400 with a Geforce 2 than the same apps on both Win2000 and Win98.

It does have 256mb of ram, but thats expected of all comparable OS's these days. I doubt that VISTA will have that high demands that you can't run it on a regular PC today. So long as you turn off the fancy graphics stuff.

Evak: I wouldn't entertain the idea of running Vista on less than 512MB in an office environment. Games will actually fare better because Vista unloads a lot of itself when (compatible) games run. It was designed to get completely out of the way and let games have as many CPU cycles and as much RAM as possible.

I would guess that DX10 plays some part in this process, hence the major rewrite and lack of backwards compatability.




Win95 was quite usable with 64MB
Win98 was quite usable with 128MB
WinME (forget I even mentioned it)
Win2000 did well with 192MB
WinXP manages OK with 256MB

Multiply the above by 2, and those respective systems suddenly become a lot more responsive.

Multiply by 4 and the respective systems are a joy to use. Apart from Win95 I think, because it couldn't really do much with more than 128MB :)

I remember seeing Win95 machines with 8Mb RAM for sale, I knew it was bad as I had 8Mb just to run DoomII in DOS. I saw one, it had to cache EVERYTHING to hard disk like just openeing folders was painful. There were even 128MB XP systems and loads are still sold with 256MB, disgusting!

About the "new standard", it was a resigned joke, no need to take seriously. I was thinking of this joke "Q: How many Microsoft Programmers does it take to change
a light bulb? A: None. They declare darkness the new standard."

Vista will likely have a rockier startup than most new editions of windows due to the significant jump in system specs (and associated cost) for the added benefit of 'looking pretty' (and even that's questionable), many large companies have stated they will not be jumping on the vista bandwagon anytime soon.

However, the majority of Microsoft's desktop OS sales is *not* through upgrades -- it's bundled OEM versions of windows. When vista comes out, that's what you'll get -- period. It will be near impossible to buy anything else. Thanks to that huge market share, microsoft can make whatever they want, and ram it down your throat. They *will* release their next version, and the market *will* run it, simply because the vast majority of retail customers wouldn't even think about spending additional money to buy anything else. Aren't monopolies fun?

It'll just be the same situation as Windows 2000 from what I can tell. Most people will be forced into Vista by way of OEM software, despite the hardware being sold with it not being up to standard.

OEM is Microsoft's mothership.

then we are all about to experience a close encounter of some kind or the other...

i'm planning to upgrade my hardware... i guess a lot of people will be getting new machines around that time too...

...by the way, what time is that gonna be... when is vista slated to appear?

--Mike

> WinXP manages OK with 256MB

I've got a winxp service pack 2 machine at work with 192MB and it is working fine. It is only being used for VB development work and to run lotus notes (and Lotus Notes is a resource hog) though.

dynaman: I know, and there's a lot of people out there running specific applications on 128MB as well and it works perfectly well for them.

I was just illustrating a rather unscientific point, but thanks anyway ;)

You'd think that an OS would get simpler and faster over the years, not more complex and slower.

The increased complexity (under the hood, at least) is to be expected; the decrease in speed is not.

If you want a simple OS, get QNX or AmigaOS (or whatever they renamed it to) or BeOS (didn't that change names too?).

Windows is the 'I do everything' kind of OS. Just think about how many components make up Windows, and how much Windows relies on its various components. It is a massively integrated (therefore complex) system which does a very good job of insulating us poor users from all that complexity.

You can write some really badly behaved software and Windows will quite calmly walk in and clean up after you if you didn't free all your resources. What happens on AmigaOS if you reference an invalid pointer? Crashy crashy crashy. Do the same on Windows and you get "This program broke, clicky the button and it will exit and I'll do the cleaning up again".

I like Windows just about as much as anybody. We all know it has some dreadful flaws:

o) Animated dog in the search function of a professional OS.
o) The registry. Honestly, there was a design-by-committee decision if ever I saw one.
o) Security. Yes, go on Microsoft, explain yourself.
o) Bloat. We know storage space is cheap, but hey, we'd like to not have to install an extra 1024MiB for Vista, thanks.

I'm not going to go on, I'm sure everyone has their pet hate. Honestly though guys, what else are you going to use? Are you going to be one of the fatalists running Linux and Wine (or a derivative)?

I imagine Zippy from Rainbow saying the following...

"Oh yes, ahem, because you see, I can run all the same apps that you can but my OS is much better"


Yes, you complete nerd, your OS is technically quite clever but grief, you're running an emulation layer just to get Windows compatability and you're stood there telling me how it's a good idea. Are you mad?!

Have you even seen some of the X windowing code? Or read how it's implemented? Efficient certainly isn't a word used to describe it. Sure, there's new stuff on the way to replace it. Give it a year and it will be mature.

I'm not knocking Linux. I would love nothing more than to see it transform itself into the computing platform of choice. I like the idea of it and I like the Linux community spirit and I like how you can choose a Linux distro for just about every job.

Enough ranting. I'm off to cook dinner.

That's funny. Especially consideing a good percentage of my windows applications won't actually run on XP without a) running with Administrator privelieges and/or b) running with compatibility mode enabled (this includes Blitz3D and anything created with it).

So before you rant about how stupid Linux users are for using compatibility layers, take a look at Microsoft. Not only don't they manage it well, but they have access to the API source code and so should (if they cared enough about their consumers) be able to bloody well fix it.

There is a guy in my class who, using an archaic PowerBook and DOSbox, runs old games better than my brand new laptop with WinXP, so I wouldn't laugh too hard at people running emulation software - particularly since it runs a lot faster than Microsofts native code.

Sorry, I'm not trying to bash Linux users too much but I was just trying to get a perspective on things.

I don't know why you have issues with running programs in XP. Fair enough if you're trying to get some really old things working, I can imagine that takes a bit of finessing. So far (touch wood) I've not had to do anything with the Program Compatability Wizard. Everything I've tried to run, runs.

There have been some old Blitz exe's I downloaded which MAV'd on loading. You can't go saying it's Windows fault, it's not, it's Blitz's or the original coder's fault (depending on your point of view). The fact that you see the MAV error means that XP is actually doing its job of protecting itself (and therefore you) against defective programs.

You also mention admin privileges. Again, I can't see that we can blame Windows for this. It's things like this that result from applications not following quite reasonable guidelines about how they allocate and use system resources. It is the same now as it was when DOS 5 was king. When updating DOS, Microsoft had to allow for broken apps. There was a classic one where a number of apps accessed files after freeing the file handle. Due to a quirk, this actually did work under previous DOS versions, so Microsoft had to continue to allow such bugged code to run perfectly. It was either that, or popular apps would fail to run and all the users would blame Microsoft for breaking things.

I don't understand your reference to Microsoft and API's. Microsoft changed a lot of API's in order to fix inherant design problems etc. You cannot expect old stuff to just continue to work. Just like you can't run the same program on two different flavours of Linux (or worse, the application works except for one aspect which you don't find out about until 5 minutes before deadline (as a rough example - pure conjecture based on no facts whatsoever ;) ).

Like I said, I don't like things about Windows, but I've tried and tested a number of OS's and unfortunately, it's the best of the bunch for what I want to use my PC for.

Playing the odd game (without mouse acceleration), Word/Excel/OneNote (mostly Excel and OneNote), Blitz, downloading 10GiB+ files from usenet, playing HDTV films at 1920x1080 with a virtual-speaker audio setting that makes things sound nice with my headphones, playing APE files, Printing custom DVD covers and discs (Canon i865 direct to disc printing) and lastly, dabbling with Reason with my Evolution MK-225C keyboard/controller connected via USB.

**EDIT**

I know of Linux alternatives for pretty much all of the above tasks. I'm sure some are even superior in functionality, features or speed. The thing is though, it's a real PITA to get everything up and running. I'd rather not have all the million and one options installed when I put Linux on my PC, but then you have problems with dependancies. Then there's the niggling things like not being able to completely disable mouse acceleration (I don't tolerate it on my PC, it really is my nemesis).

Honestly, if someone can come round to my house and sort my PC out with Linux so that I can do all the abovementioned tasks, I will be a happy man. It's just not a simple or rewarding enough process for me to want to spend the day or two doing it myself.

I recently switched back to MS Office from OpenOffice. OpenOffice was nice. I liked the interface, the ethos, the whole package. It just wasn't MS Office though. RAM usage was mad, loading times poor. I know this is unavoidable, being Java based, but you can't just say "it's OK, it's because of Java" and ignore the fact that the slow loading and high RAM usage is happening. I use MS Office at work as well, switching between the two did cause me a few problems (press Del in Calc and you'll see what I mean).

If I went to Linux, OpenOffice is really the only viable Office-type environment which means the RAM usage and loading times problem comes back. On reflection though, I think I would probably suffer that, if everything else was up to par.

OpenOffice is Java?!? Man am I glad I havn't bothered checking it out yet.


In some circumstances it is also the gfx card driver's fault. =]


I fully expect stuff written for DX3 to keep working on DX9. I was assured that would be the case. I can't remember a single DX3-DX6 game I havn't had problems with.

It's not. It supports some java-based plugins, but the core program itself it not written in java, IIRC it's some flavor of C.

However, since it can run java plugins to open office, it has some kind of javaVM stuff in there. Most people will never use this, and disabling the 'java' under the Options altogether will speed up the launch time of OpenOffice 2 tremendously.

I use OpenOffice exclusively on my home computer, and haven't missed MS Office for half a second.

I installed OO without installing Java (first time). As soon as I tried to configure any part of OO, it asked me to install Java.

Except it really is Windows' fault. Advanced Text Services (ie. speech and handwritting reckognition) will break nearly every single program that doesn't have "supports TabletPC" written on the sleeve, including but not limited to everything written in Blitz3D, even things that do not use any text services. Disable "Advanced Text Services" and/or try it on a non-TabletPC Edition of WindowsXP and everything works just dandy. Now you could blame Adobe and BRL for making bad applications, or you could blame Microsoft for making same-generation OSes incompatible and inconsistent across "flavors".

Another somewhat ironic example is Windows Server 2003 and it's failure to run anything DX based, including but not limited to anything written in non-OpenGL Blitz products.

So do I, and I haven't noticed any slow load times or large memory footprints. Particularly not compared to MS Office, and as extra icing on the cake, OpenOffice templates and documents (unlike MS Office) are actually interchangable between English and Danish versions of the same bloody program.

Flame: I didn't know about the text services thing. Not having a tablet PC, it's not something I would have every come across if you hadn't mentioned it :)

I'm confused with the Win2003 thing. DX9 runs fine on Win2003. I've just run Grey Alien's Tetroid on my server machine and it worked OK. Do you mean 3D stuff doesn't work? (I haven't got anything handy to test this).

vinylpusher: maybe it's just an issue with blitz3D exes - Tetroid is a blitz+ game.

Blitz Plus still needs DX but only V1, woo.

Well, I'm not firing the server back up again to check it. It's got 6 HD's in it. You can't even imagine the noise. There needs to be a very good reason for me to want to swithc the thing on (arguing with FlameDuck does count, but only up to a point ;) ).

Umm, it's a server and server's are meant to be on all the time? ;]


Umm, don't know what you did wrong, but I used WinServer2003 as a gaming machine successfully for 6 months. Perhaps you should have turned on hardware acceleration ;] In fact the only problem I had was getting Logitech's drivers to install their crap for the extra buttons on my keyboard (which I couldn't live without).

*I* didn't do anything wrong. It works with OpenGL, and that's good enough for my customers.

Toby: The server's role got kind of downgraded when I upgraded my main PC. The server used to be an Athlon 1200 machine with 384MB of SDRAM, 1 8GiB HD (system drive) and 2x120GiB drives configured as 1x240GiB JBOD volume.

I used to dump large downloads on it and run eMule on it to save having my main PC on all the time (an AthlonXP 1900).

When I upgraded my main PC, it became obvious that

1) It was far quieter.
2) It used less power than with the Athlon 1200 server machine or the old 1900.
3) 300GB of HD space is great.

So, the Athlon 1200 got ripped out of the server and in went the 1900 plus as many HD's as I could cram in there (I had 4x40GiB drives in my main PC, replaced with 1x300GiB). It's now got somewhere just under 360GiB of storage in the server and occasionally I do dump large files on it.

My main PC does everything now, because it's so quiet and draws so little juice I don't mind it running 24x7. If I could locate the server somewhere else, I would have that running 24x7 too but I live in a 1 bedroom flat and the only place I could put it out of earshot is the kitchen. Not the best environment for a PC ;)

So vinylpusher: did you like Tetroid? Any sound on your server (seems unlikely)?

Sure Grey, it was OK.

No sound though (shucks). You checked out my Tetris theme?

Shame no sound as the sound effects make it better + you've got my cheesy music to boot! I actually made sure it didn't crash on PCs with no sound as normally in Blitz if you load a sound on a PC with no soundcard and play it, you get a crash.

hey I really like your ogg + it loops, it's not uh royalty free is it btw, as it would go well on my Tetroid title page? ;-)

I can't claim copyright on it because it's not an original work. It was a midi file from the NES version of Tetris. I just imported into Reason and found the sound I liked, added some echo, chorus and unison, ran it through a mastering unit and voila!

Download the WAV or APE (losslessly squished with Monkey's Audio) for better quality. I use DBPowerAmp to do all my converting/encoding.

Just beware that Nintendo might not be 100% happy about the tune being used. We all know what the big N are like when it comes to protecting their IP.

Thanks for the info, I'll leave it, nice tune tho'

First, you need to upgrade your whole PC just to get it running on decent speed becose of Vista's bloated GFX effects (who the hell needs them? MS needed to put them only so stupid average American Joes sees something new). Then, all the games and OpenGL apps will be slow. Plus, you need new MS certified LCD display to get HD quality movies. Plus you have bunch of brand new bugs.. Linux for me after XP.

They can't claim copyright either since it's actually an old russian folk song called Korobeiniki. If they have any problem with it, it would be with the game.

ah well in that case, I might well use it if that's OK with you VinylPusher (are u a DJ by the way?)

Use it by all means. If you can see your way clear to including a mention of me in the program or docs for Tetroid, I wouldn't mind at all (real name, not nickname).

I used to be a bedroom DJ, but when I had to move into this flat, I had to sell my decks and mixer to pay rent :( Still got all my vinyl though :D

One day I'll be rich again and I'll have better decks and mixer.

If I get round to using it, I'll credit you of course.

Thanks dood.

Any chance of getting this thread back on topic? nah, ok then :)

For the man with the irritating GIF head, as a Linux user I will explain.

I do not use Windows applications by choice. The ones I use are due to lack of availability of options, or file format restrictions.

Only Office handles Office documents properly. This is not a fault of the Open Source/Free people, but Microsoft, who are opposed to you storing your own data in a free format.

Blizzard for example have not written a Linux client for WoW. They have an OpenGL layer and a Mac port, so they should be able to handle an unsupported Linux port, but they haven't done anything about it.

There's one app that downloads streaming media files from websites. I have an afl.com.au subscription and I wanted to watch matches on my TV, so I'd "cache" them locally to play them on the XBox. I haven't found a Linux equivalent to this yet.

Ironically, in some respects, Windows emulation on Linux makes a lot of sense outside of the "we don't have a choice" reasons. You have a fast, smooth, stable kernel and environment. You can run each application in its own area so it won't trample the settings of any other app. You can run each app safe in the knowledge that you won't be at risk of any windows bugs or other MS crap causing you to be infected with some virus or spyware overtaking your system.

A few Windows games actually run better under Cedega than they do Windows. I have not been able to run MOO II under Windows without it crashing however Wine seems to manage it OK. Some games actually run faster.

Anything about dependencies on Linux is total crap. The reality is if your stuff is packaged, it'll just work. Everything upgrades smoothly and everything is managed nicely for you. Once you experience APT, you won't wanna go back to Windows.

X-Windows is poo (it has a long history that makes it so) but we bypass it for doing anything neat. So it's not really a big deal anyway.

That's the perspective of a Linux user who sometimes uses Windows emulation. And I'm not suggesting you should do it, I don't care if you wanna use Windows or Mac or whatever.

Craig: I will say it again, I like Linux. What I remain to be convinced of is its applicability to general computing. I'm not a Windows VS Linux type of guy, they each have their own uses and so long as we agree on that, we're working from the same page.

OK, so far I've only mentioned what I don't like about Linux. This isn't about me being biased in favour of Windows (anyone who knows me will testify otherwise) it's just damn laziness (couldn't be bothered to type it all out).

If I wanted a mission critical file and email server, I wouldn't be heading in Microsoft's direction in a hurry. My feet would be firmly on the Linux side of the fence, oh yes.

If I wanted to cluster a few machines together to photorealistically (with caustics etc) render my 500 trillion polygon scene, Windows 2003 would not be something you'd find installed anywhere.

There are a lot of other more trivial things that Linux beats Windows for, but let's not pretend that it's ready for mainstream. There's a lot of very clever technology in Linux and Linux applications, some of them prove that it's capable of anything (ie. Cedega, Wine) and really demonstrate how good the OS and its kernel are. Linux doesn't need clever technology, it needs clever management.

If there was one Linux distro, it would make things a lot easier on Mr Average Joe. I know, it's completly unfeasable for this to happen and it isn't what Linux is about, but this is where it becomes obvious just how different Windows and Linux are as OS's.

There are various distributions of Windows of course, they just happen to all be made by Microsoft. What this results in is a fairly common experience between their products. The desktop environment is hugely optimised and standardised and has been subject to some rigorous planned design. KDE and Gnome are capable of so much more than Windows that it's not even funny how bad Microsoft's offering fares. Nice anti-aliasing, transparency options that are actually useful, complete control of the desktop and how it is rendered. All good stuff.

I think part of the problem is a lack of standardisation. Where is the option to change my monitor refresh, on RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, Gentoo, Ubuntu? Those are just the names I can recall right now, I'm sure there are dozens of others. It seems trivial, but it's exactly this kind of thing that your average user has no patience for. I'm not an average user and it tests my patience!

How do you control mouse acceleration? All distro's I've used will let you alter mouse properties in a graphical way from the config menus, but to really get it sorted you need to drop to a console and get stuck in with a text editor.

Which leads me onto my one real pet peeve with Linux, why is Vi or Vim a standard editor? It's a brilliant editor but lord, it is not easy to learn. It is certainly not logically deductable as to how to use it when you load it.

Emacs is pretty darn great, almost an OS in its own right. How to save a file though? Ah, gotta read the docs ;)

Petty, yes, but it serves to illustrate a larger point. Linux is not as accessible as Windows for the amateur enthusiast. You can learn much of what you need to know about Windows in an hour. Learning how to use Vim can take 15 minutes alone.

If you've got the time for it, Linux will probably make you a more productive individual, but it's the initial outlay in time and energy that scares people off.

I will continue to evaluate new distributions when they come out, just to see how things are progressing. I was quite impressed with Fedora Core 4, but ran into defective documentation when I wanted to install Eclipse. By all counts, it should have been installed as per my installation options (of which there were many) but alas, no. Maybe running it under VMWare was to blame, I don't know.

I will rise up in glory, the day that Linux has more market share than Windows. Until that day, I'll sit and wait in hope, continuing to use XP and, in the fullness of time, Vista.

Of course! How silly of me. Ignore the fact you couldn't get DX working ;]

I wouldn't use linux for lack of standardisation too. Plus the limited number of commercial apps that I could use with linux, like Maya has no developer support.

Without a single flavour of linux and a bunch of standardisation I'm not surprised either. Windows does a good job despite all its shortcomings. And I've noticed a huge improvement in quality with MS products over the last 5 years. I think they do realise that they have to compete and they seem to be trying to address what people want.

Not always that easy when you can't turn around and drag 90% of computer users on a whim. Something that other OS's can do due to a small enthusiast marketshare.

We have to put up with alot of junk but so does windows, there's a back catalogue of rubbish hardware and broken drivers and backwards compatibility to keep the hordes happy.

In the short term Vista ill be have a slow pickup, but most people upgrade their systems on a fairly regular basis, and in 3 years time 80% of people will be able to run apps in vista better than they can in current OS's.

The things you are complaining about (Vi, Emacs, etc.) are not issues the typical user is going to encounter. They will stick to the GUI which will probably open your files in Kate or Gedit and you won't even know that's what they're called because they'll be called text editor.

Issues with interface are currently being worked upon. There are desktop standards available now actively being embraced by both Gnome and KDE. I know things like Screen settings and mouse acceleration are now pretty standard under Gnome (typically System->Preferences) but I can't vouch for KDE, although under Free Desktop this is likely to be the same too.

Most of the things you complain about are either being covered under the recent Free Desktop or LSB standards and are either a non-issue already or soon to be a non-issue. As for things like Vim or Emacs, honestly do you expect the average user to be editing text files in a terminal/console? Do you expect the average Windows user to open a command prompt and start browsing directories that way? Why would you criticise Linux in that manner?

Nice try - but it wasn't my computer. It was Microsoft and IBM who couldn't get DX working.

Cheeky answer: There is - Debian.
Proper answer: There's not supposed to only be one Linux distro. That's the whole point. You choose the one which suits your needs best, in the particular situation.

Exactly. One is a scaleable, flexible solution that you can tailor to your own needs - the other is a one-size-fits-all solution. The problem is that the former can become the later, but the later cannot become the former, and when someone tries, Microsoft gets all their lawyers in gear.

I have a theory on that.