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Life­hacker is fea­tur­ing a video by Win­dows user Chris Pir­illo on his expe­ri­ence after 6 months using Vista. It’s quite in-depth (over 50 mins) and he reaches the con­clu­sion that at the moment, it is just not worth the hassle.

Life­hacker then asked its read­ers about their expe­ri­ences with Vista. The result is a mixed bag and we have to be care­ful as every­one likes a forum to bitch about stuff, but the response cer­tainly backs up the old tech adage of ‘don’t buy v1 of any­thing’. Those who’ve had good Vista expe­ri­ences are over­whelm­ingly peo­ple who either bought it pre-installed on a new machine or who did a fresh install. Upgrad­ing from XP appears to be a recipe for disaster.

Read­ing down the com­ments, the thing that struck me was how often Linux and par­tic­u­larly Ubuntu gets men­tioned. This might be a reflec­tion of the make-up of Lifehacker’s read­er­ship but it cer­tainly appears to show that Linux is finally going mainstream.

I’ve writ­ten about Ubuntu here before and have now per­suaded our IT guys to let me have a lap­top with it installed. The lap­top in ques­tion is an age­ing HP that has been thor­oughly ‘road tested’ by one of our account ser­vices team. But the OS itself and appli­ca­tions fly along quite happily.

Being a shal­low Mac user at heart, I’m eas­ily swayed by eye-candy. This has been where I’ve been dis­ap­pointed with other OSes in the past, they just look a bit too steam dri­ven. The native Ubuntu look and feel still suf­fers from this a bit but I’m now look­ing at the dif­fer­ent themes that are avail­able – and some are awfully pretty. And for the whizzy, spinny stuff, there’s Beryl as shown below:

Microsoft will cer­tainly iron out the prob­lems with Vista. They can’t afford not to. But in the mean­time you have to won­der how many addi­tional Macs and Linux machines will be sold.

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