Windows 7 First Impressions
Installed it earlier today.
The installation process was entirely hassle free. Literally not one single snag, crash, BIOS setting to change, or any foible or problem whatsoever. It was entirely quick and painless, and so much nice than the hideous XP installation (although to be fair the XP installer is very very old, and I can't compare it to Vistargh since I've only ever used machines on which it was already installed).
I opted to go for 64 bit. It's noticeably snappier on this machine than XP was. How much of that is down to the fact that I have had to install zero vendor crapware I can't say. Every device was detected out of the box, so I haven't had to install a single driver. I'll probably crack at some point and install the trackpad driver and possibly whatever enables the laptop-specific modifier keys (like volume and brightness) to work, since they don't at the moment. It's lovely to use a machine that actually feels new and doesn't grind, groan and complain doing the simplest things like moving bloody windows around.
In terms of the interface ... well, the window decorations are awful. I really hate them, and it seems you can't change them, except by turning Aero off, in which can you get an approximate facsimile of the "classic" windows window decorations, except they're all wrong and still look crap, and if you do that you lose things like the pop-up preview of each running app in the task bar. Speaking of the task bar - it's almost identical, visually, to the taskbar from KDE. And it's less useful. I'm not yet sold on the idea of "pinning" applications, but maybe I haven't had a chance to experience how it's supposed to work yet.
The standard compositing window manager tricks are present and correct. Ability to make windows transparent to show the desktop - well, since I have no widgets on it yet, that's useless to me, but that's probably my issue. Pretty alt-tab switching. Yes, that's lovely too. What seems to be lacking is a "present windows" option - have all the open windows scaled down and tiled along the desktop allowing you to chose which one you want. Now that's something that would actually be useful.
What's I'm LOVING, however, are all the shortcuts and hotkeys that have been added. Drag a window to the top, and it's maximised. Drag it off, and it is restored to its previous size. Very useful. Drag a window to the left, and it's maximised across half the screen, same for the right. This means if you want to work on two documents at once, drag one to the left and one to the right and they're automagically arranged in a convenient side-by-side view. I like that a lot. There are hotkeys for each of these actions, and loads more. For those of us that don't like taking out hands off the keyboard, this makes a big big difference. Also makes the Windows key a lot less redundant. Now if they could only find a use for it's idiot sibling, the utterly stupid context-menu key.
I think that covers about everything that I've had a chance to play with thusfar.
In summary, I really hate the way it looks. Really, really hate it. And the sound scheme makes me want to vomit up my internal organs so that I can stick them in my ears, and never have to hear that irritatingly chirpy "ba bing!" noise ever again. I thought I'd want to ditch it and run screaming back to the loving arms of Linux ... BUT ... I really can't deny how well it runs on this machine, and the new window management bits they've added are already proving useful to me. So, so far, I'm sticking with it.
The installation process was entirely hassle free. Literally not one single snag, crash, BIOS setting to change, or any foible or problem whatsoever. It was entirely quick and painless, and so much nice than the hideous XP installation (although to be fair the XP installer is very very old, and I can't compare it to Vistargh since I've only ever used machines on which it was already installed).
I opted to go for 64 bit. It's noticeably snappier on this machine than XP was. How much of that is down to the fact that I have had to install zero vendor crapware I can't say. Every device was detected out of the box, so I haven't had to install a single driver. I'll probably crack at some point and install the trackpad driver and possibly whatever enables the laptop-specific modifier keys (like volume and brightness) to work, since they don't at the moment. It's lovely to use a machine that actually feels new and doesn't grind, groan and complain doing the simplest things like moving bloody windows around.
In terms of the interface ... well, the window decorations are awful. I really hate them, and it seems you can't change them, except by turning Aero off, in which can you get an approximate facsimile of the "classic" windows window decorations, except they're all wrong and still look crap, and if you do that you lose things like the pop-up preview of each running app in the task bar. Speaking of the task bar - it's almost identical, visually, to the taskbar from KDE. And it's less useful. I'm not yet sold on the idea of "pinning" applications, but maybe I haven't had a chance to experience how it's supposed to work yet.
The standard compositing window manager tricks are present and correct. Ability to make windows transparent to show the desktop - well, since I have no widgets on it yet, that's useless to me, but that's probably my issue. Pretty alt-tab switching. Yes, that's lovely too. What seems to be lacking is a "present windows" option - have all the open windows scaled down and tiled along the desktop allowing you to chose which one you want. Now that's something that would actually be useful.
What's I'm LOVING, however, are all the shortcuts and hotkeys that have been added. Drag a window to the top, and it's maximised. Drag it off, and it is restored to its previous size. Very useful. Drag a window to the left, and it's maximised across half the screen, same for the right. This means if you want to work on two documents at once, drag one to the left and one to the right and they're automagically arranged in a convenient side-by-side view. I like that a lot. There are hotkeys for each of these actions, and loads more. For those of us that don't like taking out hands off the keyboard, this makes a big big difference. Also makes the Windows key a lot less redundant. Now if they could only find a use for it's idiot sibling, the utterly stupid context-menu key.
I think that covers about everything that I've had a chance to play with thusfar.
In summary, I really hate the way it looks. Really, really hate it. And the sound scheme makes me want to vomit up my internal organs so that I can stick them in my ears, and never have to hear that irritatingly chirpy "ba bing!" noise ever again. I thought I'd want to ditch it and run screaming back to the loving arms of Linux ... BUT ... I really can't deny how well it runs on this machine, and the new window management bits they've added are already proving useful to me. So, so far, I'm sticking with it.