Regular readers will remember quite a few posts in which Your Humble Narrator complains about this, that, or the other flaw in desktop Linux in general or an Ubuntu distribution in particular. (New visitors arriving here from tuxmachines.org can view past whines by browsing the Linux category, to your right.)
Well, I take it all back.
For the last two days I have had the dubious pleasure of working on a pair of Acer laptops, belonging to the two college-age daughters of an acquaintance. I rashly agreed to see what I could do to optimize their performance. (The laptops, not the daughters. I’d probably not be complaining otherwise.) Of course these laptops run Vista. Vista Home Premium, to be precise.
I have avoided Vista with almost complete success up until now. I still remember how to get under the hood of XP, though, and I figured, how much different can it be? And the answer turns out to be, not all that different, and very different. Depends on how you look at it.
These machines were both running dog slow with horrendous amounts of disk activity. I start with the first one out of the bag, at random, and watch it grind and grind away, disk light constantly on, CPU up, taking two minutes to open a simple Explorer window. What’s it doing? Who knows? Task Manager tells me what tasks are running, but no clue what’s using so much disk. Two guesses present themselves, both plausible: antivirus, and swap. Antivirus looks like a candidate because you can see that McAfee is looking at file after file after file, but on the other hand these are all system files or close to it, so they could be files being opened by the system as part of normal operation. Swap seems like a possibility because the system’s constantly riding up near 80% of physical memory. Why? Oh yeah, it’s Vista. Now, these are not speed demon machines, in the big picture, but they’re not antiques either; 2GHz Core Duos with 1GB RAM. With any modern Linux distro these machines would both be swimming in CPU and memory headroom, but with Vista they’re barely adequate.
Trying to free up resources on this box was an exercise in frustration. The machine was loaded with crapware, much of which starts as system tasks or tray tasks. Why do you need a tray task to launch video settings? Who uses the manufacturer hotkeys, and why do they need three (possibly four) tasks running to control them? Are QuickTime and Adobe Reader so desperately important that they need to run quick launchers as startup tasks and stay in memory? I prune out a lot of junk from the Run sections of the registry and a few more pieces of junk from the startup folder. Then I get rid of McAfee, pig that it is, in favor of AVG Free and ZoneAlarm. (This is the part where everybody chimes in to tell me to use Avast and Condor, or whatever. Please consider it said, ok?) ZoneAlarm tells me it can’t install. Why not? Because it requires Service Pack 1.
Service Pack 1?
You mean that this machine, connected to a university network with Windows Update enabled and set to automatic, has never automatically installed a service pack? Unbelievable. So I download SP1 and SP2 from Microsoft and run the SP1 installer. It tells me the process “might take an hour or more” and the machine “may have to reboot several times” to complete the update. In my head, I compare this to Ubuntu version updates, which are more complete, take less time, require one reboot, and usually let you keep working on the machine while it’s happening. In practice the SP1 update winds up taking about 90 minutes and does in fact require several reboots. So did the SP2. (And yes, you have to run them both.) At the end of it I have a system that won’t recognize that virus protection is actually running. This sends me off googling, and I eventually discover that this is the result of a problem between Windows Security Center and User Account Control. The fix is to disable UAC, reboot, enable UAC, and reboot again. All this rebooting wouldn’t be so annoying if it didn’t take So. Damn. Long. Each. Time. And the whole exercise wouldn’t be so annoying if I didn’t know that antivirus is just there slowing things down so it can plug a gaping design hole that Microsoft still hasn’t fixed after what, 20 years now? You design an OS so that any old random app can install itself into system directories and play tiddlywinks with the core files, and then your solution to the problems this brings is to run another program that’s supposed to act like a bouncer standing in the middle of a freeway trying to read license plates to see who gets to drive. And when that doesn’t go to plan, along comes User Account Control, which is kind of like the high-school dropouts who man airport security checkpoints. Or the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, except with flashy colors.
Anyway. I cleaned it up as much as possible, made some decent performance gains, but I was reminded of the old adage about not being able to polish a turd. But then I realized, that is exactly what Microsoft did. Vista is pretty, but under the skin it’s like someone took all the worst things about XP and gave them a scoop of Miracle-Gro. It’s same-old same-old but with a prettier face.
You hear these stories on the odd news blogs, about people who shoot their computers or throw them out of windows. If I had to deal with this crap all the time, I’d be wanting to shoot a computer or two myself. My complaints about Linux and Ubuntu are usually pretty specific; this one thing doesn’t work the way I want it to, or this other thing isn’t right. Discrete, pinpoint issues. Vista, by contrast, just feels systemically messy, inefficient, wasteful, undisciplined. It’s not bad in this or that specific way; it’s just generally a mess.
It frustrates me no end to know that there are people all over the world going through the same kind of useless, pointless struggle I’ve had to have with these simple consumer level laptops, trying to clean them up and optimize them manually to avoid a complete OS reinstall (another thing you generally never have to do with Linux). All that wasted time, wasted effort, frustration. Millions upon millions of hours, and it galls me that this is all done pointlessly when there is clearly a better alternative.
All this makes me glad to be a Linux user. It also makes my earlier complaints seem kind of petty and stupid. For all the minor issues I’ve had with Linux and Ubuntu, today I’m glad that I threw Windows out of my computers, instead of the other way around.