@blakeyrat said:
This type of person, if using Windows, would prefer XP over Vista or Windows 7, because it has less new stuff in it. They default to "looking pretty", and some native apps (like Paint) don't even let you turn the "prettiness" off. Vista and Windows 7 have more aggressive disk caching, and thus to the Linux user "uses more memory".
Actually, Windows 7 uses almost 750MB more physical RAM than XP on the same machine here. Both are running 32-bit, and I'm talking about purely physical memory, not including disk caching the less-used memory. This is from a fresh install of XP SP3 and 7 SP1, both with and without installing the 3rd-party video drivers. In fact, I consider it a miracle if I can get W7 to run at less than 1GB of RAM without anything opened, after trimming down unneeded services and startup items. Considering 64-bit support is still terrible, though better than XP, having a full quarter of my maximum possible RAM used up by the operating system is outrageous. I pity anyone who needs to do CAD or high-level modelling and is stuck using windows 7, because it's going to be a slow experience with all the disk caching it needs to do.
On the subject of Linux, most linux distributions use disk-caching of memory by default. It's generally good practice to disable this for laptops though, considering running the hard drive is really bad for battery life.
As someone who tends to use a lot of memory-intensive programs, XP or Linux are my platform of choice just because it's impossible for Windows 7, with its' base usage of 1GB of physical RAM, to offer any sort of acceptable performance. I'm also against the "ribbon interface" not because it's new, but because it effectively hides all the advanced tools I tend to use and is generally implemented poorly, or when using most default windows themes, the text on the ribbon is hard to read. It took me 2 minutes to find the Page Break when I first started using Word 2010 (up from 2003) because I didn't know the icon and the text was impossible to read. It's not a usability improvement if it hinders usability instead of helping it.
Compare to Linux, where I run gentoo, compile my own kernel, and tend to use the latest beta builds just because I know either:
- They aren't going to fuck up the interface.
- If they do fuck up the interface, I can always revert to an older version, which is difficult if not impossible to do with most software in Windows.
- I can change what windowing environment I use (KDE, Gnome, etc) and customize it highly, compared to "oh I can change the color and position of the task bar, and the colors and fonts" in windows.