Windows 7 Released, Scrutinized

Gizmodo has had a laid back look at the new OS:

The Verdict
Windows XP was a great OS in its day. Windows Vista, once it found its feet several months in, was a good OS. With Windows 7, the OS is great again. It's what people said they wanted out of Windows: Solid, more nimble and the easiest, prettiest Windows yet.

OK... Let me see if I got that one right? XP was great back in it's day... Huh?!? People do have short memory.
If I recall correctly, I tried it when it got out, dual booting with Windows 98, found too many problems and got back to Win98SE for a whole year before XP got anywhere close to a "replacement". No change in hardware in between mind you. Was I the only one? I doubt it.
Even after that, I went looking for a WinXP replacement - it was still bug ridden. I settled with the more mature Windows 2000 SP4 for a couple of years, until Linux finally took a hold of my life. WinXP is now a good OS but I wouldn't say it was good when it launched and not even after XP 2 in 2004. I'd say somewhere around 2005, it was probably where most bugs were ironed out.

But Linux has a greater appeal, it lets me switch hardware with little hassle(Windows is improving) and is very low on memory usage:


That's my home server, running KDE+Apache+MySQL+Samba+SSH server. On 70MiB of RAM. The SWAP usage is reminiscent of a previous usage of BitTorrent and compilers, as this is a system where uptime is measured in months - it is mostly buffered data, like in the 4xx MiB usage, the actual unallocatable memory is the shown one.
You can easily get away with a more common desktop for under 200MiB, although mainstream Linux distros are getting kind of fat lately, they're still quite lean.
There are the issues with hardware (mostly vendor's fault) which are being constantly improved, but it's a free system, virus and malware free.

Microsoft surely seems to have improved the OS and I will try it sooner or later, although I will sit out any pre-SP usage in favor of Windows 2008, that I currently visit once in a while, or the XP in VirtualBox. I really don't like the bleeding edge, it's not a very sensible place to be very often.

If you can't upgrade from XP effortlessly, why not try another OS? Ubuntu is becoming more usable everyday but do stick to LTS releases if your hardware doesn't require the cutting edge 9.10 Beta. Just remember, be it Linux or Mac OS X, you won't learn another system in two weeks, just as you didn't when you first used Windows. I'm with Apple on this one: