BetaONE will rise again! - Longhorn 4008 Mini-review

Well, I finally got around to installing Longhorn build 4008 on my laptop, and have decided to write a mini review. Rather than writing a full review of each possible screen, I will concentrate on changes from previous versions of windows.

Installation
Behind the scenes a lot of changes have happened to the setup program.
* Rather than having all files in one folder (i386) there is now a directory dtructure in 'boot' which resembles the structure of the system once installed.
* Rather than having a text-mode preinstall upon booting the cd which then spawns a graphical setup, the entire Longhorn M4 setup is graphical. This seems to be based on Windows XP PE (preinstall edition).

The changes look very promising, although the GUI is clearly unfinished and seemingly rushed;
* In many places the wording is quite unproffesional
* You are informed you will be informed when you can "just walk away" and "setup will complete on its own". While setup requires little user interaction, you are not informed when your input is no longer required.
* There is a nice treeview for selecting the installation partition, but your options are quite limited. In XP you can select Fat32/NTFS, FULL/QUICK format. In LH M4 the only option you have is a checkbox - "Format this partition (NTFS)".
* The layout will need more work. Currently everything is centered, giving a kind of pyramid look. The previous setup style with several 'panels' proving information looked more visually pleasing.

I am sure the little flaws will be ironed out sooner or later, but one thing is for sure, a lot of work has gone into improving the setup wizard which until now had remained largely unchanged ever since windows 2000.

Visual and Features
When longhorn M4 first starts, you are greeted with a much nicer screen than in Longhorn M3. In M3 there were a lot of visual imperfections and the plex theme looked worse than the luna theme on many windows. Now these imperfections have been ironed out and longhorn looks truly beuitiful as far as visuals are concerned.

The sidebar, in additional to being much nicer visually, now has a few essential features that were missing in M3. Namely, there is a tray icon tile, so you do not lose access to trayed programs when using the sidebar in place of the taskbar.

Glitches, Speed, Stability
I tested M4 on modest hardware - a laptop with a 600Mhz P3 and 128MB of RAM. Longhorn ran SIGNIFICANTLY slower than .NET (which I was running previously). Even with the WinFS service disabled, the system runs painfuly slow.

After altering the screen resolution the sidebar seemed currupted. Hiding and then reenabling it made the sidebar completly invisible.

Stability is difficult to comment on because I have only been running LH for a short time so far. Till now I have not had a single crash or even error message.

Rant on WinFS's implementation
A lot of effort seems to be going into WinFS. The idea behind it seems brilliant - store files in an SQL like database so you can search for files, run queries, and receive results in a fraction of a second rather than having to wait for the computer to scan through each folder and take several minutes to search through the entire drive. Unfortunatly if the implementation in M4 is anything to go by, MS are going in completly the wrong direction. The new search panel prompts the user to enter a search string "Example: 'Pictures from John' or 'What is a firewall?'". It can search both the local files and internet resources (currently unfunctional - a search for "windows" yeilded 0 results). This seems very newbie-oriented. Computers are usless at interpreting natural language queries. They should do what they are good at - fast indexing by filenames and keywords in the files contents. Also, searching a local filesystem for a jpeg and searching the internet are two entirely different activities. Combining them into a single search seems to make no sense and will just confuse advanced users.

The current search system in XP is good enough as far as the interface is concerned (at least after you kill the faqing dog - again classic newbie-oriented bloat). You can search by filename, modified/created date, and a files contents. It is layed out in a perfectly logical way, and you know exactly what you are asking the computer to do. If only this was based on SQL and queries lasted under a second it would be perfect. Why replace this clean, logical interface with a textbox that claims to supposedly understand plain english questions and automatically decide for you if you are looking for an email message, file, internet document, or application. Pointless artificial intelligence which will be far from perfect. I think ill stick with 'grep' and 'ls -R' - they do everthing I need them to.

Longhorn looks promising in some ways. If developed correctly, it could have the capability to compete with unix or bsd-based platforms. Unfortunatly early indications show that Microsoft is fighting for the market by making Longhorn appeal to novice and inexperienced users, rather than fighting for technological superiority. Technologies like WinFS should be exploted to their full potential and the emphasis should be on functionality and not excessive ease of use. Microsoft should not give in to pressure from coorporations to implement destructive technologies such as palladium. Appealing to newbies is a short-term solution that will inevitably backfire if power users and developers become tempted to move away.

Update 3/3/03
I mentioned that longhorn ran unbarably slow. After playing around with it for longer, I discovered that its only slow for a few minutes after startup (presumably its still loading services). After its fully started it is actually surprisingly fast and stable.