The Apple press release from last June includes:

… Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. …

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

Although QA people love this attention to what we are passionate about, conventional wisdom in the software world is that a major release with few new features is suicide, but there are factors working in Apple’s favor.

I don’t find the current version (no snow) Leopard v10.5 to be unstable or buggy, but I know other people have problems with it. There are a lot of user interface (UI) inconsistencies in Leopard among the various Apple applications. I’m interested to see if Snow Leopard sports a more consistent and usable experience.

Apple is selling this upgrade for only $29 US, when their major releases normally sell for $129 US. At $29 Apple customers won’t be looking for much to think they have got a good deal.

Apple’s main competitor Microsoft has created this opportunity. Microsoft Windows costs close to $300. And although Mac OS X only runs on Apple hardware, people’s frustration with Vista’s bugginess and instability has led people to specifically look for a computing experience that address this.

People are hopeful for Windows 7, but it won’t be available until at least a month after Snow Leopard ships. We can expect Windows 7 to have a lot of customer untested technology compared to Mac OS X which looks to be is a very incremental release.

Performance (and polish) is a feature. “Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this.”, my boss Matt Mullenweg, Velocity 09 Conference Presentation.

Because Apple builds both the software and the hardware, they can release their next generation of computers to immediately take advantage of the upgraded 64-bit stack, OpenCL for graphic card processing, and GCD multi-core processing throughout Mac OS X.

If Snow Leopard is well executed and well received, it will help people be more confident on computers and expect more from their software. It will be a good day for QA geeks.

Far from taking the path of least resistance, I’m an ultra tech geek running each of Ubuntu Linux, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X every day, but still I’ve been feeling like I’ve been having my own Maximum Overdrive on a number of fronts, and I’m very happy that another week is over.

Sure, my tank is regularly at half empty because we have the little guy (I’m working on better fuel), and that is part of it, but it has felt like the machine has been winning.

Well, this is my declaration to you, the machine, that starting now, I’m back on top. You aren’t getting the better of me!

Photo from bricolage.108.

My first disappointment is the timing of the article. September 27th Ubuntu will have a beta release of their next version with Ubuntu 7.10 scheduled for release October 18th.

I don’t think you would write an article about the experience of Windows XP a month before Windows Vista, nor Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) now with Leopard… somewhere in our future.

My next disappointment is you leaning on the term user: mainstream, nontechie users; average users; vast majority of computer users; average Ubuntu users, and mainstream, nontechnical users. You used the term 10 times in the article (+1 quoting Dell), and I think excessively.

Couldn’t you just write that you don’t think Linux is ready for most people. Oh, that is pretty much how the title of the article reads, but that message is lost in the article — likely because the article is largely you asking the Linux zealots not to come after you.

To most people I recommend Mac OS X, because I think that’s pragmatic, but I would definitely recommend Ubuntu over Vista to most people, also for pragmatic reasons. I use Vista everyday on a Dell Dimension E520 that it came pre-installed on. It may someday soon be the best Windows yet Walt, but as I told Don Dodge “It will be, but not likely until a couple of service packs from now.”

“People are having variety in their experiences with Windows Vista.” Zipkin, what does that mean?

How is this for a variety in my experience, I tried to delete a small file on the desktop and that was flushing much too long, so I tried to cancel and that hung:

Trying to force that to quit in Task Manager caused Windows to shutdown.

Internet Explorer 7 regularly crashes and unlike Firefox it doesn’t save any of the tabs and windows I had open, nor more importantly any of the content I was editing in those tabs.

On two occasions IE7 has started opening the same window over and over again until I had to shutdown the computer, and I definitely wasn’t on a malware site.

Are the very regular updates requiring reboots making it better? A little I think.

About those updates, who do I have to thank for the experience that has trained me to put the computer to sleep:

and then when there is an update required:

That is a great help in losing work as I quickly go to shutdown the computer when I’m running out the door, or exhausted and off to bed. No warning, just closes all of the applications and shuts down.

Do I have to wait for a first “service pack”? We’ll be waiting a long while yet. “Microsoft finally came clean yesterday and said it will release Windows Vista SP1 in the first quarter of 2008.”

Notice how no one is claiming any more that Windows is the best operating system. As Windows plays catch up, there is a lot of opportunity for Linux and Mac OS!

Walt, I notice that the problems you describe are all getting Ubuntu setup. That’s the next reason I’m disappointment with the article, though it mimics my own experience with Vista on this Dell computer.

My description of problems with Vista are all ongoing problems, and the problems I have had setting up Vista far exceed the ones I have setting up the current Ubuntu 7.04 or the ones you describe in your article.

The best part of Ubuntu is that once you set it up, you won’t ever have to worry about it again and you will automatically be kept update to date with the latest security and features. In the other hand, setup is Ubuntu’s achilles.

All of the problems you describing having are issues that need to be addressed.

Did you try solving the problems? Are you going to give Ubuntu a real chance and use it for two weeks? (That is what Steve Jobs asked for with the iPhone on screen keyboard, and that was a very minor change compared to a whole OS.) You can at least give it that, or are you going to assume that it will leave you wading through online forums or finding complex workarounds?

You will actually find solutions in plain English to all of your problems and assistance from a diverse and talented community for free.

But it isn’t really free is it? Everything has a cost, to someone.

My last disappointment is with your assertion:

But open source is a two-edged sword. While it draws on smart developers from many places, nobody is ultimately responsible for the quality of the product, and open-source developers often have an imperfect feel for how average people use software. A European company called Canonical is the “commercial sponsor” of Ubuntu and provides support. But it’s largely focused on corporate and techie users. Average Ubuntu users are likely to have to wade through online forums, often written in technical language, to get help.

There are real people ultimately responsible for the quality Ubuntu and many open source products.

Your article unfortunately reinforces the fear that there is no accountability available when choosing open source products. Your research should have found that open source products are often backed by companies that have commercial motivation in the success of the products, and offer equivalent support and customization as any company selling propriety products. ie there is professional quality open source software without the lock in.

The irony is I don’t know any “mainstream, nontechie users” that have ever directly received support from Microsoft, and those people have already paid Microsoft hundreds of dollars for the product.

I think for most people Ubuntu will have a smaller cost than Vista.

It is also the acronym for the stack of software that WordPress runs on where the W is for Windows not WordPress. Windows
Apache
MySQL
PHP

Wow, there are a lot of ways to install it.

WAMP is the awkward cousin of LAMP where the L is for Linux.

LAMP is what much of the web is built on, and the acronym is all to familiar to a web developer’s ear. There are other popular web “stacks”, but WordPress was written in PHP using this stack because it is ubiquitous/everywhere/available on every host.

PHP isn’t a sexy programming language like Python, Ruby, or for the Microserfs .NET, but the WordPress developers have always put first what is most important: everyone being able to use WordPress, and a 5 minute install helps, a lot.

I always recommend developing in an environment as close to what your customers are using , or in the case of a web service the environment that the service will run on.

WordPress is run on a lot of LAMP like environment where the most common variations are, of course, different versions of the software. In putting the WordPress members first, WordPress developers have stayed unsexy by supporting older versions of MySQL and PHP.

Next to running on older versions, the most common variation is using litehttpd, Windows’ IIS, or LiteSpeed Web Server. Solaris for the OS seems to be an increasingly popular choice for web servers.

Environment specific bugs with WordPress are very rare, but when they do occur they have seemed to be PHP version related, or Windows IIS specific. We are very fortunate to have participants like Robert Deaton with the expertise to work around PHP related issues. We are fortunate to have contributors like “Computer Guru” of NeoSmart Technologies and Bas Bosman (nazgul) reporting all problems they find with WordPress on Windows IIS.

So there I was setting up a development environment on Windows because my Ubuntu Linux was laptop temporarily out of commission. The first part of this is installing WAMP.

There are a huge number of popular WAMP packages. Wikipedia (encyclopedia++) has a comparison page of WAMPs. Any of the popular ones that have been updated in the last six months would probably be a good choice.

When I have a choice where there seems to be no difference in functionality, I choose based on which one appears to have the strongest community or is better produced and supported. Which of those two depends on whether I’m looking for community and free, or produced and paid support. With community and free, I’m ultimately taking the risk that I will be by myself in investigating any problems.

Here community and free are a good choice, because I’m not going to need a more advanced WAMP stack with monitoring (now).

There are a huge number of popular choices, but the most popular based on reading blog posts and forums seem to be XAMPP and WAMP (now called WAMPServer). I’m surprised by how much more popular XAMPP is given that WAMP has the generic name. XAMPP seems to have few Google Search results related to “security exploit”, so the popularity isn’t likely negative because of bad security.

So that is the long story of me choosing to install XAMPP on Windows Vista.

I will probably follow up with some of my notes from installing it, but for now I leave you with my colleague Mark Riley’s still excellent Installing Xampp and WordPress or John Godley’s Installing WordPress on your own Windows computer. After you are setup on Windows (if you must) see Peter Westwood (westi)’s Windows WordPress Toolbox.

Update Sept 19th: Chris Kasten (handysolo) is writing a great series of posts the first one being Testing New WordPress Versions Part 1: XAMPP

What do you call it? Do you talk nice to it?

Here for your pleasure, super-sized (which doesn’t happen nearly enough these days) and superimposed onto the original size, the Flushing Blue Toilet Cleaner of Death!

Who has an animated version of this image? Thank johnbillion!

The toilet experience really seems to resonate with Microsoft’s team and their customers.

“Toilet paper is sold more effectively than Windows Vista, according to one member of Microsoft’s UK marketing staff, [Allister Frost]“. Allister wrote Why buying Windows Vista should be simpler than Toilet Paper. Allister, if you are reading this, I’m interested in upgrading to Vista Working Edition.

Paul Thurrott writes “Microsoft changed folders completely in Windows Vista, and all that work just got flushed down the virtual toilet.”

doctorbad writes “we will truly see if microsoft can pull vista out of the toilet” in responded to Chris Pirillo’s “Windows Vista Rocks”.

It prompted Microsoft to also update the sounds in Vista to this toilet theme as described in the responses to James Senior article Windows Vista Sounds:

Jane C writes “…the Empty Recycle Bin sound is a flushing toilet…”

Jack Sprat writes “the startup sound in vista is at best a flushing toilet, since thats the sound of your money going down the drain into Bills wallett as you fork over $299 for the Ultimate Vista experience.”

I use Windows Vista because you do! Help a friend out show them your Mac.