Microsoft meets Gartner and makes agreements about Windows Vista ahead of the launch

Microsoft is frightened. Even Ballmer is telling users that they can skip Vista, which tells you everything you need to know about Vista's failure.

I thought it would be interesting for the open source crowd to get my initial reaction to my explorations with Windows Vista. You know, see how (or if) it stands up to Linux. It was a hard pill to swallow for me. It might be a equally as hard for you. Let’s find out. Shall we?

The much-hyped "year of the Linux desktop" may still not be with us but there’s no doubting the free open-source operating system has gained significant traction in the last year. One reason for this is, with equal certainty, the mess that is Windows Vista. Here's how it's actively driving new interest in Linux.

I’ve started my simulated migration from Linux to Vista already, starting my dog food challenge two days early, I will go over my findings so far, sometimes making the assumptions a new Windows user would, and mostly from the perspective of a Linux “switcher”, with a dose of sarcasm.

A few days ago i published a short article describing how Windows Vista would accept incorrect passwords at the login screen. Now, as if God/Microsoft her/himself had intervened, my Vista connected to the network, installed some unspecified update, and the password problem is solved. The weird thing is - Vista refuses to connect to my WLAN, so it shouldn't have been able to get any updates.

Windows Vista will accept incorrect passwords, at least on system s set up to use multiple keyboard layouts. It's probably "a convenience to the user", but it seems odd that they would add such a convenience, and then continually bombard the user with inconvenient "are you sure YOU clicked that .exe file?" dialogs.

In a setback for the City of Vienna's three-year-old open-source migration programme, city authorities decided on Wednesday to scrap most of the systems that have so far adopted the city's custom-built Linux distribution, instead approving an €8m migration to Windows Vista.