Good article and good overview of Vista in general. I agree with many points in this article. There are others however that I believe to be more of personal taste -- things could be different, but wouldn't be objectively 'better'.

For example, I don't personally need a basic-yet-more-powerful text editor if I want to do simple text editing. Kwrite and its brothers (gedit, etc.) have a truck load of dependencies and are becoming bloater with each releases. They could learn from Notepad (but see below). Syntax highlighting and spell checking require by themselves quite some logic to be implemented -- nothing that would keep Notepad as simple as it is (though features could be added to Wordpad).

I also want to point out that saving as PNG (or a few other formats) in MS Paint is present since XP SP2 (or before?), as is saving text in UTF-8 (or Unicode or Unicode big endian) with Notepad (see the Encoding dropdown box in the Save As dialog). One thing though is that it still defaults to the older BMP format. Another very annoying thing is that Notepad still can't open Unix-encoded files properly (even though text files are opened by Notepad by default, not Wordpad -- which does handle LF-ending text files properly), which is sometimes a pain when you work in heterogeneous environment.

About the desktop interface, did anyone see the Beryl window manager for Unix? A colleague a mine showed it to me running on Linux. Haven't seen something like that anywhere else yet. Another three to four years ahead of MS.

People should also take note that buttons to quickly navigate directories were also present for some time in GTK2 and probably other toolkits as well.

On another subject, I've had some problems installing Vista too, though it was in a virtual machine for testing purposes. But it was due to the more general drivers problem that plagues Vista -- drivers are not ready or available for Vista right now and multiple issues seem to spring because of that. Probably because of the politics surrounding the approbation of drivers from Microsoft.

Looking forward to read your next articles.

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