Chris WiegmanWell, I know I said I wouldn’t even bother trying it, however the allure of “new” was just too much to pass up and as a result I’ve been running 7 in my office since it came out to Enterprise customers in August. As of this point (about 7 weeks in) all I can say is I’m just waiting for Ubuntu 9.10 to be released in a couple of weeks so that I may switch back.
Here are the highlights of my experience so far:
Boot time is about the same as Vista, when attached to the company domain we are still often seeing boot times of 5 minutes or longer (from power on to being able to launch an application).
Disk IO is still horrible. In fact, many simple file operations (copy,delete,move,etc) often take longer than they did under Vista. This is a problem I’ve have a number of users report regardless of hard drive, etc. In addition, the reliance on a formal defragment procedure on a modern file system is archaic compared to other systems such as EXT3/4, HFS, etc.
Software maintenance is still a nightmare as upgrades of many 3rd party apps continue to expose the weaknesses in the Windows registry.
While hardware support seems to have finally caught up to the newer kernel (the 7 kernel is virtually unchanged from Vista) it still cannot produce consistent performance on even multiple uses of the same device.
Applications, especially Java, are still painful compared to any other system I’ve used in the last couple of years. The launch time of application such as Netbeans and Eclipse can be measured in minutes rather than seconds.
The list can go on, but in a nutshell 7 is still a sub-par OS who’s only redeeming quality is the widespread adoption which allows for the most comprehensive library of available software. Even that quality is fading however as both open-source applications and the growth of Linux and Mac are making development for systems other than Windows much more compelling (I haven’t even installed a Windows VM on my Mac since Snow Leopard as I just do not need it anymore).