I was actually watching this happen, when Chris was working to install SP1 for Vista onto his machine. And while I am most definitely not a full time Windows user, I have to agree with the sentiment that beta means beta. So even though I could make a book out of the various things that drove me to Linux, Microsoft’s releases of a SP beta would simply not be one of them.

Case in point. Today, I finally upgraded my Ubuntu Edgy workstation to Feisty. Yes, I waited THAT long before trusting the update process to the new release. I also did plenty of research as to what to expect and how to handle anything unexpected should things go badly. The result? A nearly flawless upgrade to the new(er) release, once I understood how proprietary video drivers needed to be addressed BEFORE the switch.

Now to examine a failure - Gutsy Tribe 5 on my notebook. The release is fantastic; way better wireless support than seen with any previous release. But because of my “Windows’ hugging” Broadcom chipset; which conveniently is not able to be disabled at the BIOS level, I am seeing start-up errors with other cards plugged in. How do I know? Unplug the other PCMCIA wifi card that doe work, boot off CD, then plug it in - everything is dandy. Try the same with the PCMCIA wifi card already inserted - black screen goodness. After doing some testing, I was able to see the Broadcom piece of code falling on its face over and over during boot. Lesson here? I now know, on a non-production machine, I need to blacklist the Broadcom driver before going into the wireless world once I am ready for Gutsy. Now back to Chris’ situation.

Again, I honestly hear what some of his Microsoft supporting commenters are saying. After all, this is beta software we are talking about. But this does little to alleviate the sting of yet another issue with an OS that Chris has supported and built a business around for years. Some people are stating that this is no different that what we saw with XP during its initial release. Uh, folks…it’s not that new - we are looking at SP1 and if it does not resolve some of the software/hardware compatibility issues for the users, XP will become the best selling OS of 2008…

So before we label Chris as being misguided for installing a SP beta onto a production machine, understand that he was able to recover and was more miffed about more lost productivity with something that he felt should have never happened, than anything else.

Does this mean Chris will be switching to a Mac? Well as far as I am concerned, if similar bugs are experienced with too many otherwise happy Windows users out there, there will be a split between sticking with XP and then at hardware upgrade time, a possible trip to the Mac store for many users.

[tags]Apple, Linux, Windows[/tags]