I’ve been playing with Vista for a few days now and for this installment of my Vista vs Linux examination I’ve chosen to write about the features that struck me as most interesting. I then compared them to Linux equivalents, if any exist. Is there anything that Linux can learn from Vista?

My examination looks at the features that leaped out at me. This is fundamentally an end-user examination and isn’t too concerned with underlying technologies.

Desktop eye candy

As computer users we’re entering the Age of Eye Candy. Boring old rectangular windows and block colors just don’t cut it any more. Today’s user demands shadows and glossy special effects.

Mac OS X users have had this for years, of course. Icons have zoomed in and out, and windows have shrunk into the taskbar like a cartoon.

This is known technically as a composite desktop. What you see on screen is composited within the graphics card memory, allowing the use of specific 3D functionality, and then transfered to the screen.

Is eye candy a necessary feature? Well, I often compare operating systems to automobiles. In the case of eye candy, the analogy is that of power steering. Power steering is not essential. Cars work fine without it. But power steering makes driving a car more pleasant.

That’s how I feel about eye candy. It makes using a computer a nicer experience.

Vista employs “Aero” technology to give the whole user interface a new look. Windows have shadows and pop into/out of view with a cool fade effect. When they minimize they literally shrink to the taskbar. A unique feature of Vista is that the titlebars of windows are translucent. You can see through them, as if looking through clouded glass.

Linux has its own eye candy projects in the form of Compiz/Beryl, AIGLX, and KDE4 (and, to a lesser extent, the Enlightenment project). Arguably, none are yet ready for production systems although all are under furious development. I’ve played around extensively with Compiz and it can match Vista’s effects blow-for-blow. It even includes quite a few effects that Vista hasn’t got, and because development is on-going this is likely to remain the case.

But eye candy on Linux has an Achilles heel. As mentioned, composite desktops make use of advanced graphics card features, and the required functionality is only available via proprietary drivers (although AIGLX has support for some ATI and Intel cards). This is a stalemate situation—it’s very unlikely ATI and Nvidia will release open source driver modules, and the gargantuan work of reverse engineering 3D cards is unlikely to be achieved soon.

Compiz is available for users of some distros as part of the base package list, including Ubuntu 6.06, SUSE Linux and openSUSE 10.1. Because of the problems with graphics drivers, getting it to work can be something of a pain and it isn’t yet seamlessly integrated.

Security

Vista is big on security features, as you might expect considering the appalling state of Windows XP security until recently. Let’s not forget that, at one point, you would become infected by a worm within minutes of putting an unprotected XP computer online.

New to XP is Windows Defender, which guards against malware. The Firewall isn’t too different from that which arrived for XP during the SP2 upgrade, and Windows Security Centre is also still present (and still nags you if you don’t have a complete armory of defensive software).

One curious new feature is User Account Control (UAC). As with Windows XP, the first user on the system is automatically an administrator. However, the UAC system pops up a confirmation dialog box whenever you do something that might affect the system, such as run an executable you’ve downloaded, or attempt to delete a driver. No password is needed—the user simply clicks Continue or Cancel.

The nearest analog to this is the root/sudo password box within Linux that appears whenever you try to run a GUI-based system configuration tool. An almost identical system is employed within Apple OS X.

My concern about the Vista UAC system is that an attacker could install a program that automatically clicks the Continue button on the UAC dialog. All the viewer will see is a quick blip on the screen. At least with a sudo/root password box, something more than clicking a button is needed for authorization.

Vista offers a way around this but it requires manual intervention on behalf of the user. Simply create a standard user account straight after setup. This will then require the password of an administrator user before you can do anything drastic.

But the fact remains you’re made to run in an administrator account by default, with there’s then nothing between you and potentially system-destroying actions except a Continue button. Not good.

Sidebar

For some time users of Macintosh OS 10.4 have had a feature called Dashboard. This is a curious desktop-upon-a-desktop that contains widgets—small programs offering simple functionality. Some display a calendar, for example, while others might display a calculator. Some are quite advanced and display the likes of airline flight tracking information.

The new Vista Sidebar feature steals this functionality and brings it to the Windows desktop, although to be fair, Apple itself stole the idea from Konfabulator, which is now owned by Yahoo!. Vista offers similar kinds of widgets, except they can live anywhere on the desktop. The Sidebar itself is a thin panel on the side of the screen where they live by default.

Linux has a couple of similar projects. KDE4 will feature widgets and is even compatible with some of OS X’s Dashboard widgets. The GDesklets project aims for similar functionality too, although is currently at version 0.35.3, and is still under heavy development.

No distro currently features any kind of desktop widget functionality out of the box, and the signs are that this won’t happen for some time. This is a shame because widgets are genuinely useful things to have around.

It would be great to see the GNOME guys working on something similar. We definitely shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that desktop widgets are frivolous home-user toys. They have a handful of genuine business uses too.

Conclusion

All in all the Linux desktop is matching Vista blow-for-blow. Some components aren’t quite as fully developed as Vista, while other elements have been around since day one, such as root/sudo authentication.

After playing with Vista for a few days I’ve got to say that it’s a pretty neat OS. Put it this way—if you showed me a Linux distro with the same of functionality then I’d award it full marks.

There’s only one thing that Linux can learn from Vista: Polish. Vista looks and feels smooth. This inspires confidence in the user. Switching back to using KDE and GNOME after using Vista was profound. Both now looked flat and lifeless. Even worse, both look worryingly primitive.

Let’s be honest—the desktop experience today is not that different from the way it was back when the WIMP GUI was introduced with the Apple Mac back in 1984. Vista (and OS X before it) moves the desktop experience forward.

Just as all car makers had little choice but to introduce power steering once their competitors did so, Linux on the desktop now has to match Vista in terms of user-experience. The distro companies need to raise their game. The technology is out there so hopefully this challenge will be addressed soon.