http://www.trnicely.net/misc/vista.html Summary excerpt: Dear Microsoft: if you do not fix this, I will never upgrade to Vista, even if I can get it free.
You can't: run DOSBox for retro games, install Nero Burning ROM 7, run any old DOS games that require full screen, open help files for non-Vista-specific applications, or run any open-source software that requires more than 32 MB memory.
This is going to kill cross-platform development... if you have to link against Win32, that makes it much harder to link against, say, glibc on Linux without a bunch source-level modifications.
It's amazing how Microsoft can continually stab itself in the knee like this and still make millions of dollars per day.
How many DOS apps use more than 32MB of memory anyway? At least you can still run all those on Linux or OS X. Oh wait... I don't understand how people expect MS to tighten security and improve efficiency, then bitch every time some 15 year old software becomes unusable or limited. I looked over that site and it seems to mainly be the complaints of one guy. Not saying he is wrong, but given that CD has been able to use Nero with no problems, maybe that is the case. By the way it is important to consider what rights the applications have been granted, and more importantly, what rights/compatibility modes their install processes were granted. If these issues apply to new multiplatform software that is being developed, then it could be a serious issue. I'm still not going to be too alarmed though, after reading dozens of claims that using any java application was incompatible with Vista's Aero interface and it would be disabled as soon as the app was launched... this turns out not to be the case (altho it was the case in RC1).
BS. Nero 7 runs just fine, as do Help applications. And give me one DOS application that needs more than 32 megs of RAM.
Dear valued customer, Sorry, we do not care. Soccer moms and know-nothings are so taken in by the boxy and transparent and magic interface that we cannot be bothered to address or even care about your complaint(s). They give us much more money than you do, and until they stop, we'll do what we think is best for our wallet.
Wow.. a complete non-issue. Woot. Use an older version if this is so troublesome to you. It is not up to MS to make sure every piece of dinoware is going to work with their new OS.
That used to be their strategy... and it lead to a lot of (valid) criticism about security holes and how outdated and inefficient MS operating systems were (registry anyone?). Now they are working on patching up security and getting a more secure/smarter file structure, and the penalty is some compatibility is lost. Just like complaints about DX10 games not being able to run on anything older than DX9. First off, the people without a DX9 card are a tiny tiny minority. Second, keeping all that legacy code had huge overhead implications for new styles of rendering. The decision to drop the older cards out of the spec was a smart one.
I really don't see people who have no DX9 card being the target audience for new games. How long has DX9 been around now? 5 years or so? There is no modern game that will run on a card that old anyway so I can't understand the screams of indignation. MS just can't do it right for some people. Screw them and let them have their Linux command line if it makes them happy
Losing the ability to run programs compiled with GCC and linked against something other than Win32 is not a trivial loss of compatibility.
As I said earlier, I doubt the veracity of the page you linked to. Just from the small pool of us in this thread, there have already been two posters who attest that things that he says don't work, do in fact work. The claim that "no open source stuff that uses more than 32MB of memory will work" is definitely BS. I've been using OpenOffice & Xming with no problems. If it was really killing a lot of open source software, we'd see a LOT more of an outcry about it... I haven't heard of this issue outside of this thread.
My laptop has an ATi Radeon Mobility 9100, which is technically DX8. Runs Doom3 to a point of playability. HL2/EP1 beautifully. Of course, those are probably not even "modern" games anymore .
Plus, running dx8 mode saves resources. When HL2 launched (and cs:s), steam forums were filled with people complaining about performance and a lot of threads explaining how to set the game to run in dx8.1 mode, even on dx9 cards. DX10 standards are much different than dx9... a certain performance level is written into the spec so we won't see shit-tacular cards that "support" dx10 like we did with dx9.
