Windows 7
Wow, it’s been a while since I was last here. Alienware was finally resolved (I got the drive I wanted then decided the machine was altogether too flimsy for business travel anyway and bought a superb Dell), Defcon happened (google news can give you the details), and my company is now officially launched and running. Lots going on, not enough time, yadda yadda.
Anyway, I finally got around to installing Windows 7 and decided that I finally had something worthy of blogging. I normally tweet my random thoughts but this one won’t fit 140 characters, so here I am. Here’s the thing – after 5 minutes with Windows 7 I have decided, once and for all, that I will never voluntarily use another Microsoft product.
Let me be clear first of all – I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with the security of Windows 7. I was deeply involved in the Vista security review (source code access, interviewing developers and PM’s, threat modeling, etc) and saw far behind the curtain at Microsoft – the best description I can give of the experience is the H. P. Lovecraft quote which we had printed on the back of our “Windows Vista Pentest Team” shirts: “Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.”. There’s some real nightmares in there, but although I was not involved in the Windows 7 review I have confidence in its security. I know the team, I know the processes that were already mature after Vista, I have an idea how much further the review went for 7, and I have confidence that it’s been done very well indeed. Security is absolutely not the problem with Windows 7.
The problem with Windows 7 is that it’s 2.8Gb. That’s an awful lot of code, and a significant amount of it is for “legacy support” – the obscure little features that some random company in some random place absolutely can’t live without, but the other 99.9% of us get to carry around as well. That’s why Windows is so big – it’s carrying around the baggage of decades of legacy support.
Why is it then, if we’re all carrying around this huge pile of backwards-compatible junk, that Windows 7 doesn’t support “older” hardware right out of the box? My test victim for tonight’s installation was my old Dell Inspiron – a 3-year-old sub-notebook with completely standard Intel-everything-on-board Dell-branded hardware. I expected it to be flawless, given the size of all the companies involved – if you don’t get support from them who are you going to get it from?
Instead, the first thing I noticed was a lack of screen resolutions above 1024×768 on my “Standard VGA Graphics Adaptor”. Nothing widescreen, certainly nothing approaching the native resolution of 1280×800. Next up I tried to connect to my wireless network, only to notice that I had no wireless card – no sound either, and a couple of other things in device manager that I’ve yet to even figure out what they are. What the hell? We’re all carrying around gigabytes of “legacy support” code in Windows but we don’t actually get any “legacy support” for our hardware? Why isn’t this on the CD, let alone on the Intel or Dell websites?
I’m done playing this game. I have a ton of hardware around here with multi-gigahertz processors, plenty of drive space and RAM, and no Windows support for any of it since Windows 2000 (Windows 98, in the case of one ATI card). It’s all perfectly serviceable; any time I need a machine for something-or-other I can almost always be assured that the very latest distribution of my choice will have near-perfect support for anything _that_ old.
It’s a difference of mindset. To Microsoft, Dell, and Intel, we’re all customers – they can’t afford to let us know that the hardware they sell is actually perfectly capable well beyond the shelf-life of the software, because if they did we’d all stop buying it. Linux has a diametrically opposite viewpoint, in that if something is truly that old then there’s a very good chance that at some point in between someone has just coded up a driver and made it work – and that’s all you need. Open-source will always have support for any of the older hardware of mine that I will ever care to throw at it, whereas the lifetime of hardware in the Windows world is getting shorter with every release. It makes no sense – why keep dancing the dance for no reason at all other than to “stay current”?
So yes. I’m done with Windows and Office (I’ve been impressed with OpenOffice – it has its quirks but it’s generally pretty decent), and Exchange, and in fact any commercial software that requires me to throw away perfectly serviceable hardware. Why bother? I’ll buy new hardware when it has something to offer, and I’ll upgrade my operating systems as and when I please. When did it start being Linux and not Windows that “just worked” anyway?
4 Responses to “Windows 7”
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August 7th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Valid points, but didn’t you have problems getting your ubuntu laptop to work with the projectors for your RFID talk at defcon? … and had to use a macbook running Vista to show your slides… just saying it makes the last sentence of this post a little… funny?
FWIW, Win 7 has worked really well for me with just about everything on which I’ve installed it (including some 3+ year old laptops). The only problems I’ve had stem from Intel abandoning the 915 chipset and not creating WDDM drivers for it. They claim they can’t, but it doesn’t make it suck any less.
August 8th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
It’s a fair cop, my laptop screen is widescreen and I’d never tried to put it into a fullscreen aspect ratio before. My bad for not learning the UI first. Not quite the same case though – you could have exactly the same problem on any OS, assuming the hardware is at least working correctly.
Do you have a link to anywhere that says Intel “can’t” produce 7 drivers? If that’s true it’s likely because the older hardware can’t support the DRM requirements to be fully certified as compliant – another reason to avoid it, IMHO. Would be nice to at least get a non-certified driver so that we can at least use decent screen resolutions…
August 10th, 2009 at 6:30 am
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2007/04/02/video-why-intel-915-graphics-dont-have-a-wddm-driver-for-vista/
Not so much that they can’t make a driver at all, just that they can’t make a WDDM driver. WDDM spec requires hardware that doesn’t exist on the 915.
I’m really not looking to argue with you here… there are plenty of good reasons to use linux over windows. I just don’t think “it just works” should be one of them. I look at linux with a “things that are awesome are worth working for” attitude, and I don’t expect non-standard stuff to work without a bit of effort.
And I’ve never had a problem hooking a 16:10 laptop to a 4:3 projector and having it switch to 800×600 or 1024×768 in Windows
… but that’s because people have been hooking a billion windows laptops to a billion projectors for presentations for years and years. Linux, not so much. I’m sure the UI for accomplishing that in ubuntu will get better in the next few years, but it is still kinda rough.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:32 am
Forgot to mention… I’ve seen a few of your talks and I always dig them (Defcon, Shmoocon). Keep up the good work.