Longhorn Beta Begins

As reported on Slashdot, beta copies of Windows Longhorn are being sent to developers from the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). The current screenshots from the latest version are available, but there's also some nice user interface screenshots from previous Longhorn builds.

Anyway, as one can see in this short video clip from the conference, gobs of processor cycles have been spent in order to render transparency effects for GUI windows. . .

. . . but honestly, these computationally-intensive changes don't seem to make Longhorn more *useable* than prior GUI iterations:

As a personal note, I'm really not too keen about Longhorn -- I purchased Windows x64 Professional a few weeks ago with my new system, but uninstalled it in favor of Windows 2000, just because of horrid driver problems -- it was impossible to create PDFs through Adobe Acrobat due to incompatible printer drivers, listen to music due to incompatible 8-channel sound drivers, or even install a functioning firewall/antivirus utility. According to Paul Thorrott's Longhorn FAQ, this situation is going to become even worse:

In the past, Microsoft allowed customers to use non-signed drivers, which helped compatibility, but caused stability problems. No more: In Longhorn, users hoping to take advantage of the system's exciting new capabilities will only be able to use signed drivers.

Anyway, I'm seriously thinking about migrating one of my research computers to Linux, since most of my programs have Linux analogs -- the main problem is choosing a proper Linux distribution, but I guess there's always advice for that:

Ok, so now we have Ubuntu, Gentoo, Suse, Red Hat, Mandriva, Colinux, Yellow Dog, Caldera and god knows who else vying for a slice of an ever so slowly growing pie, not even counting Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese or german national efforts.

Most of the distros you mentioned are designed to fill a particular niche. Ubuntu is designed as a user friendly Debian-based distro (meaning, it uses apt-get and not RPMs or some other scheme). Gentoo is for the ricers. Suse and Red Hat are for the enterprise. Mandriva is an easy to use RPM based distro. Yellow Dog is a lame RPM based distro for PPC machines. The Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese, and German distros are for people who speak Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and German, respectively. Caldera is dead.

Eh.

In any case, just as a final fyi, the Ubuntu Linux Foundation will send free pressed installation CDs (free shipping too) if you so desire.