Longhorn: First impressions
I installed Longhorn on my home dev box this weekend. Since I only played with it on the lab computers, I did not see much of the install and setup. Since the major thing that I had drilled into my head at the PDC was that Microsoft want's my opinion, I thought i would post my first impressions.
The install was very nice. When I put in the DVD, I got a very nice GUI installer rather than the text-based ones from 2000 & XP. UI on the installer was very clean, and it gave me fairly accurate guesses on how long it was going to be working. It hardly gave me any options on how to set things up, though. This is somewhat good, somewhat bad. Most of the time I just take the defaults, but there are some things (like timezone) that need to be changed and I hate looking through the control panel to figure out how to change them. This could just be because it's such an early build.
I'm pretty sure the sidebar will be very useful in the futre, but in this version, there are no useful tiles (as much as I love the huge clock...), and it's just a waste of screen space.
The memory leaks are very bad. Woke up this morning to a machine that was using 1.5gb of memory. Killing explorer every now and then seems to keep it down. Not a major problem for such early software, but it makes it diffucult to use for too long. Also, File IO and networking seem really slow. Once again, not major because it's so early, but it's somewhat annoying
WinFS seems pretty good, but I've not figured out a whole lot about how to use it. I was hoping it could just scan my drives and figure out where things were. I guess that's not (currently) the case, so I dropped some stuff into my default store and it seemed to work fine.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the new stuff I've seen. Once I get Widbey installed (more on that later), I'll start playing with some more of the new Avalon stuff and posting what I think abou the new API's.