I bought a pentium su4100 based netbook recently. It comes with Windows 7, and I must say it is a refreshing change to just be able to run games without spending 3 days full-time trying to tweak the wine configuration to try to get something passably working…
And Windows 7 works generally rather well I feel. Hasn’t crashed on me once yet. Microsoft produces a free real-time virus and malware scanner now.
So, what is there left to improve in Windows 7 for future versions of Windows? Off-the-top-of-my-head, I came up with two things:
- make other things become built-in, available at no extra cost, eg Office
- add an application store, a one-stop shop to buy everything, including everything currently available from Steam, battle.net, and so on
– no more need to wonder whether something one is downloading is legitimate or not
– downloads would be easy and secure by default, ie make sure they use https and so on
– could provide an option to either buy software outright, or lease it for an hour, 24 hours, a month, or whatever
– or whatever is done for applications in the iPhone app store, which seems to be very successful
I suppose that if everything were made available through an appstore, then that would be a great whitelist for 99% of end-users, and all other applications could be entirely banned from running, eliminating a lot of viruses, rootkits and so on.