In theory: yes. In practice: not very often, if ever. A simple check: search for the threads at this board where users complain about being the victims of malware. Count how many of those people were running Windows vs. how many were running Mac OS X. In my experience, it has always been people running Windows.
Apple will have system updates, same as Windows. I run Windows at work and Macintosh OS X at home. The Windows updates are much more frequent. If you buy a new Mac and hook it up at home the same day, it would be rare for you to be getting any updates on your first day. But if you take your original system disk and a few years later try to reinstall it, there will be updates to install. (Usually there will be one big “combo” update that will be installed if you go back to an original OS that is several years old and then check for updates). However, the number of updates to install when restoring your system is minimized if you upgrade your OS whenever Apple releases a new version. The last new OS was two years ago and cost less than $30. There is a new OS coming out this year, that will also be less than $30.
Not very often. In the past ten years I ran into a grand total of one problem that stumped me and caused me to do a Google search. A graphics program was not showing the colour picker palette correctly, and it turns out that a system library file had the wrong name somehow and I had to reinstall it from my original OS disk.
Installing basic programs is very simple. Instructions are:
Take this icon, drag it to your Applications folder.
That’s it.
Linux is not a bad OS, but I think there might be a lot more fiddling around to get things to work than you would run into with Windows. If the OP installs iTunes as one of his first applications after a restore, I doubt Linux is for him. There is no Linux version of iTunes.
Forgot to say: this is much less of a problem today than it was 15 years ago, but you can avoid a lot of problems if you check, before buying hardware (e.g. printer or hard drive or scanner or webcam), that the box lists Macintosh OS X as a supported OS .
If you have any favourite “must-have” programs, look to see if there is a Mac version or a similar Mac app. And check to see if the Mac equivalent can open the files that you created with the corresponding Windows program.
Finally: be aware that you can run Windows on your Mac in a pinch. e.g. Install both operating systems and switch back and forth.
Funny, I would have sworn this post was from about eight years ago. Have you tried a modern, user-friendly distribution like Ubuntu or Mint? It installs and works far more smoothly than Windows, and I haven’t plugged a piece of hardware into a Linux box in years that didn’t work immediately; at worst, Ubuntu will tell you that it needs to download a proprietary driver to make full use of the device. Once you give it permission, it will download and install it automatically.
It also comes with a lot of the basic tools you want already installed (like an office suite that is at least as powerful as MSOffice, and can read and write MS formats). Pretty much anything else you want, you can pick from a searchable list in the Synaptic GUI. Again, it will fetch and install the software for you.
Now, there’s no argument about hardware compatibility with a Mac…if only because Apple doesn’t even try for broad compatibility. They dictate what hardware you use, and make sure their stuff works with that specific set of stuff. It limits your options, but it does make for excellent stability.
You don’t even have to switch back and forth. VirtualBox runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows, and will allow you to run a full installation of Windows inside any of them. There’s a free version of it available.
I have to disagree with this. I do almost all of my web surfing these days on a linux box and it works just fine. And, unlike older versions of linux, I haven’t had to spend countless hours tweaking and fighting with it to get it to work.
I will admit however that if something doesn’t work correctly on linux, getting it to work can be a bit of a nightmare. Fixing something in linux often means building it from source code or tweaking a bunch of cryptic lines in some script somewhere. There’s an old joke that says unix is very user friendly, it’s just particular about who its friends are. When you get down into the tinkering with scripts level, you find out just how user unfriendly all unix based operating systems can be.
Pretty much everything on my current linux system worked right out of the box though. It was pretty much just as easy to set up as a windows box.
There are some issues with linux though. Some web pages just don’t work well under linux. Note - mac users often have the same problems with those web pages. Some things are designed for windows and that’s it.
Videos don’t play as smoothly under linux. If you have a high enough horsepower linux box that might not matter, but a slightly older machine that runs videos under windows just fine will sometimes stutter a bit under linux.
A lot of things are just clunkier on linux. An easy example that many people might recognize is the game freecell. The windows version plays much more smoothly and has much better graphics. The linux game isn’t bad, but it is noticeably inferior to the windows version. The linux version is perfectly usable, it’s just a bit clunky. A lot of other linux software is the same way.
Software on a mac is generally on par with windows as far as how smoothly and well it works. The big problem with mac software is that a lot of windows software simply doesn’t have a mac version. Macs have a tiny portion of the computer market these days. It’s bigger than it was in years past, but it’s still small enough that software developers make their bread and butter with the windows version, and probably won’t sell enough copies to make a mac version worthwhile. Linux, also being a little guy in the grand scheme of things, suffers from the same problem.
Open office (or whatever they call the newer version these days) tries to be a perfect replacement for microsoft office, but it’s just not there yet. The word processor is pretty good (IMHO) but the spreadsheet leaves a bit to be desired. Both work well enough for what I do, but a lot of hardcore spreadsheet users aren’t very happy with it. Macs do have a version of microsoft office available. Linux users are stuck with open office though.
Macs are also the most expensive for what you get. Microsoft comes in second, and linux (being free) is by far the cheapest.
Macs and linux boxes do not suffer from anywhere near the same level of virus and malware threats. Anyone that tells you that either mac or linux is completely immune to such things though is an idiot. Mac malware and viruses are particularly on the rise because so many users think that their machines are invulnerable to such things. Mac and linux viruses are so rare though that you just might never encounter one on your system. Note however that if you do run windows software on your mac you do open yourself up to potential windows malware problems. Virtual machines can get infected just as easily as real windows machines (though they can be much easier to clean if you back up your virtual drive - all you have to do is restore the file and your VM windows machine is back to the way it was).
Personally, I run a windows box and a linux box side by side. I used to use the linux box to tinker with, but I recently upgraded the box to the point where it runs most things smoothly and also got hit by a windows virus a short time ago. Both of these combined convinced me to switch to the linux box pretty much full time for anything internet related. I can’t ditch the windows box though because I have too much software on it that doesn’t have a linux equivalent. So far, the linux box has worked fine with all of the web sites I tend to visit, with the exception of the web site of the company I work for. YWSMV (your web sites may vary).
I haven’t upgraded to Win 7 yet (still dual-booting XP on my MacBook and the PC is dead) but I’d assume that Microsoft makes a free SP1 CD available, correct? When I was still running my PC, I would generally do a complete reformat and reinstall every six months, and one of the first things I did was order the SP2 CD from Microsoft so that I’d at least get the firewall security up and running before I brought it onto the Internet to install the latest updates. Heck, it got to the point when they released SP3 that I actually made a slipstream CD so that I could really cut down on the updates.
I would argue that that’s a problem with the web pages not following standards. It’s also a problem that’s fading quickly, as MS is being forced to make IE more standards-compliant.
Really? I recently set up a micro-PC (a tiny box with a 1.66GHz Atom processor) as a media PC running XBMC on Ubuntu. I had it playing a movie in XBMC and a 720p YouTube video in another window as a test, and neither stuttered at all. It does have a decent onboard GPU, though.
I dunno. I still see all kinds of problems with IE 8/9. I’m not a web developer but I support web-based software and we just had three different browser-based issues today alone, all of which affected only IE.
If you have any charity in your heart, please stop. I am a web developer and just ran a query on our JIRA bug tracker after reading this thread. Over the last 8 years we’ve had 11.5 IE only issues for each Firefox/Safari/Chrome only issues combined.
Teachers are required to give some darn test to the students. Despite my pleas, the only warning I get is when they give the test and it requires to install software on limited user computers. AND Firefox crashes it. I keep an admin account for them to use, but I still have to uninstall Firefox on ten high school lab PCs quickly enough for the kids to take the test in their 45 minute class period.
There are also reports that must be generated for the state on each student, and the website doesn’t play well with Firefox.
Why on Earth would you think that? That’s definitely the IE crowd.
By recommending that people actually use IE, you’re actively undermining the good works of the noble IT warriors who have given their (working) lives so that one day their children may live in a world free from the tyranny of horrible web browsers, and making the world a worse place in the process.
I agree, however I would argue that a “Service Pack” should include all patches from before, meaning that from a fresh install just SP1 needs to be installed. Having to spend an hour upgrading a system so it is in a position where SP1 can be installed is just insane.
I’ve been hearing about the coming Mac viruses since I bought my first computer 14 years ago. Not only have I never had a virus, I’ve never even known anyone to have one.
