Oh so, so true.
Fair enough; most of my horror is based on an enforced spell using Calc for some simulation output. I don’t really expect it to come close to Excel (which is a quality product), but the graphing and presentation options are just shocking. Plus, I nearly had a heart attack when I was looking for “help” and up popped a “helpful” lightbulb, precisely where Clippy would have been.
As a LaTeX user I’ve never really looked back to WYSIWYG software since the horrible day that Word decided that my 52-page Master’s draft had too many editable equations in it, and that they’d all be much better off converted to static picture objects. I’ve got no illusions that many non-academics would want to use LaTeX though, so if Writer really does have better styling design than Word (and it’s hard to see how it couldn’t), that’s good. I still maintain, however, that if Lotus hadn’t essentially (and inexplicably) ceded the word processor market to Microsoft in favour of trying to make Notes a world-beater (gag), then we might now be able to set our sights a bit higher than “not a complete mess” when writing our documents. Personally I believe WYSIWYG doesn’t help at all, but I think that’s a losing argument.
I don’t love my OS because I don’t notice my OS. I turn on my computer each morning because I have work I need to do, a game I want to play, or a website I want to browse. I can’t recall ever starting up my computer because I couldn’t wait to experience my OS.
This is true, but works both ways. I was on the fence about Windows and Mac until my current job. All the writers and account execs uses Windows (XP or 2000), all the designers use Macs (9 or X). On at least a daily basis, I work with one of the designers’ computers to fix layouts and make corrections, usually in Adobe Illustrator. The frequency with which their machines crash (at least once every few days, including one who’s Mac was so touchy it would crash when you clicked an arrow button four times in a row), compared to the frequency with which our machines crash (the only time in the last four years was once when I was trying to embed Flash files in a Powerpoint), has convinced me of which OS I want for my home (I use XP at home now and it has been just as stable).
So what do you do when Illustrator keeps locking up and/or quitting on you?
Quite. And that “sometimes” is precisely when someone is asking what sort of computer to buy. No other time.
Maybe, fine; but you’re mentally equipping this person’s system (which you don’t use) with a maelstrom of problems that you’ve read about in some gleeful Mac hack’s lousy blog, or whatever. The whole point of this thread is that actually, most problems are just minor, and have a simple enough solution that will allow the user to go back and carry on using the system they’re used to, and which they are happy with despite gasp not having the same thing as you. Comparing using Windows to an “abusive relationship” is just the sort of ridiculous hyperbole that pisses people off in the first place. If I were to post a problem with my XP box, you would probably roll your eyes and wonder what on earth I’m doing with it in the first place. But you wouldn’t know that I have had no viruses, no spyware, no non hardware-related crashes even since I built my machine some three and a half years ago, and that I’m pretty damn happy with how it’s set up thankyouverymuch. No, to you I’m just some schmuck who likes punishment. And from my perspective, what you’re doing is suggesting that I get a divorce because my partner farts in bed occasionally.
Maybe they’ve got personalities that can’t be summed up in a .sig file? Y’know, I know a lot of Mac users who don’t love their OS, or feel the need to tell me about it. Actually, that’s most of the Mac users I know. Most people just aren’t that wrapped up in their computers, I’m afraid. My OS’s are XP and Linux, and there are bits about both of them that drive me batshit insane now and then, but I survive. I’ve used OSX enough to know that the same would be true of that. How about doing people the favour of assuming that they’re not complete morons, and that they know that if they want to spend thousands of dollars fixing a minor problem, they can?
Mac Gamer Swith Parody, which incidently is only avaliable in Quicktime format.
I have to agree with Dead Badger though. I hear all the time about how buggy Windows is compared to Macs, and I’m sure the Mac users hear the same. The difference is, I’m a Windows user and I know that my OS isn’t near as buggy as it’s made out to be–it doesn’t crash twice a day and I don’t get a new virus every week. I’ll admit the UI maybe isn’t as intuitive to someone who’s new to it, but I’ve used the OS long enough that I understand it and it does make sense to me (at this point it’s the Macs that are confusing). The biggest problem I’ve had with my current machine has been finding a working printer driver, and that was because I’m running 64-bit, not because of anything wrong with Windows. (I did find one eventually, but it wasn’t the driver for my model. I blame Samsung.) Yes, I do have the occasional problem, but it’s infrequent, generally minor and I can almost always easily fix it myself. Frankly it’s not a big enough issue that it would make me want to switch platforms.
Maybe someday I’ll decide that a Mac might be better for me and I’ll decide to buy one. But don’t tell me I should switch just because Clippy is being annoying and I want to know how to turn him off.
A lot of it is legacy carryover argument. At this point it’s like two sports teams with a rivalry stretching back in time: ragging on the other team is a participatory event 
I used to ridicule PCs and criticize folks for buying them, but that was back when I had a very valid point. Is anyone really going to step up and say we were wrong when we had System 4 and PCs had MS-DOS only? Or even when we had System 7 and PCs were running Windows 3.1? And in those years, PC users were calling the Mac a toy. It was a two-way street on the harassment, the Mac genuinely was markedly superior, and whereas Mac-base hostility towards PCs was no major threat to the continued use of PCs, hostility towards Macs did easily and often lead to IT decisions or purchasing decisions etc etc that eliminated Macs or made it harder for them to function.
For the most part I no longer get harassed or exposed to contempt from PC users for having a Mac, and I do not bad-mouth PCs or Windows any more either. Windows has come a long long way (and, no, not all of it right smack dab in the footprints of the MacOS that preceded it, either). You got a good OS. I don’t want to use it, but it’s become more like an argument between Wüsthof knife afficionados and Henckel weilders: I feel very strongly about which tool I want to use, which feels right and familiar to me, and yes I could make a list of objective testable assertions to support my choice, but so what? It’s the “feels right and familiar” that does it.
Lissa, sorry, I have tendency to sound more serious than I am when I’m writing. I wasn’t trying to be ultra-serious, it’s just how I usually come across.
Dead Badger, you’re making a lot of assumptions about me just because I said a few things in favor of Macs. I picked out the parts for my wife’s Windows computer and had it put together for us at a custom shop when I realized that it wouldn’t cost much more for someone else to do the work instead of me; I was prepared to do it myself. I’ve used every flavor of Windows at work or at school since 3.1. I know exactly what the user experience is because I’ve been a user for a long time, though mostly not by choice. While I’m no expert, since I’m not a complete idiot about computers I end up de-facto maintaining my mother in law’s XP laptop and troubleshooting my sister in law’s two computers running XP. There’s a reason my home computer has been a Mac since about 1994, I don’t want the headaches when I’m doing my own thing.
If Illustrator locks up, it might be the fault of the Illustrator software. If my system crashes, it’s Apple’s fault, if the app crashes, it’s the app writer’s fault. I wouldn’t blame Windows for an individual program locking up, I’d blame the program. It’s funny that you blame Apple for Illustrator’s shortcomings. (Are you sure you’re running Illustrator with sufficient resources? 512 MB is shown as a minimum for regular usage but something resource-intensive like Illustrator or Photoshop can eat memory like candy. I wouldn’t even try to open that program without at least a gig, preferably two.)
My mother in law’s new computer was running dirt slow a while. I asked her what she’d done recently and she told me that she just updated Norton a month or so ago. I immediately realized that Norton <spit between forked fingers> was the culprit and got rid of it, downloading Zone Alarm and a couple of free but good AV programs to replace it. I didn’t blame Windows for the system slowdown, I blamed the resource hog that was causing the problem.
I don’t spout off about Macs that much. I do it in real life a lot less than I do it on the message board where computer things come up more, and I’d bet that I’ve only done it a few times here. I am one of the Mac users who doesn’t really feel the need to tell you about it, most of the time anyway.
Sublight, I don’t notice my OS either. It’s not like I boot up my PowerBook and say, “Ooh, I get to use Tiger today!” That’s kind of the point. I can get stuff done without having to mess around with my computer to get it to work. When I use Windows, though, it suffers in comparison with OS X. I almost went Windows about 3 years ago. I’m glad I didn’t. I’ve had zero headaches related to OS X, but I have several friends and relatives who use Windows and who talk to me about their problems. That and my first hand usage is enough to remind me that I really did make the right choice for me.
I last encountered a Windows headache when I was trying to print wedding invitations and the color balance was all messed up, the print driver kept changing my margins, and even though I had the proper font installed it kept substituting a different font. I noticed that it was Windows because when I’d done the test print on my Mac, I had no problems; it looked great. I was using a supposedly OS agnostic PDF file. In other words, I noticed only because it was getting in the way of what I wanted to do. A five minute job turned into 30 minutes of troubleshooting, plus the time it took to print it. I ended up later using my Mac for the job because the color control was better. (Shameless self-promotion: My guests didn’t realize that my wife and I had made them ourselves. They looked like they were professionally done.)