Windows, Mac or Linux?

Great Debates
1

Well? Personally I use linux because its free, fast, stable customizable and fun. I also use Windows, but only for games. In my opinion, Mac OS is the crappiest OS on the planet. I hate how it hides everything from you; I like to be able to see the device drivers and system files and to have detailed, complex error message reports, not just “Error 14”. What’s everyone else’s OS of choice?

2

Somebody (I forget just who) compared computer users to drivers (car users?). The person who knows where the ignition switch and the gas tank are located, but nothing else (and doesn’t want to know anything else), uses a Mac. The person who can and does change her own oil uses a Wintel box. And the person who pulls engines and rebuilds them as a hobby runs Linux.

3

This is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Both Windows and Linux hide much more from the user than than the MacOS.
Windows seeds DLLs all over the place and threads vital information through the registry in such a way that only the most expert can sort it out (and I’ve had a few experts muck up my registry). Linux/unix is not much better with lots if little files scattered about and the potential for multiple paths to confuse and deceive the user. With the Mac you always know where everything is.

As for error messages, on the MacOS you see fewer error messages because the interfaces are either highly fault tolerant or the OS automagically corrects for them, and in a few cases just tells you what you have to do to make them go away. Most of the error messages you see on the Mac, particularly the ones of the “Error ##” variety are due to bad programmer assumptions and laziness. Many of these error messages are relatively meaningless unless you’re the programmer. Unix likes to do core dumps when things go wrong… real helpful that. Windows rarely gives me error messages… it usually just gives me the blue screen of death!

4

I think that the article to which Akatsukumi is referring is a long essay by Neil Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash, as well as an excellent article in Wired magazine about laying a 5 GB undersea data cable from England to Asia.

The article is available for download here, as a text file.

Stephenson represents the balance of OSes as a crossroads with car dealerships on each corner. One dealer (Mac) sells luxurious cadillacs with the hood welded shut: everything runs very well and very smoothly, and the owner need never worry about the workings of the engine - if anything goes wrong, back to the dealer.

The next dealer (Windows) sells station wagons: not nearly as nice as the cadillacs, and kind of cranky to maintain, but generally getting you from A to B without too much trouble, and besides, everyone else is driving them, and they’re cheaper and you can get parts everywhere.

The third dealer (Linux) is giving away M1 Abrams tanks for free: it can do anything at all, and runs forever, and if it breaks down, there are other owners everywhere who’ll not only tell you how to fix it, but will come over and show you themselves; however, you need to be a tank driver to really get your use out of it.

The last dealer (BeOS) is selling batmobiles that are as stable and capable as the tank, but look really cool, too, and you don’t need to know that much to drive them if you want; but no one else is driving them, and though they’re cheaper than the station wagons, they’re different, and while they can do as much as the tank, they’re more expensive.

The article is really an extended meditation on command lines versus GUIs. Worth reading.

5

Woo, a religious war I can participate in!

I’d encourage everyone to read that article hansel posted a link to. Just one comment…

not anymore its not.

Now, heres my rational no-emotions-involved response:

Different OSs are good for different purposes. None of them (well none of the big 5) are inherently better than the others. Linux is a better server than the others. BeOS handles multi-media, and specifically audio, well. I wouldn’t want anything but MacOS for doing digital pre-press work. WinNT/2000 is a good office os. Win9x, well, ok, maybe some are inherently worse than others…

And my impassioned hellfire and damnnation response:
BeOS, MacOS, and Linux rule! (in decreasing order of ruling) Woo! I can’t believe people would use any micro$oft software!

All my spare time programming I do on beos and linux. My next computer will probably be a mac portable. But I still use win95 for games and internet stuff.

6

I have been using Windows for a few years, and recently tried out a Mac. I LOVE the Mac OS. Windows is OK, I still prefer a few of it’s features, but I was destined to love the Mac OS.

Now, granted, I haven’t been using my Mac for that long. But it is the right “fit” for me. You know, some of us are horrified at the thought of tinkering around in the bowels of the OS. I know I am. If Windows has some serious registry problem, back to the shop it goes. Any kind of really bad Windows problem, I throw money at it to make it go away. I am not a total newbie (I just trouble-shooted a CD RW USB driver problem, thankyouverymuch) but I know my limitations. A lot of computer users do. We don’t want to get under the hood.

From my experience, the Mac OS doesn’t have near the bugs or problems as Windows. It’s not bug-free, but I think it’s much less screwed-up than Windows. And that means less trips to the shop for me. And that suits me fine. Even when I can fix a problem in Windows (like I just did today) it takes a lot of time. Less troubleshooting problems on the Mac sound great to me. I got my Mac so I could run Photoshop. And that’s what I want to spend my time doing. Running *Photoshop—*not tinkering with the registry. Yikes.

So, put me in the Mac camp.

7

My preferences are based on compatibility… I don’t want to shortchange my selection on the market due to some silly preference thing.

Windows is designed for more “multipurpose” tasks. It’s designed to do everything relatively well. Linux… doesn’t. MacOS… well, heck, Mac’s are only compatible with a small fraction of the software on the market (the highest statistic I’ve seen was in a Consumer Reports, I think, talking about the iMac, which was %20… higher than it used to be, but still tiny). So these specialized OS’s are definitely going to run well, since they’re designed to do less overall. Ever wonder why Linux is cheap? It’s a simpler program.

Personally, I’d prefer the MacOS if Macs themselves were compatible with more software on the market (I’ve heard nice things about OS 10… is it even out yet? I haven’t been following that…). But, oh well… personally, I’ve never really had any problems with Windows. Sure, I’ve gotten error messages before, but after I checked stuff out, guess what? It was either a hardware glitch (damage to the HD) or the other software (like when Painshop Pro glitched up bigtime… it was because the files were corrupted from said HD damage).

8

Just for the record, I’ve only found one pice of software that runs on my PC but doesn’t run on my Mac (with Virtual PC). Come to think of it, that software doesn’t run on my PC anymore, but it did once… I’m sure there are games that will run faster on a similarly clocked PC, but then I don’t play games (OK, not much, as long as I’m being honest).
I agree wholeheartedly with Hunsecker’s statement:

I haven’t tried BeOS yet - that seems to me to be the biggest compatibility gap, no?

9

Put me firmly in the Mac camp for all purposes. I work on Windows at work, and find it to be slow and user-unfriendly (and I’m a user, not a programmer or engineer). At home, things just fly. Of course, I was also weened on Macs - I started my college career as a freshman at Drexel University, which had only just I think two years before I got there started the requirement that each incoming freshman buy a Macintosh (I got an old MacPlus at the time). Never looked back.

Esprix

10

Frankly, I’m partial to IBM’s MVS O/S. Been doing it for almost 20 years now. It’s hard to beat. It’s got everything for the bare essencials user to the grass roots systems programmer. It’s highly stable - I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen it come down, and when it did, it was because of some rookie systems programmer.

When I’m not using MVS to keep the corporate systems purring day to day, I use Unix for data warehousing purposes. It’s kind of fun and very tunable but those HP servers do tend to act up much more often than the mainframe and they require more TLC to keep them running smoothly.

Finally, there is the good ol’ Microsoft Windows. I think I like this OS the most because it provides me with hours of entertainment. Ever try sending a message to a colleague via MVS send command? Trust me, Outlook and IE, not to mention the miriad of games available for Wintel platforms, are worth every minor annoyance presented by the odd GPF error that is kicked out by Windows.

Like many people have already correctly stated… the right tool for the right job - that’s the key. Why belabour this subject unneccessarily?

11

Note from personal experience in my years as a PC/Mac tech:

Most PC users I’ve encountered (and I realize that, since “everyone uses them”, that the intelligence of the Average Person drags down the high-IQed propeller-heads) are AFRAID to mess around with their machines. There’s just so much that can go wrong; move one file, and the computer will refuse to work any longer. Most know how to open their word processor, maybe a few other programs, print, and that’s about all.

Mac users, by contrast, don’t seem to have that fear. They’ll plug in external devices with reckless abandon, install new software without calling the Computer Services people, move files and folders around, and generally “play” with their system, because they trust their Mac to work. And it almost always does.

Count me among the Mac crowd. I’ve used Wintel machines, and can repair most hardware and software problems with them, but I would never have one in my house. I’ve been using Macs since 1984, and I ain’t going back now. In fact, I think it was my experience with Macs that allowed me to learn to fix PCs so rapidly; in less than a year, I had surpassed most of the PC techs in my department in fluency. Reason: I wasn’t afraid to poke around and see what resulted, because my Mac experience had removed that fear.

Linux, I’ve not played with, because, quite frankly, I don’t enjoy messing with my OS for its own sake. Linux is great for people who leave their PC cases off and want to spend each new day reconfiguring their systems with the newest whizbang code. That ain’t me.

12

Uh huh. OK, quick test for Windows users, from whom of course such things are not hidden:

  1. I don’t like the keystroke Control-L for specifying an URL in my web browser, I want Control-O, which currently brings up a window to open a local document. I’d like to have Control-D do that. Would you mind switching them for me?

  2. I have some JPEG files on my hard drive. These over here I would like to be set so that if I open them, they open in Photoshop; these others, I’d like to open in Paint Shop Pro.

  3. I just bought a new hard drive because the C drive in this thing is too small. My drive is chock full of software for which the original installation CDs and floppies are god knows where, lost or misplaced. I want to boot from the new drive, since it came with Windows98 preinstalled, and I’ve only got Win95 on the old drive, which doesn’t have room for a proper install of Win98. Would you be so kind as to set up my old C drive as a D drive and make sure all my old apps and settings work?

  4. My other computer has a nice big hard drive, but the computer itself is just too old, it’s a 486DX66. It, too, is full of irreplacable software I can’t really reinstall. I bought a new PIII box. Help me take the hard drive out of the old machine and put it in the new and change anything I need to change to get it to boot right?

  5. I’m giving the old machine to my Mom to use as a word processor. She has an ATAPI CD drive for it (it didn’t come with one), and someone else gave her a cheap but good sound card. Hook them up for her?

  6. I have some old parallel-port devices and some new USB devices. Should I use a newer computer and hook a USB-to-parallel converter, or put USB into the older computer? Will I have any problems using both ports at the same time?

  7. I have a roomful of old monitors. Rather than throwing them away, I figured I’d use Windows98’s ability to handle multiple monitors to make use of them. Here are 4 different PCI video cards (from different vendors), here’s the full page black and white portrait monitor, these two are 15 inch monitors that came from Gateway computers, and this other big old graphics monitor I discovered will display at 1800 by 1350 if I use this card for it as long as I set it for 4-bit color (16 colors). I want one of the Gateways in the middle, the big graphic monitor to the right, the portrait to the left, and the remaining Gateway on top of it, and I want my virtual desktop to reflect that shape and orientation. Hook them up and set them up for me? Here are the floppies and CDs with the video drivers if you need them.

[end of test questions]

13

Yup, thats the biggest problem with it. Well, that and poor security. The same anti-mac argument (“Theres no software for it”) applies to BeOS even more. And actually, hardware is a little hit-and-miss too, because vendors aren’t writing drivers, and the user base doesn’t have nearly as many systems programmers as linux. Check thebesite for compatability first.

<plug>
Everyone should try the free version of BeOS. It lives happily on one of your windows drives, no partitioning or anything to get it running.
</plug>

Anyway, back to the current argument. I’ve had the same experience as MaxTorque, as far as the fear people have of screwing up their machines. Also, Mac users seem to ask less “how does this program work” questions than Windows and Linux users, not because the interface is more consistent in MacOS, but because they feel freer to experiment with the software.

Personally, I prefer BeOS and MacOS to Linux and Windows because they have a sense of style to them that the others don’t. Its hard to define, but they both have a consistent, clean, well designed interface which isn’t an eyesore. Someday Linux probably will too, but my hopes aren’t high for windows.

14

I don’t want to come off like too much of a smartass, but I thought turnabout was fair play…

No-can-do: PEBKC

PEBKC again.

No problem. Did this 3 times last week, got another this afternoon.

Again, no problem. Do this all the time…

This is supposed to be difficult? Besides, this sounds like a hardware problem, not an OS problem – what does windoze or M$ have to do with this (since that seems to be what you’re knocking)? Stop setting up strawmen.

Again, hardware problem. What does this have to do with the operating system? Anyway, no, there shouldn’t be any problem using both devices at the same time. The machine I’m on right now (old Dell) has a scanner and MP3 player hooked up to the USB ports, and a printer on the parallel ports – and there were no problems hooking any of them up.

PEBKC. But that aside, sure, just gimme a couple minutes. Of course you DO realize that this is an area that Win was never intended to handle (kinda like Macs and data warehousing)?
Now I have some questions for you:

  1. I just tried to start up Photoshop and I got this message: “Error 9”. That’s it. I rebuilt the desktop, reset to base extensions, made sure nothing else was running, turned virtual memory on and off, nothing worked. What now?

  2. I prefer to use Netscape 3 to do most browser because it isn’t as bloated. However, I need to use a level 4 browser for a project I’m working on. I only have 1 partition on my hard drive and no zip drive. Ever since I installed Netscape 4, every time I try to start Netscape 3 it either quits with an error or just opens up NS 4. Suggestions?

  3. I’m doing some work on my Imac at work and I have Performa 6200/CD at home. I have some critical files on the Imac that I need to take home to work on. However, the Imac doesn’t have a floppy drive, and my office doesn’t have any kind of dialup service. How do I transfer the files?

  4. I just got a brand-spanking new G4, with OS9. It’s really fast and cool, except that when I try to install and run some of the older software I have, it doesn’t work. All I get are Applescript errors, or file application errors. I’m told by my mac guru friend that Apple dropped applescript support in OS9, and a G4 isn’t capable of running a lower OS (once the ROMS have been upgraded). I really need those older programs. What do I do?

  5. I can’t get virtual PC to work correctly, so now I can’t play 90% of the games on the market. I really like to play games. What do I do (besides digging out the Playstation)?

  6. I really need to get a faster system than I currently have, but I only have about 1000$ to spend right now. An Imac won’t cut it; I need more memory and hard drive space. What can I get for the money I have?

[end of test questions]

15

OK, fair enough.

  1. I just tried to start up Photoshop and I got this message: “Error 9”. That’s it. I rebuilt the desktop, reset to base extensions, made sure nothing else was running, turned virtual memory on and off, nothing worked. What now?

a) That would apparently be a DS Table line 1010 trap error, which tells me not a hell of a lot more than it would tell the average end user, which is to say that it says nothing useful that “Error 9” doesn’t tell us. You are correct in noting that the long version is hidden from the end user, and if I were sufficiently geeky to know what the heck is a DS Table line 1010 trap error, I suppose it would annoy me that I have to result to a lookup table instead of having it appear onscreen the way a WindowsNT error does with all those 0x00-whatever strings in the error message box. Point for the opposition.

  1. I prefer to use Netscape 3 to do most browser because it isn’t as bloated. However, I need to use a level 4 browser for a project I’m working on. I only have 1 partition on my hard drive and no zip drive. Ever since I installed Netscape 4, every time I try to start Netscape 3 it either quits with an error or just opens up NS 4.

Suggestions?

a) Double-clicking Netscape 3 or an alias to same should launch it, not NS 4. You should not see errors just because of installing NS 4. If you are already running 3, you will get a rather specific error from Netscape: can’t run two versions of Netscape simultaneously. If you have other errors, I’d need more data to provide a meaningful answer. Meanwhile, you can get iCab and solve both problems (it is lean and quick and unbloated and yet supports level 4 browsing and can spoof its identity as NS 4 or IE 4 for picky web pages. No points for the opposition.

  1. I’m doing some work on my Imac at work and I have Performa 6200/CD at home. I have some critical files on
    the Imac that I need to take home to work on. However, the Imac doesn’t have a floppy drive, and my office doesn’t have any kind of dialup service. How do I transfer the files?

Install a floppy drive on the iMac. It is strictly plug and play, hot-pluggable even. Any idiot could do it. The fact that it isn’t standard equipment is relevant to other discussions but not this one. No points for the opposition here either.

  1. I just got a brand-spanking new G4, with OS9. It’s really fast and cool, except that when I try to install and run some of the older software I have, it doesn’t work. All I get are Applescript errors, or file application errors. I’m
    told by my mac guru friend that Apple dropped applescript support in OS9, and a G4 isn’t capable of running a lower OS (once the ROMS have been upgraded). I really need those older programs. What do I do?

Tell your mac guru friend that Apple did not drop AppleScript. Reinstall AS from the OS9 CD if need be. With very few exceptions (you are welcome to provide a list), the only older software that won’t run under 9 is WAY old, dating back to the pre-32bit-addressing era, and you can run it under vMac if it is that old. If your software dates from the late System 7 era or beyond, it should run fine. No points for the opposition yet again.

  1. I can’t get virtual PC to work correctly, so now I can’t play 90% of the games on the market. I really like to play
    games. What do I do (besides digging out the Playstation)?

You get points here. If you want to play games, you should get a PC. (That’s what they are for). Virtual PC does a good job of being a PC, often a more generically compatible one than many hardware PC boxes, but a blistering fast, state of the art speed demon it ain’t, and that’s what you need for games, which tend to push the graphics (in particular) capabilities of the computer to its limits. Anything you’d hesitate to throw at a Pentium II 233 isn’t going to be happy on VPC on your G4 either.

  1. I really need to get a faster system than I currently have, but I only have about 1000$ to spend right now. An
    Imac won’t cut it; I need more memory and hard drive space. What can I get for the money I have?

Depends on what you have, I suppose. If this were a serious inquiry I would try to run down the best prices on upgrades, but the short answer, realistically, is “not as much as you want if an iMac ‘wont cut it’.” You get points here.

Meanwhile, I’m collecting points on switching the menu hot keys (any 5th grade teacher has had to deal with the kids changing the menu commands to things like “Barf” and “Fuck” with ResEdit; changing the keystrokes is literally child’s play), assigning different apps to different files of the same type (via creator code, assigned easy enough for the average dummy by opening and resaving in the program you want to “own” it, or with more flexibility for us geeks by using interface extensions such as Snitch).

I’ll take your word for it that swapping drives from box to box or switching C drive to D drive and having everything work without major hair-ripping is NOT a problem for PC users, I’d always thought differently.

I will not take your word for it that adding a sound card and a drive to a Wintel box (especially an older one) is a piece of cake. Easy points to the Mac.

16

AHunter3 wrote:

Wait! I’ve got a few more basic ones…

  1. I want to print this web page on my PC exactly as it appears on my screen, except shrunk a bit because it’s too big to fit on the width of the page. Where’s that reduction option in the print dialog again?

  2. I installed this application in the default location on my PC. Then I decided to move it to a different folder. How do I make it work again? Why do I have to do anything to make it work again?

  3. I just installed application XYZ, but now application ABC no longer works. I suspect one of the DLLs has been replaced and is causing a conflict. How do I figure out what file is broken?

  4. Well, I didn’t like that XYZ application at all so I decided to remove it. The “Add/Remove Programs” utility had some problems and reported to me that some things were not removed. How do I figure out what they are and how do I know that removing them will not break something else?

  5. Application JKL installed an icon on my desktop. My desktop is already too cluttered. I don’t ever plan on launching the application JKL from the desktop so I decide to remove it. The OS won’t let me drag the icon to the trash. It won’t let me delete with a right click on the icon either. How do I get rid of the icon without trashing the application?

  6. I inserted a data disk in my floppy drive yesterday and now my PC won’t reboot. What’s up with that?

  7. I have a folder that is shared by two different application environments. Each application environment expects this folder to be in different places in the directory structure. How do I make an alias of the folder so that it can appear to be in two places at the same time?

  8. I have a big folder with lots of small files (hundreds and hundreds). Some are folders within folders. I decide to back these files up to a Zip drive. I check the sizes and it looks like the files should fit. I drag to copy the files over and the copy process starts. Nearly complete, the process balks and tells me that some files were not copied because there was not enough room. For some reason the copy operation has decided to copy the files over in a seemingly random order. How do I know which files were copied and which were not?

  9. Real life story. I want to do a screen capture but I don’t know how. So I go to the Help tool and search on ‘screen’. Nothing looks like a screen capture function. Let’s try ‘snapshot’. Hey here’s something, but it doesn’t tell me how to do it. It says it’s more commonly called a ‘screen dump’, well go figure, but ‘screen dump’ comes up empty in the database too. After half an hour of searching the help database I finally ask someone. “Oh, just use the ‘Print Screen’ key”. “I don’t want to print it; I want to capture it”, I say. “Well, that’s what ‘Print Screen’ really does.” So I press the ‘Print Screen’ key and nothing happens. Later I figue out it placed the ‘screen dump’ on the clipboard. What was intuitively obvious about any of that?

17

sixseatport writes:

Then AHunter3 conceedes:

Before you give that point to the opposition, I’d like to point out a couple of things. (1) That’s really an application issue. Well written Mac applications give easily understandable error messages. Lazy programmers sometimes just report the error number because they know that the user is probably not going to be able to do anything about it anyway, except call in and complain. Then then tech support folks can find out all of the interesting ideosyncracies of your configuration and give you good advice. (2) Many PC applications are just as bad. They give error numbers or cryptic text or sometimes they just quit… just like on the Mac.

Well, I don’t play many games at all, but my kids do. As for VirtualPC, I haven’t found a game yet that wouldn’t play correctly and at nearly the same performance level on my 300MHz G3 as my 366MHz Pentium II (the graphics usually look better on my Mac, BTW). Are you sure you installed it and configured it properly? Admitedly, we don’t play that many PC games because they just waste disk space and we’ve go so many great games that run PowerPC native that we really don’t miss it. I will conceede that there are a lot more games for the PC platform, though and I’m sure there are many of these that will perform better on a Wintel platform than a Mac emulation.
On the drive swaping and other ‘hardware’ issues that AHunter3 brought up. While not entirely OS related, part of the reason that Windows has yet to realize true plug 'n play is due to OS issues. I say this because Windows 2000 is claiming better plug 'n play operation on existing hardware. I’m sure there is a part that is due to the system architecture, but I guess that’s another thread…
Ummm… stupid question… what does ‘PEBKC’ mean?

18

I don’t have time to address the rest of the stuff, but I do have a serious question about this. Where are you getting these floppy drives for the imac? I’ve got 3 catalogs from Mac vendors (CDW – okay, they’re not Mac-specific, Macwarehouse, and a 3rd one buried under some papers that I’m too lazy to dig out), and I can’t find a floppy drive for an Imac anywhere. I see lots of Zip drives, external CD and HDs, but no plain ol’ fashioned 3.5’ floppy drives. What am I missing? (I really do have an Imac at work and a performa at home…this has been bugging me).

19

sixseatport,

Try the Mac section of http://www.microwarehouse.com

I’d give you a proper link, but I’m having issues with my NT box at work.

20

Okay, I’d like to add something to this discussion - it seems like everyone is debating back and forth between mac and windows - we are forgetting the other option:linux!
It let’s you move application folders around without worry about changing the system registry or any of that crap.
Adding a HD is as simple as modifying one file; you don’t even need to reboot (as a matter of fact, the only thing that you need to reboot for is updating the OS itself; which only happens about every three months, and usually there is no need to upgrade anyway)
Adding a sound card is easy : plug it in, and the run the driver for the card (if its not included with Linux, download it from the manufacturers web site).
The OS never crashes, only the applications: in windows, if something screws up, it can freeze your entire computer, in linux, all you do is press ALT-F2, and then tell the OS to stop the app. Then press ALT-F1, and you’re back in business.
Multiple monitors - the new version of the GUI supports them, and its quite easy to set them up too, I hear.
To remove a program, just delete its directory.
Some people would have you think that you need to be a techno-geek to use linux, but really its easier to learn than windows: its just that its different, which makes it seem difficult because you need to relearn simple things.
Best of all, the OS is free.