X vs. XP.com Site Launched 200
Dan Pouliot writes "I've been compiling a shootout of X vs. XP for some time, but I've finally given it it's own domain xvsxp.com. Sure, I prefer Macs, but I've tried to have this site be as objective (and thorough) a shootout as possible."
Re:Organisation, Issues (Score:3, Informative)
IME, the Mac apps that quit on close are utilities that people can be assumed to be finished working with when they close the primary window-- Calculator, Disk Utility, Key Caps, etc. Like, when I'm using Calculator, I switch away from it if I need to refer to something else. When I'm done with it, I close it. I think this fits the desktop metaphor well because switching away from the calculator is analagous to leaving it on the table in front of you, and closing it is like putting it back into a drawer when you're done with it.
Plus most of them are so small in size that they can be relaunched just as quickly as switching to them and spawning a new window if they were still active.
~Philly
Re:Pricing Perspective: (Score:4, Informative)
No, you are wrong, idiot. I have 3 Macs running OS X at home and the family pack @ $199 is still a good deal even if it's just for 2 machines.
>> OS X now seems quite expensive.
You are talking shit. At amazon.com, Mac OS X sells for $96.99, much cheaper than Red Hat 8 Pro for $116.99 and Win XP Pro for $199, and comes with more and better software than the other two put together.
Re:Organisation, Issues (Score:3, Informative)
Why not? An applications can run without any document window, it might be doing some house keeping at background.
Most of the times when the user closes a document window, he or she doesn't intend to stop the application. When people open and close lots of document windows, it's very annoying that they have to remember avoiding closing the last window and killing the application by accident.
Plus, due to the excellent virtual memory system in OS X, there is really no need at all to frequently close documents or quit applications - you can hide all the documents of the front application or all the other applications by a single key stroke, and the background apps consumes very little CPU or RAM.
Could use some improvement... (Score:5, Informative)
? Use of Internet Explorer as a benchmark of dragging support. For both OSX and XP, they docked points because Explorer didn't do something (such as drop text on the desktop as a clipping), while noting that Mozilla or Opera or some other browser did it correctly. If you're going to use specific software, test Safari Beta vs Explorer (the "beta" part gives Explorer the advantage, of course); otherwise, use several browsers.
? He could have mentioned OSX's annoying method of converting / to : and back in the filesystems.
? Search on Mac has a similar annoyance in screen real-estate to that in Windows: the default position of the path drawer is too high, making it impossible to read long paths.
? OS X help system is slow as sin. And although I don't need it, the red-ink-circled buttons in OS 9 help were very useful for beginners.
? Mail: Mail is a much better tool than Outlook, in my opinion. The spam filter is excellent and it's more secure, especially by default. It also has better plug-in support. The "number of new mails" indicator in the toolbar is also very nice.
?Browsing: I like Safari and Chimera (err Camino) much better than IE for the Mac, or IE for anything for that matter. Maybe just a personal preference.
? iChat has lots of bugs and missing features, and its interface, while neat, is a bit bloated (what do you mean, only one line of text?!?). Adium has fewer bugs but more missing features (file copying comes to mind... you can't scp to a windows machine). AIM for Mac is slower and clunkier than for Windows. I use Adium, but it could use improvement (we'll see when 2.0 comes out).
Re:Some errors (Score:5, Informative)
What the fuck are you talking about? The OS X Finder does have "the classic directory tree + file list" called list view, and is miles ahead of Windows Explorer in at least 6 ways:
(1) Column View is the best feature for file browsing not available on any other OS.
(2) Spring-loaded folder makes it possible to drag and drop files to any depth without opening lots of windows.
(3) Finder toolbar is much more configurable than Windows Explorer.
(4) Music, graphics and movies can be played or viewed right in the Finder preview pane without starting applications.
(5) One-click search by content, size, type, date, extension, or visibility.
(6) Automation with AppleScript.
Oh, if that's not powerful enough, there is always the Unix terminal to play with: csh, tcsh, bash, Perl, Python, Ruby and lots other tools all preloaded. Windows is not even remotely close.
>> Connecting to remote machines in Windows is vastly superior. You can navigate directly to machines, the shares they have and manipulate things in those shares - even launch programs - all without having to map or mount the share.
Do you know anything about networking at all? Windows only understand Windows or SMB, while OS X can handle Windows as well as NFS, UFS, HFS+ and SMB. What do you mean by "without having to map or mount the share"? Surely you still have to login to a remote machine before accessing it. And OS X comes with Rendezvous ZeroConf so that devices (not just computers) can discover each other.
Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
I will admit that I've upgraded the memory to 320 megs or so. But even on a 300 mhz G3, running with a Rage Pro chip, things work surprisingly smoothly and well. I wouldn't do all my development on that machine if I had a choice, but for day-to-day usage it's perfectly fine.
-fred
Re:Organisation, Issues (Score:2, Informative)
Let's just agree that different people prefer different things. It's not like the Mac doesn't support multi-button mice and scroll wheels. And if you're going to argue that Apple not including one causes an extra cost to get one, then I'd say that probably quite a good deal of PC users go buy another mouse from the typically crappy one that came with your typically cheap PC, causing an identical extra cost.
Re: Menubars
True, the Mac menubar system was probably greatly influenced by the small screens we all used a long time ago, but it still very true that it has a great advantage from Fitts Law. I don't buy the idea that not having to click on a background window to select a menu item for it is an advantage. That only works when the menu item is not covered by another window and when the application does not implement that stupid metaphor MS introduced of a background app ignoring the first click as a command and just using it to bring the window to the front. This metaphor is only stupid because they only implement it in some of their apps and not system wide, so you get inconsistent behavior, which is far worse than consistently using either method.
The other thing is the damn MDI (multiple document interface). Within an application using this mode, you get a one-menu system, which is like a Mac, and it invalidates the multi-menu-is-better argument unless you throw out MDI apps. The problem with MDI is that the windows are trapped within the host app, so most apps like this are used with the document maximized within the app (also since the MDI window management functions are lame). Now combine this with DDE or "smart" apps that open documents I click on as a new MDI window in an existing instance of the already open app, and I see the document open, but then unless I look, I don't know if its a new application window that I can just close or if its a new window within the existing app. Many is the time I've closed the app, thinking it was a new app window for the document, but it was really just a new window in the existing app, and I just closed the handful of other documents it had open. True, I'll not lose data, but I'll lose several places where I was. So now I have to have the habit of closing the MDI document window first, then see if there are any more - if none, then I can close the app window. This doesn't even start to talk about the fact that an MDI app cannot have document windows mixed with those of another app. In fact, MDI causes the app to have a filled background behind its child windows that obscures things behind it. This kind of thing is what makes the Windows way completely app-centric and totally unfriendly to a doc-centric way of thinking. And this even within the supposedly "integrated" office apps!
Re: App not closing when last doc window closes
I agree that it takes getting used to on a Mac the app not closing when the last doc window closes. A PC user would really like to have an app close button on the menubar, but this is again just a holdover from app-centric thinking. A PC user thinks that they are thinking "I'm done with Acrobat Reader - close Acrobat Reader", but they are really thinking "I'm done with this document". It's just that it's actually easier (ironically via Fitt's Law) to close the app rather than the document because the app close button is in the top right corner of the screen (not always if the window is not maximized, but many people do have their apps maximized), or if the app is not maximized, it is visually the primary "x" button, so you are drawn to click it first, which is made even easier since they tend to be right next to each other. This gets back to my previous point of MDIs - I wind up closing the app and every other possibly unrelated document that app had open. This is hardly acceptable UI behavior.
What has been the complaint about older Mac OS versions, is that there was no immediate visibility of apps that were open with no documents unless they were the foreground app. The app list was a drop down list, so you couldn't see the others until you dropped it down, and since there is only one menu bar, then you don't have other menubars in the background to give you a clue (but then if you had minimized a Windows window, you would not see a menubar either). Windows had a similar problem prior to Win95 with minimized apps because they went to the "desktop" behind other windows. But now Mac OS X gives visibility to the open apps via the dock so that even if they have no open windows, you know they are open. So let's not beat up OS X for a shortcoming of OS 9 and prior had, which seens to be all that many ex-Mac users seem to remember because they don't think that things may have changed with OS X. Many only remember and criticize the cooperative multitasking of OS 9 and prior while forgetting that Win 3.x used exactly that, and Win9x still used it when 3.x programs were running (did you know that Win95 could have two 32 bit programs running but be cooperatively multitasking because they were thunking down into 16 bit code a lot of the "32 bit" code just called down to 16 bit code?).
Re: Having those unclosed windowless apps open in the backround does not affect performance
I mostly disagree with this. It is true that in general, this makes opening a document for one of the open apps load quicker, but as you have enough apps open to commit all your physical memory, then opening other apps will be slower because the system will have to page out the idle background apps to make room for the new foreground app. If the OS were to implement a policy of paging out apps that have been idle for a while, then you would not have to wait for a pageout to make room when opening a new app, but you would have to wait for the idle app to be paged back in when you opened a document for that idle app. However, this would be faster than reloading the app from scratch due to not needing to initialize the app.
defrag (Score:4, Informative)
I remember finding out that ext2 doesn't get fragmented, and doing a happy dance. Not having to defrag beats the best defrag utility in existance, even if it checks email and handles buggy IMAP servers.
Re:Dock feedback far from pointless (Score:1, Informative)
I then proceded to play 4 quicktime movies with sound mixing on and minimized them to the dock. My system was still plenty responsive then too (although CPU usage was pegged.)
Admittedly, I have a recent powermac with quartz extreme. maybe it was worse in older OSXs?
Re:Some errors (Score:2, Informative)
File Management:
You can recreate this file list + tree thing is easy. Set to list view then turn off all the columns. Icon View can be ordered as more than Name, it includes date modified, date created, size and kind. As a matter of fact all the 6 views in windows can be recreated by using the View Options control panel (Cmd-J). Also Column View supports spring lodaed folders so the easily movings things point is moot. Also copy and paste is supported for copying files as was covered in the section on drag and drop. It was mentioned as a blurb.
File Systems
NFS is transparent from any other fs. I had several user's accounts NFS mounted and none of them ever had a problem. Though i do agree that SMB and FTP is flaky, the rest is simply untrue.
The rest I just couldn't care less about.
Re:sorry, try again (Score:3, Informative)
There's a retail site near me that sells used G3 boxes pretty cheap, like $200 for a 333Mhz mini tower.
Re:Organisation, Issues (Score:5, Informative)
Why couldn't you MS trained monkeys see things from a slightly different angle? A file manager like Finder might have a background thread for content indexing or repairing the file system, even if there is no browsing windows.
>> As previously mentioned, the user shouldn't have to think about the application at all. The whole concept is simply unintuitive.
That's just your simplistic world view. People do think about applications, and frequently choose different tools for the same document.
>> The Mac in front of me has 512MB of RAM and an uptime of less than a day. Thus far OS X has create 3 "swapfiles" of 80MB apiece for paging reasons. All that is running is X11, MSN Messenger, Mail, Safari, Terminal, Word and Excel. That's a _lot_ of memory usage.
And my 400 MHz iMac with 512MB RAM runs 24/7 for weeks or months as a software AirPort base station for web browsing and for kidds playing games and my wife doing research (statistic analysis, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc). My 700 iBook is used for programming Unix / Java / C++ (X11, tcsh, bash, Ruby, Perl, JBuilder, Eclipse, NetBeans, Project Builder, Interface Builder, etc), web design and graphics (FireWorks, Flash, DreamWeaver), database (MySQL, PostgreSQL), web browsing (Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, IE), networking and web serving (FTP, Apache, SMB, AFP, Firewall, NetInfo, AirPort wireless, iDisk, iChat, iSync, Network Utility), Word, Excel, PowerPoint, QuickTime, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, Mail, Address Book, OmniDictionary, World Book, and more. Typically, there are 70 to 80 processes running, and I generally don't quit applications, so they run continuously for days or weeks, and everything remains responsive virtually all the time.
Re:Pricing Perspective: (Score:2, Informative)
Apple also offers other licensing options (10, 25, 50, 100, 250, etc) for people that maintain larger installations. They're just not offered in the retail section.
But then again, I don't expect to be able to walk into a Best Buy and purchase a 50 client license pack for Windows 2000/XP (although I can do that for various Linux distros since the installation license does not even mention how many machines you can install...).