Mac OS X Versus Windows Vista, The Rematch 709
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek follows up its widely read review where Mac OS X beat out Windows Vista in a head-to-head comparison, with a reader debate on which is really the superior operating system. From the article: 'Mac users love venting about Windows... Any company that calls their techs "geniuses" thrive in forums like this. They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes. Windows Vista all the way. If Windows sucks soooo much, how come more people are familiar with it than Mac OS X? Last time I checked, Windows wasn't just a business operating system. Tons upon tons of people use it and like it.'"
Appletalk? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have two Macs at home and I can not remember using it.
We may *use* windows, but like it? (Score:4, Interesting)
But it's where the games are. First of Linux or Apple OS to get all the games Windows gets, and I'd change in a heartbeat.
Didn't we have a whole trial on this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to recall a lawsuit regarding Microsoft's predatory practices by making it financially difficult for vendors to sell any operations system other than Dos and Windows - then there's the code stealing (Doublespace), the intential breaking (DR DOS), and other practices that, over time, have helped to lead to not just Microsoft's and Windows domination, but also the discouragement of any other operating systems from gaining hold.
I thought there was a whole court case about this, Microsoft being found guilty or something. But since there was no punishment, I must be wrong.
Who loves Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh? In my experience, almost all Windows users hate it. They use it because they have no idea that there's a choice. They didn't buy "windows", they bought "a computer", and that mysterious thing called "Windows" came with it. From the name, they understand that "Windows" is the thing that draws the windows on the screen. All computers do that, so they all have "Windows", right? Even those who have heard of Apple tend to think that Macs run Windows, because you can look at the screen and see the windows.
An important reason for all this is that Microsoft has an advertising budget larger than the budgets of all their competitors combined. This simple situation is all you need to understand MS's market dominance. (Though their ability to lock out competitors via their contracts with retailers also helps.)
Indeed...and Anatole France summed up such logic: (Score:4, Interesting)
There was also a time when the vast majority of people thougth that the world was flat...that didn't work out so well, either.
*sigh* (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, this whole thing pretty much boils down to "which one do you prefer?" - how scientific is that?!
Give me a real debate ffs; better default security, faster networking, better f/s, better app-support, better memory management....anything! Anything but "which one's better?"!
Christ, it's Friday night, everyone's going out and I'm on slashdot. Good evening everyone, the beers are calling.
Re:New results: Windows Wins! (Score:2, Interesting)
I work on OSX every day, I develop software for both OSX and Windows, and reliability-wise, OSX is not that much better than Windows. It's not the uncrashable behemoth that Mac fanboys would like to pretend it is, though I do find that as a general non-scientific statement it crashes less than Windows. This is due to a lot of factors, not the least of which is the fact that your hardware configs are limited, so driver conflicts that bring Windows to its knees simply do not have an opportunity to manifest itself on a Mac.
On the other hand, the user doesn't care *why* their machine doesn't work, just that it doesn't. Reliability-wise I would say OSX wins, but only by a slim margin.
Agreed on the UI though, Windows' UI has always been obfuscated to me, and I find OSX much more intuitive. I've convinced many people to switch to Mac, and other than the 2-week "OMG I CANT TO ANYTHING!" break-in period, all now prefer OSX to Windows.
Also agreed on cost. Windows costs an ass-load. OSX costs $100 every couple years. All in all I see the whole cost argument as pretty moot: nobody says you have to buy Vista and/or Leopard. Tiger/XP runs just fine, why is cost a factor in the OS wars at all?
Re:the underlying argument (between the enemy line (Score:5, Interesting)
Same here. Of course, the terminal I usually go running for is called Terminal. :-) (I.e., most of my Unix work these days is on OS X.)
True Story (Score:5, Interesting)
My company has a policy where by all purchase orders must be submitted using a form in Outlook. Forms are the one thing my Mac can't do because Microsoft dosen't want Macs to have Outlook. (Run OS 9 to get Outlook? Get real, I haven't run "classic" Mac OS in over 6 years. It's not even installed on any of my Macs.)
So I fire up my PC. Outlook is hosed. No problem, just uninstall and reinstall from the company file server. Connect to the VPN, go out to the file server and AUTHENTICATION DENIED.
WTF? Try several times, on the phone with company tech support. They check my permissions in the domain, still can't get in. Finally I say, "Hang on, let me try something."
I close the VPN tunnel on the PC. Connect to the VPN on my Mac. Go straight to the file server and login without a problem using the same domain credentials. Download the Outlook installer and then map a drive letter on my PC to my Mac to get the software to my PC.
Ironic isn't it? Windows would not authenticate with a Windows file server in a Windows Active Directory Domain. But my Mac just waltzed right in and got what I needed.
I don't hate Microsoft because of Windows. I hate Microsoft because they made mediocre software the standard.
very complimentary of Tiger (Score:1, Interesting)
I use Nikon Capture NX and Photoshop 7 regularly, Firefox, NeoOffice (better than MS Office), edit web pages, and use my Archos GMini MP3 player.
The best observation is WinXP requires constant attention and updating, and fucking with antivirus stuff. I don't even see Tiger, it's disappeared.
I'm a fundraiser for a tiny nonprofit, a side job is keeping one WinXP and a dozen Win98 and one DOS computer running. I keep telling them Mac is the way to go to save money.
Re:Didn't we have a whole trial on this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember BeOS? Be was going to bring all the cool, hip video and audio work from Apple back to the PC with its amazing multitasking support. So they went around and tried to get companies to ship their OS on hardware, but wait! Microsoft was banning PC makers from shipping computers without Windows if they wanted to sell a single PC with it. So they went around and tried to convince companies to sell machines that could dual boot, but that was a no-go too, Microsoft didn't allow anyone to sell a PC with a modified boot loader. Be offered a desktop icon and a program that the user could click, that would repartition the drive, install BeOS, and set up dual booting, but MS said "no, only approved partners' icons can appear on the desktop".
I think they eventually managed to convince some company to ship it despite all this, and there might be a few hundred BeOS installs still out there, buried in progra~1, waiting for their owner to discover and install them.
Anyway, explain why you believe Apple for the PC would have been different?
Re:Appletalk? (Score:2, Interesting)
1. The reason that Windows sucks is because the whole system is broken and MS can't fix it.
2. The reason that OS X sucks is because of annoying crap that Apple does on purpose.
Perhaps I should justify myself better than that. Here are my gripes about windows:
~ Everything is bundled, which makes using it bloated and overly complex. WMP 10, Internet Explorer.... if I don't like them, it's practically impossible to get rid of them.
~ Purposely incompatible formats. Annoying. Specifically locks competitors out of Office file formats, particularly Access files. I suppose this is MS more so than Windows, but it still counts.
~ BSOD. I used Windows 98 for a long time, and miserably so. I got a new computer that had Windows ME on it, hoping it would be better. Boy was I wrong.
~ Security, Security, Security. Need I say more? I thought MS was going to get better over the years, but after the rootkit disaster, it's clearly gotten worse. Now with Vista's core open to HDCP downgrading, etc, it's DEFINITELY gotten worse. Bleh. Just what I need bundled into an OS. DRM, and lots of it.
Here are my gripes about Apple:
~ Everything is disabled. Cutting/Pasting in Finder. Writing files to ftp servers with integrated client.
~ Slow slow slow. Not really in a performance sense of the word, but annoying crap. Window animations, while nice-looking, take too long; when you point to a slide-open menu, you have to hover over it for too long before it actually opens up (then has an animation).
~ Changing annoying defaults is a pain. For instance, to show hidden files, you have to type (in terminal): "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE". How the hell am I supposed to just know that? Thank god for Google.
~ I got about 100 more gripes like this... I could go on all day.
~ Annoying priss-ass fanboys. Everywhere. Practically everyone that has a Mac is a walking billboard. Apple is a company that makes money off of you. They're not paying you to advertise, and I probably don't even like your computer. Shut up.
~ Apple and the courtroom. Everything has to be proprietary and exclusive. Realplayer music compatible with iTunes? God forbid. Some smart programmers do some serious leg work porting OS X over to standard x86 hardware. Thank them and credit them, like Google would probably do? Nah, let's sue the shit out of them.
As I said before, the key difference here is how easily the problem would be remedied. The windows problems.... well, it's taken generations to fix, and they still don't have it right. Even with the largest pool of programmers and arguably some of the best. Sucks. Apple's problems are rather trivial, but extremely annoying. Not so much that they're as much of a problem as BSOD's, but it's so irritating that they could fix all of these problems and just... don't. Again, God forbid we could get an advanced device like a mouse with a 2nd button and a wheel shipped with the rest of the computer. Go figure. There you have it. One of the less biased reviews of Windows and OS X you'll see for a while. Take it or leave it.
Re:informal tone (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Who loves Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
I've pretty much made the decision to never move to Vista. Between XP, OS X, and linux I should be able to run any program I need to for the foreseeable future. Of course I'll be hosed when MS forces people to move to Vista for DX10, but then I'll just get my game fix from whatever console is hot atm.
Re:Didn't we have a whole trial on this? (Score:4, Interesting)
OS X is the closest I've gotten to what BeOS was, and in many respects it's excelled far beyond BeOS. I still miss the leanness that was BeOS though. If Haiku would take off, perhaps I'd buy a PC just to run it.
Re:the underlying argument (between the enemy line (Score:3, Interesting)
When OSX hit the market I was ready and waiting for a chance to play around with the UNIX tools. I use Links, Scribus, GIMP, Pico, and Inkscape quite often. Those were the Linux apps I used the most. If you like playing in the UNIX/Linux world, OSX has a window into it right there in the
I am not a gamer, I am not a bean counter so Windows is not essential to me. I chose the OS with the most appealing interface and the company that seemed to be friendly to the creative arts. Mac OS just seems to demand less of me than Windows. The interface seemed more appealing to the eye. MS still hasn't learned to be subtle. Their look is cartoonish and angular. They really need someone with an artist's eye to design the look and feel of the interface.
That's what it comes down to: what suits you best.
Re:We may *use* windows, but like it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a lying female.
IT vs OSX (Score:2, Interesting)
OSX, it's a painful tack-on. You can't lock a desktop down particularly much (and I don't want to hear about 'with mac's you don't have to, users can't do bad things to themself,' you haven't met my users (grade school kids and worse, their teachers)). Everything is half centrally controlled, half hands on each machine.
I've moved on from that job, supporting PCs and Macs in a school district, so maybe opendirectory and Apple's management tools have grown, but somehow I doubt it.
Re:Appletalk? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, sounds about right; AFP uses a keepalive 'tickle' system to determine whether the other end of the connection is there. Usually a tickle packet (16 bytes) is sent from server to client about once every 30 seconds, and the client will either do the same or (more usually) send one back every time it receives one. There are some timeouts (I think 60 seconds or 120 seconds, depending on whether one side is expecting data from the other) where if one end doesn't receive a tickle during that time, it assumes the connection has gone down.
The nice thing in AFP 3 (introduced in OS X) is that on top of this they added protocol support for reconnects. So you can have your connection drop and choose not to automatically disconnect (although you won't be able to access the volume -- may hit timeouts if you try), and when the connection is once more available it will re-establish a connection and quite possibly get back the same session you had before, complete with opened files and suchlike. It also has nice sleep support, but that's not very new (been around since AFP 2.3) -- a client can tell the server it's going to sleep, and that basically sets the server's no-tickle-disconnect timeout to 24 hours.
-Q
Heh... can you tell I do this for a living? ;o)
Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a few in Vista, just as there are some in OSX and other OSes, but nothing as bad as XP.
They tend to be personally subjective in Vista, rather than what people saw as non-sense in XP. UPnP was big one people that was goofy in XP, and for the timeframe it was, but now that most routers and home networking devices utilize it, it is no longer something you would want to turn off, since using UPnP applications can easily access router for applications like bittorrent.
If you don't need defender, you can kill it (but don't recommend for novice users) as it is the final defense against spyware if the user is stupid enought to fully click through to allow a bad application to run.
You can also kill the TS server if you don't ever have more than one person logged in or plan on remote log in, but again, this is a feature most families and geeks use.
There is also stuff like the DNS cache like in XP, but this means it has to grab the DNS from your server each time, and also considering it is about 16K of space used in System RAM, it is not a big service. (Many of even the 'extra' XP services were quite lite that many people would go around turning off, all less than 128K combined.)
You could also kill the Search system, but since it has almost no utilization on the system once the system is indexed, it would be a waste to lose its functionality.
Of course you can turn off the themes manager or DWM, however by turning off DWM and AERO, you actually lose a lot of performance on application screen redrawing, and even if you are using Vista Basic the DWM uses DirectX7 Video card to accelerate GDI and WPF application drawing that you lose with this turned off.
There are a few other services that people will tell you can live without, as they are supporting new specifications and new technologies that are NOT widely used, however when you do start using these technologies on your computer or network, you will want to get them turned back on, and again, they are under 512K in total RAM usage and sit dormate until used.
Vista has more 'sense' to the services installed and turned on than XP, but again this is really subjective. For example XP installed a disabled Telnet Server and active client, and people complained, yet in Vista this is not installed by default, and guess what, people are complaining...
I find it highly crazy that people think Windows is the only OS with lots of underlying process/services when that is what makes up all OSes, whether they are apparently visible or not...
Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe if they lower the price within a few weeks (not sure the exact time frame) of buying your machine, they'll refund the difference.
Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves (Score:1, Interesting)
I have a Mac Mini too, and what a charming, discreet, perfect little computer it is. It sits there quietly under my TV, serving up music and videos at my command and doing a bit of large-screen Google Earthing and iChatting on top.
Computer as appliance - the way it should always have been.
Re:Wait a minute! (Score:5, Interesting)
As I understand it, the problem comes from the fact that the VM subsystem is in the Mach layer. This means that every VM operation (e.g. mapping or unmapping a page) has to go through two layers of indirection, the second of which is incredibly slow.
I wrote some code recently that mmap'd a large data structure (a few GBs). Actually, there were a few back-ends, one used mmap, one used POSIX AIO. On FreeBSD, they were both roughly the same speed. On OS X, the mmap back end was not just an order of magnitude slower than AIO, it was an order of magnitude slower than a userspace demand-paging approach (no pre-fetching). To me, this says something is seriously wrong with the VM subsystem. I should have had more overhead from all the extra system calls and extra copies doing the demand paging myself than the kernel would have had.
Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
Spotlight can do the same sort of thing, but it's much slower. My app just has a sorted NSArray of all applications and an NSDictionary for mapping them to the executables for launching, so it will find them as fast as you can type (Spotlight has a huge index of things to search).