Mac, PC(Windows), or Linux/Unix

[itznfb]

Windows for over 20 years. Never had any problem, never had to worry about viruses, etc.

Congrats on not having problems with windows. People like you are far and few between(or you are still using 3.1).

Not really. My parents, my sister and my grandparents have also been 20+ year users without a single issue.

I've also run several desktop departments and had to deal with nothing but hardware failures. Which you'll have to deal with no matter the platform.

Liked WindowsME

OSX was the only reasonable choice for me, since I didn't want to bother with Linux distros, and Windows wasn't functional

I can accept people saying they use Mac because they have a personal attraction to it. They like the feel... whatever. But when people say Windows isn't functional.... c'mon. Windows XP is the most functional and stable desktop OS ever released to a public market. I've seen way more gray screens of death on Macs due to hardware driver issues than I have blue screen of deaths on Windows. Which is ridiculous since Mac on uses a specific set of hardware specifically to avoid this issue and they still can't accomplish that task.

 

[musicaleCA]

Apple makes it really hard to futz with the hardware of anything but a Mac Pro. Reason being two-fold. They market to people who won't want to futz with the internals anyway, and they can make their stuff sexier and more compact if they cut you out of the loop. You can take the screen off an iMac, but that's tricksy. And Apple solders the CPU and GPU to their boards, so those can't be replaced. About the only thing you can touch is RAM.

Of course, with a Mac Pro, none of that applies. It's big, it has space, and my gods, are the ones today ever fantastic. Internal drives just pop-in, and pop-out (thank you eSATA.) Video cards are the same (thank your PCIe). I kinda gawked at what the Xeon processors were sitting under though: a heat sink bigger than my two fists. :shock:

 

[musicaleCA]

I can accept people saying they use Mac because they have a personal attraction to it. They like the feel... whatever. But when people say Windows isn't functional.... c'mon. Windows XP is the most functional and stable desktop OS ever released to a public market. I've seen way more gray screens of death on Macs due to hardware driver issues than I have blue screen of deaths on Windows. Which is ridiculous since Mac on uses a specific set of hardware specifically to avoid this issue and they still can't accomplish that task.

Erm, yep. That's what I said. XP ain't functional. Not for what I needed it to do. And the GUI was never a comfortable interface for me to work with regardless. I much rather have the intuitive, right-hemisphere-oriented mess of exposé and spaces, than the taskbar *shudder* or the cut-and-dry, perfectly scaled grid of Vista's equivalent feature.

And that said, some Linux operating environments are WAY, WAY better than either.

And as for hardware drivers...You sure you're talking about OS X here? I haven't had a single problem with Apple's hardware not working with their current OS. And I've seen far more BSoD's in my lifetime than kernel panics.

 

[itznfb]

Apple makes it really hard to futz with the hardware of anything but a Mac Pro. Reason being two-fold. They market to people who won't want to futz with the internals anyway, and they can make their stuff sexier and more compact if they cut you out of the loop. You can take the screen off an iMac, but that's tricksy. And Apple solders the CPU and GPU to their boards, so those can't be replaced. About the only thing you can touch is RAM.

Of course, with a Mac Pro, none of that applies. It's big, it has space, and my gods, are the ones today ever fantastic. Internal drives just pop-in, and pop-out (thank you eSATA.) Video cards are the same (thank your PCIe). I kinda gawked at what the Xeon processors were sitting under though: a heat sink bigger than my two fists. :shock:

I'm not sure what type of customizations they've done as I don't work in the desktop department of my current company... and this is the only experience I have with MacBook Pro. But our desktop team rolled out a beta program with 5,000 MacBook Pro's to technical users in January and by the beginning of this month they had them all replaced with HP Elite Books because of all the issues they had with them. Granted a lot of the issues were with Fusion but the users that had requested them (VPs) just kept complaining that they were unusable.

 

[itznfb]

I can accept people saying they use Mac because they have a personal attraction to it. They like the feel... whatever. But when people say Windows isn't functional.... c'mon. Windows XP is the most functional and stable desktop OS ever released to a public market. I've seen way more gray screens of death on Macs due to hardware driver issues than I have blue screen of deaths on Windows. Which is ridiculous since Mac on uses a specific set of hardware specifically to avoid this issue and they still can't accomplish that task.

Erm, yep. That's what I said. XP ain't functional. Not for what I needed it to do. And the GUI was never a comfortable interface for me to work with regardless. I much rather have the intuitive, right-hemisphere-oriented mess of exposé and spaces, than the taskbar *shudder* or the cut-and-dry, perfectly scaled grid of Vista's equivalent feature.

And that said, some Linux operating environments are WAY, WAY better than either.

And as for hardware drivers...You sure you're talking about OS X here? I haven't had a single problem with Apple's hardware not working with their current OS. And I've seen far more BSoD's in my lifetime than kernel panics.

Give me an example of how XP isn't functional.

And yes I'm talking about the most current Macbook Pro. My buddy work in the architecture department who all had Macbook Pros until Aug 1, and every time I was in a meeting with him he would at least 1 gray screen. And most of the time it would take him 10 - 20 minutes for it to even power back on. This was very common with the users.

 

[c.cloudwalker]

Granted a lot of the issues were with Fusion but the users that had requested them (VPs) just kept complaining that they were unusable.

Unusable for what reason exactly?

I mean if they've never used Macs and can't figure out out to use them within 25 seconds, you can't really hold that against Mac.

 

[itznfb]

Granted a lot of the issues were with Fusion but the users that had requested them (VPs) just kept complaining that they were unusable.

Unusable for what reason exactly?

I mean if they've never used Macs and can't figure out out to use them within 25 seconds, you can't really hold that against Mac.

They consistently gray screen. And I guess there is some issue with the power because you can sit there hitting the power button over and over and over and it doesn't turn on. I sat there watching one of them for literally 10 minutes before it actually turned on. And this is apparently affected over 50% of the stock. At least from what we received. They also complained about slowness and issues with connecting to network resources.

That being said. As of Aug 1 Mac is no longer an approved notebook or desktop in our entire corporation. A big part of that is the lack of support they received from Apple.

 

[musicaleCA]

Give me an example of how XP isn't functional.

And yes I'm talking about the most current Macbook Pro. My buddy work in the architecture department who all had Macbook Pros until Aug 1, and every time I was in a meeting with him he would at least 1 gray screen. And most of the time it would take him 10 - 20 minutes for it to even power back on. This was very common with the users.

Well that's just weird. Haven't heard that one before. Mine is from the previous generation, and I haven't had anywhere near such problems. In fact, I've always been pleasantly surprised that when I did have a catastrophic failure, the OS sprung back without me interfering. The darn thing fixes itself.

As for XP, NTFS is such an incredible PITA. Defragmentation is a time-consuming, annoying process that I had to do far, far too often (since I was and still do deal with large volumes of data, both small and large files). HFS+ manages things so much better by simply not fragmenting files in the first place if it can be avoided. And it's journaling surpasses NTFS by a modest degree.

XP does not have a UNIX-like permissions structure, which complicates file management between users, and makes it more difficult to manage for me as an administrator, and repair issues with read/write access. The basic folder structure is also a problem for me in Windows; having preference files, programs, and various other resources strewn everywhere down from the root directory is a nightmare when I need to fix something, because it's hard to know where to look. OS X, again with it's UNIX-like structure, makes this a heck of a lot easier by having standards. Application resources are contained in APP files, which are similarly contained in either the user's home folder under /Applications/, or the root applications directory. Preferences and other dynamic resources are held in under ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/ . Piece of cake, most of the time.

Services and the registry are flawed concepts that should be junked, the registry being the worst. An OS can survive quite well without it, and it does more harm than good.

Oh, and I don't like the taskbar and start menu.

Those are my reasons for leaving Windows, from a technical standpoint.

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention, that while XP needed some amount of manual work to keep it running at peek efficiency, by cleaning caches, those preload files (have I really forgotten what they're called? Bah, you probably know what I'm talking about), and so on, OS X still uses the good ol' daily, weekly, and monthly UNIX maintenance scripts. So for someone like myself who leaves their computer on all the time, OS X largely maintains itself and is less prone to that slow but inevitable decline in speed and performance that XP so often exhibited while I was using it.

 

[c.cloudwalker]

Before I respond to this, let me say once more that I do not get paid by Mac to push their products and I could not care less what anybody uses. In reality, the fewer of us Mac users there are, the fewer viruses will be written for us so I'm not even interested in making converts.

I'm not sure I know what a gray screen is but I think I can imagine. Never had one. Then again, never had a laptop either. I can't help and think however that if their laptops were so bad I would have read about it on the internet.

Slowness? Sorry, I don't get that unless you're company bought off all the laptops left over from three years ago.

As for connecting to network resources, have you given any thought to the fact that it may be a problem with your network administration people who don't know what they're doing when it comes to Macs? Isn't it possible that your company bought those machines because people wanted them (for probably the wrong reasons) but your geeks weren't quite ready to deal with them...

 

[Opher]

Give me an example of how XP isn't functional.

And yes I'm talking about the most current Macbook Pro. My buddy work in the architecture department who all had Macbook Pros until Aug 1, and every time I was in a meeting with him he would at least 1 gray screen. And most of the time it would take him 10 - 20 minutes for it to even power back on. This was very common with the users.

Had a problem yesterday. Did a nice fresh install of xp(done this like 40-50 times so i do know what im doing). Did the Updates and bam Got the worst case of blue screen ever. Now this may not be a problem with the origenal Xp but for the company behind it to release an update that will destroy it is retarded.

Ps. as with any OS when first released it will have bugs. Probably why the new macs are having problems. But if you look at Xp when first released you can see that it was a lot crappyer than the current macs.

The macs have also switched CPU architecture to which may knock them back for a bit on the stability aspect.


My point ALL computers will have problems but most OS's are more stable than windows.

 

[musicaleCA]

I'm not sure I know what a gray screen is but I think I can imagine. Never had one. Then again, never had a laptop either. I can't help and think however that if their laptops were so bad I would have read about it on the internet.

On OS X and other UNIX-based operating systems, it's called a "kernel panic". It's essentially when the core of the operating system, the kernel, chokes on something and someone forgets to do the Heimlich manoeuvre. On OS X, your screen freezes and goes grey (a transparent grey; you can still see the frozen screen) from top to bottom...actually a pretty sleek animation considering the entire OS just tripped and died. There's a message that then tells you, essentially "Well...Something went wrong there! Time to restart your computer. Whoopsee..." When you restart the OS asks to send a report to Apple, with the log of what the kernel was doing at the time.

All this kernel talk reminds me of some Linux distro my friend was talking about. Apparently it can update the kernel while it's running, making it completely unnecessary to restart for any OS updates. :shock:

 

[musicaleCA]

Ps. as with any OS when first released it will have bugs. Probably why the new macs are having problems. But if you look at Xp when first released you can see that it was a lot crappyer than the current macs.

The macs have also switched CPU architecture to which may knock them back for a bit on the stability aspect.

How right you are. OS 10.5 wasn't nearly as awesome as it is now back when it was 10.5.0.

As for architecture changing, Apple's handled that splendidly. Oh, and another reason I switched: OS X handles 32-bit and 64-bit drivers and software without issue. It doesn't matter if the program was written in either, or the driver in either, and it doesn't matter if it was written for PowerPC Macs or Intel Macs. They just work. Windows can't lay claim to that kind of seamless acceptance of new technology yet.

 

[Opher]

All this kernel talk reminds me of some Linux distro my friend was talking about. Apparently it can update the kernel while it's running, making it completely unnecessary to restart for any OS updates. :shock:

Updating a kernel while runing seems like a bad idea.:geek:

 

[Opher]

As for architecture changing, Apple's handled that splendidly. Oh, and another reason I switched: OS X handles 32-bit and 64-bit drivers and software without issue. It doesn't matter if the program was written in either, or the driver in either, and it doesn't matter if it was written for PowerPC Macs or Intel Macs. They just work. Windows can't lay claim to that kind of seamless acceptance of new technology yet.

windows never will.

It is not necessaryly there problem but also that of the (non Microsoft) software developers. Im not a windows fan but we should at least be fair.

 

[musicaleCA]

All this kernel talk reminds me of some Linux distro my friend was talking about. Apparently it can update the kernel while it's running, making it completely unnecessary to restart for any OS updates. :shock:

Updating a kernel while runing seems like a bad idea.:geek:

Indeed, unless you do it right, which they have, TMK. The kernel is held completely in memory while you update it, and somehow, it works. Crazy, I know.

As for architecture changing, Apple's handled that splendidly. Oh, and another reason I switched: OS X handles 32-bit and 64-bit drivers and software without issue. It doesn't matter if the program was written in either, or the driver in either, and it doesn't matter if it was written for PowerPC Macs or Intel Macs. They just work. Windows can't lay claim to that kind of seamless acceptance of new technology yet.

windows never will.

It is not necessaryly there problem but also that of the (non Microsoft) software developers. Im not a windows fan but we should at least be fair.

I think the problem really is with standards. Apple sets-out clear standards for almost everything, particularly the interface of programs, and where resources should be located. With the ApplicationSupport directory, it's kinda like they're saying "Here you go, put your stuff in here, and create whatever crazy directory structure you want, just don't leave your designated play pen."

OS X is the zoo, Windows is the jungle.