Blog Reader's Profound Opinion on Mac vs Linux vs Windows - Good Read!

The Macintosh operating system cannot be compared to other operating systems. It fills a computing niche that has long since disappeared. The reason that Apple moved to FreeBSD, with the operative word being Free, was because Apple could not extend its own code base into a modern networked programming world any more than the old Windows before NT core came along. The old, old Windows crap was single user to the core and had to be replaced with NT core, which is a heavy duty server core OS designed to take on the Network big boys at Sun and IBM.

In order to deal with a fully wired and networked world Microsoft went with NT core to replace all its old code base and to make sure that their OS would stay modern. The old Windows core died with windows ME and nobody cried at all since with its death went all the single user problems that had been hammered into the code base over ten years. Apple went to FreeBSD as its core since the BSD license said that they could use it in any way they wanted to use it Apple got a fully functioning core OS from the FreeBSD open source programmers and the open source programmers fixed all of Apple’s core OS problems for them. So ask yourself this, when Novell and other groups are done putting a pretty face on Unix how well is Apple going to look then? Until recently, the Compiz/Beryl groups were working at odds but now they are united and Ubuntu and all the other linux variants are putting in the Compiz-Fusion which is now out there and maturing at a blazing pace. Check back next summer or next year at this time and tell me what you see then? Right now, the movement to a much better presentation foundation for Linux is just starting. KDE 4 may or may not be worth writing home about when it comes out but it will be one of over a dozen different graphical front ends that will run on any hardware out there.

Windows won the OS wars because it did not do Vendor hardware lock down like all Microsoft’s competitors did. Leopard is locked down to the hardware from Apple and in spite of moving to an intel core base Apple can’t make money selling Leopard at all as an OS all by itself so in order to use Leopard you have to have all the vendor lock down from Apple instead of the freedom to have whatever hardware you want to run. The reason that Apple can’t make money selling its OS in a free and open market is because Apple would then have to do what Microsoft and now Linux did, which is get hardware agnostic and it would take about twenty times the money already spent on Leopard to make it totally hardware agnostic.

In the hardware agnostic world we don’t have smoothly integrated hardware and software from a single vendor and yet both Vista and Linux are superb general purpose workstations that anyone can go buy or install for free. You mentioned at least ten odd ball things you did not like in Leopard and you probably will never get fixes for those things in the proprietary world of Apple, ever. Apple seldom, if ever, listens to its customers and its designers don’t seem to be in sync with their customer base at all.

Apple is not to be admired but dumped. It is everything the Linux world is against and is the last of the hard core vendor lock down computer companies left for the Penguin to eat up. That time is not too far away. Right now, I can run any version of Unix or Linux on my Vista box as a virtual machine and I have my XP copy running on Ubuntu in VMWare virtual machine.

You can do the same thing on the Mac, use virtual machines to run other operating systems but the problem is that nobody can run the Mac software without having a Mac. The really sad part is that the Mac would not be there if it were not for all the work done in the open source world for them. The older, single user core Macs were horrible. Why did it take Apple so long to get a winner here? They have had only one architecture to work with at a time. Is Apple just hardware churning to get business? Of course they are. Their OS is no more intuitive than any of the Linux front ends out there and in fact the Linux front ends are pretty easy to learn and use on a daily basis.

Gnome is rather odd to me and I definitely agree that the Gnome front end in OpenSuse should be adopted in all the Gnomes. The KDE front end in OpenSuse I do not like, though. The usability studies done by Microsoft for Vista showed that the OpenSuse Gnome front end was a winner and this design and practices is in Vista. Vista also moved the most likely to be used elements int the Vista start button and organized the file system around the same elements of usability that Novell did with Gnome.

In usability studies done a long time ago and in the present Vista wins hands down in ease of use and for new users. Microsoft pretty much owns the notions of making windows useful and once you run one Windows program you pretty much have them all learned was by design at Microsoft and not accidental at all. The usability guidelines for Windows developers are ancient and still with us. Vista can and will take user front ends into a more web like user experience using the Expression tools for Vista.

The era of desktops being the reason for computers is long over. The winners in the modern era are still going to be the operating systems that can be used on any hardware and the operating systems that make it possible to do workstation tasks will continue to win here in the future. Linux ate up all the old school unix vendors like Sun and even IBM because it is free and better on all measurements than their very rich cousins in the main frame world. This was done by volunteers who are, even on a bad day, far more responsive to end users than Apple or any of the old vendor lock down pros ever were.

Microsoft, though, is equally smart and a hard competitor. The Mac is the computing world’s weak sister and deserves derision instead of praise. Open up the Mac and make it work on all hardware and lets see how well Apple does as a competitor on just any old box like Microsoft or Linux does. The code base in the Mac should be working a whole lot better than it does considering they have no cost for the core OS and are using off the shelf hardware what happened? Why are there still problems with the Mac? Well, their code base is why. In order to churn hardware they have had to constantly re-work and re-do their software and their software base has been shown to be very buggy. Vista had about twelve critical issues last year but Apple averaged ten a month. This means that if you want a secure and problem free computing experience you have to go with the workstation pros at Microsoft. Linux software is also constantly being monitored and updates fly fast and furious but Apple is the one that lies about its competitors and lies about how buggy its code base really is. But they were caught out in their lies about Vista since Vista is much better for day to day work and Vista and all the Linuxes run on damn near any hardware you can imagine and still works better and is more bug free than a single architecture OS like the Mac the Mac users should just dump their Macs and go with either a commodity Windows box at half to one third the cost of a Mac and get far better performance out of them.

I have Vista on a core two duo but it runs like a raped ape. I also have it on a single procesor with just a gig of ram and it also runs well. I add in an extra meg of memory stick ram and it runs even better. So explain to me why I can get world class performance out of XP class boxes using XP, Vista 32 or Linux and explain to me why the Mac look and feel some how trumps the power of the operating systems you are dissing here? Now, take the Mac OS and run it on the same low end hardware you ran Ubuntu on and tell me who wins? What, you can’t get Leopard to run on anything other than Apple hardware? It seems to me that if you are going to compare these OSes the least you can do is run them all on the same hardware. If you run Vista on the Mac using boot camp you will find it not only runs faster but is far more dependable and has a much larger software base at over 100,000 plus applications for Windows. Linux also runs over 30,000 applications and the Mac, even using FreeBSD software, only has 20,000 applications written for it. If you take out the open source software for the Mac you will find you are down to roughly five thousand native Mac applications.

You did mention this weakness in Windows and in Linux, the over abundance of software and choices. These choices can mean the difference between your company succeeding and failing or your kids succeeding or failing in school. The Linux and Windows world allows for right sizing and if you don’t have money then you can easily get the free software you need or the very lost cost Windows software you need if you do have enough money to pay for software. But if you go out today and check you will see that you can buy your family three computers for the cost of a single Leopard equipped computer and if you go with open source you can even go with 50,000 software tools and suites in the Linux world. You can certainly compare Apples and oranges but all you are going to get is that they are both round. FreeBSD is quite ugly and needs a face lift but Linux is getting that face lift now and this time next year you will probably be wondering why you thought the Leopard crap was so cool after you realize how much of it was stolen directly from the open source world it will make you wonder why anyone can support Apple for any reason.