On Jul 9, 2009, at 10:50 AM, Dave Land wrote:
I am not like our friend Mario with his "57 Varieties" approach to operating systems. I use Mac OS X almost exclusively because operating system fit and finish matter to me. (This is not a statement of superiority to Mario, merely noting a difference. I am left-handed, too, but I don't hold that over him, either. I become competent in pretty much any OS you toss me into in a short time, but given a preference, I'll drive a Honda with a manual transmission and use Mac OS X.)
Well, I'll admit it -- I'm biased. I grew up with Macs from the original 128K Classic on up, had way too much fun with ResEdit from the moment it was first released until OS 9 became obsolete, have been using OS X since Public Beta rolled out, and am currently working on wrapping my head around Cocoa, so that's where most of my experience lies. I've had to use NT and XP for work, found both somewhat counterintuitive to use and more than a little unstable even with very little if any third party software installed and every possible protection against viruses, and generally only use Windows nowadays when I absolutely have to (see below).
So I'll take Mac OS any day, because my experience with it is that it works, its interface makes perfect sense to me, and it's stable enough to run for *months* without even a logout/login. The longest I've seen a Windows machine stay up without needing a reboot is maybe a few days.
I use Windows pretty much only when I have to (which is still all too often) in order to test our web sites on IE6/7/8. I consider Linux an interesting side-show, but I'm damned happy it's there, because I /can/ have an alternative to Windows on X86 hardware.
I'm interested in Linux mainly for its server capabilities. LAMP is still the de facto standard web server platform, and while i can run MySQL as a root process in Darwin on my dev machine, alongside PHP 5, I'm pushing the boundaries a bit with that and it works better, and more reliably, on an actual server build of something like Debian (and would allow me to add Python and PostGreSQL to the LAMP stack). When it comes to servers and configurable routers and other stuff that's not directly end-user-facing, Linux is about the best game in town.
At the risk of being flamed, I might also point out that NASA has long since forbidden any primary functionality on ISS from running on Windows platforms because of stability concerns -- if it's onboard and actually has to do with life support, maneuvering, or station operations, it's running on Linux. They only allow Windows for non- mission personal use and, in some cases, non-mission-critical experiment support. That says a lot, to me.
"And you've got to ask yourself, if no one on the internet wants a piece of this, just how far from the pack have you strayed?" -- Toby Ziegler
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