Favorite OS

Post Reply New Topic

For me, Gnumeric and Abiword are rough under OS X (actually AbiWord is nonfunctional, but I can usually tolerate the native app Bean). Excel and OOo Calc both have very severe failings that make them inadequate to what I need to get done, and although I did manage to compile Gnumeric under OS X, it's very inconvenient to use because you can't set file associations to open in an X11 program.

Windows 7 is complex, but at least it doesn't force you into a terminal when a display driver crashes or whatnot. I'm sure having all your software in one place like on a Linux system is convenient if you don't have internet, but some people don't want to use Open Office or Abiword's clunky interfaces. I installed from the repos, I tried to install Rosegarden and some stupid components clashed with some other audio drivers. I don't see the appeal in an OS way more prone to user-caused malfunction. The reason why desktop Linux users are a tiny minority compared to other OSes is because they aren't user friendly. Can you find a comparable Digital Audio Workstation that uses VSTs besides Renoise on Linux? If you're a modern gamer you're SOL too, WINE doesn't work on all games and programs sorry to burst your bubble.

It's a couple hundred bucks for Windows 7 ULTIMATE. I have Home Premium which actually came with my laptop, but I know the standalone isn't $200. You pulled the less power, less security, more expensive bits right out of your ass. Windows 7 isn't XP, they patched a crapton of problems that Windows XP was famous for. With an antivirus I don't see any issues with security at all. For slowness are you sure you're not talking about Vista, which was a complete memory hog? Windows 7 isn't XP in terms of speed, but if you find Windows 7 slow you must have a pretty damn old computer.

All in all, haters gonna hate, Microsoft has a bad rep for making crappy OSes in the past by idiots who can't move on with the times. They improved. You see Apple slowly going the way of Microsoft by being a patent and DRM hog. Linux is getting better but it's still not completely mature yet in terms of user friendliness, on top of lots of notable software not being available for it.

Abiword clunky? Compared to MS Word? Are you serious?


A large part of the reason is because there is no pre-installed base. People generally aren't going to go out and install their own OS.


No I didn't. Windows 7 Home Premium costs $200, or $120 for the upgrade version. Snow Leopard full version (bundled with iWork and iLife) is $169, or $29 for the upgrade version. GNU/Linux is free. Windows is the most expensive OS on the market.

Power? UNIX>Windows, and all other operating systems out there now are Unix-based.

Security? You can quibble about the reasons for why, but the fact remains that if you use OS X or GNU/Linux, you really aren't going to have security problems. Windows is the only operating system on the market right now where security is actually a problem. Again, you can posit different explanations for why this is the case, but you can't argue with the fact that it is the situation right now.


7 is based on Vista, and as such it is still pretty memory-hungry. Benchmarks actually don't show its performance as being significantly better than Vista—we just all have better hardware now. Anyways, performance-wise Windows 7 is still definitely slower than either OS X or GNU/Linux on the same hardware.

I use Windows. I've grown to hate shareware. The reason is because I've foudn that most of it doesn't work well. Open Office is an exception. I've grown to like Microsoft Office though. I like being able to insert Excel documents into Word, PowerPoint slides into word, and more.

That's just plain wrong.

Give me a Mac OS X or Linux portable computer, configured however you like, and I'll have the data from it within 24 hours regardless of you using FDE via PGP or FileVault or whatever you like.

On the same token, I'll give you 72 hours with my portable computer, which runs Windows 7 Ultimate (and several guest OSes when I need them), and see if you can get my data.

The security problem today is the user, not the OS. I have seen more Macs infected with malware and more rooted Linux boxes used by unsuspecting users who didn't follow basic password security than I care to think about, (hundreds), and their users didn't even know their machines had been rooted.

OpenOffice isn't shareware.

Anyway, I use Arch Linux as I've stated before. I'm happy with it, nobody can get in to my computer remotely, although I don't have my home folder encrypted.



They fixed that in Linux 2.6.32.

Who in linux uses shareware? Shareware is a design philosophy from the MSDOS and windows environment. It is closed source software with a limited use lifespan, after which you are encouraged to pay for a licence. Sometimes it is feature crippled to encourage payment and registration.

That is not open office at all.

Nor is open office freeware, which is essentially the same: a closed source application. The primary difference is that it lacks the use limitations of shareware.

Open source is not shareware.

Shareware is not a design philosophy, it's a licensing model, which happens to predate the IBM PC (albiet not by much, and it was popularized on the IBM PC). Same with the FLOSS model, the same as a commercial licensing model.

Open source simply refers to the opposite of closed source - that the source code is available for inspection. It may still require licensing fees to actually use the software and in some cases does - particularily some software from IBM and Oracle come to mind which are both open source and commercial.

There are two known pieces of Mac malware out in the wild right now (both trojans that you'll only get if you're dumb enough to download pirated Apple software) and zero for Linux. How much malware is running around for Windows right now? And yes, the weakest link in security is usually the user, and a competent Windows user won't get malware. Even so, almost all Mac users are incompetent, and they generally don't have malware.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's "only because Windows is more popular." But that doesn't change the fact that the typical user is not going to run into security problems on Mac or Linux, though they might on Windows.

Yes, but that's where free software comes in rather than just open source.

There are Linux viruses but they are so rare and patched very fast once discovered so pretty much Linux is much more secure than Windows.
Unices in general are less affected by Viruses.

Ah, we were referring to Apple's X11 implementation in OS X. In particular (for me at least), it is impossible to set file associations to open files in X11 applications. This is rather a nuisance, on top of the relatively poor performance and the weird disconnect between X11 apps and Apple's native Aqua UI.

Hence FLOSS, due to the English ambiguity in defintion over, "free."

The thing is, they do run into them and they are compromised with more than just malware. Most consumer Mac installations have a blank admin password that gives access to sudo, and if a novice is installing Linux they use insecure root and other passwords all over the OS, or click the, "install everything," option that installs things like telnet onto their Ubuntu box and get rooted through that.

Most Linux or OS X compromises are usually one off, but there are tons and tons of them becuase they're often so easy to pull off and once you're in the user has no idea what is going on in their system. Try reading the firewall log on any standard home internet connection in the US and you'll see just how many scans and attacks hit one on a daily basis - usually triple digits for mine, and usually from outside of the US.

These people are why Microsoft pulled raw socket support from the consumer version of Windows, put a TCP/IP stack connection rate limiter on Windows XP Home Edition and Vista Home Premium through SP1 and so on - and they make up the vast majority of home computer users.

No patches for stupidity

I really should find a poster to that effect and frame it and put it above my desk...

I use GIMP in X11 on OS X and it works perfectly fine. That being said, I've found that most programs written for X11 (rather than for KDE, GNOME, or Aqua) are really crappy. XEdit, XPDF, XCalc, XTerm... Awful stuff (and no, this was in Linux, not OS X). They're not intuitive, a lot of stuff doesn't work, and the interface looks like it was made in the 80s.