Is The Apple OS More Stable Than MS Windows?

[Orius]

If I was going to dump Windows, I'd probably go Linux. Apple's got too much of a yuppie-ware vibe for me to want anything to do with it. And I hate their commercials.

That's just my feelings on the matter though. Not likely to be of any real help to you. I've had few problems with Windows anyway.

 

[Aus_Snow]

If you have the time, inclination and opportunity, I suggest trying a few out. See what appeals, by actually using them. At the least, the latest MacOS, Vista Home Premium, and a popular Linux distro (e.g., Ubuntu.)

None of them is a great deal more stable/secure/reliable than the applications added to them, their network peers at any given time, and most of all, their users.

 

[azhrei_fje]

None of them is a great deal more stable/secure/reliable than the applications added to them, their network peers at any given time, and most of all, their users.

Good point. Most people treat their computers (and networks) pretty sloppily (is that a word?) and they haven't the first clue about security. The ones that think they do are the worst.

If you get the Mac, you can install the free VMware beta of Fusion to see if you like virtualization as a solution. The same goes for Linux and Windows. But you won't be able to install OSX inside the virtual machine. (It's not that it can't be done, but the OS is very picky.) So if you really want to try out all three, the Mac is the way to go.

I teach Linux Internals, Linux Device Drivers, Linux Kernel Debugging, and other heavy-duty Linux classes. I bought a MBP because I was having a larger and larger percentage of my students with them! I felt that as a consultant and educator, I owed it to my students to have an informed opinion about the platform. Now my wife has a MacBook and will be getting an iMac for Christmas (she compared an iMac with a 24" display to a Dell with a 24" display and the Mac was only a few hundred dollars more -- including her software picks -- so she decided she wanted to try OSX). My 80 year-old mother hated Vista on her new machine and bought a MBP a month ago and runs two apps inside Parallels (another virtualization package) running Windows XP.

My sister and her husband are now considering a Mac as well.

Having typed up all that information, I personally won't be buying another Mac. While I like the machine I have, I really want the features of Linux: windows that snap into place when I move them around the screen, an email client with integrated "everything", an included software mgmt system (I like apt-get), first-line support for Java, and so on. I left the Windows world back in 1988 and haven't looked back. And I had hoped that Apple's Unix would win me over. But Apple is just as proprietary as Microsoft, perhaps more so, and that's the clincher for me.

Whew! "Your mileage may vary." "Results are not typical." "I am not a lawyer." And all those other disclaimers...

 

[dvvega]

Background: I'm a Windows developer, all my money is made teaching/programming in a Windows environment. Thus I should, in theory, be happy with Windows.

Reality: every machine I use at home is a Mac. Windows is craptacular!

Why? Because I can run everything I want on the Mac (windows and mac stuff) without fuss, without an issue. I've never had to reinstall ANY Mac I've used except at certain OS upgrades. Even Windows has the problem with upgrading sometimes so I don't hold it against Apple. Unfortunately this will sound cliche but everything "just works" on a mac. I've never had problems with any of them and in the house we've been through 5 macs thus far (6 if you count the old little biege box floppy only box we had for a while). None of them flopped on us, none of them died, none of them had an OS reinstall except for my Powerbook going from OS X 10.0 to 10.2

The reality is as follows:

1) You can install Bootcamp and run Windows natively on the machine. I boot into Windows when I want to play certain modern games that do not run in a virtual box.

2) VMWare runs all my other windows needs. I develop in Visual Studio 2008 under VMWare. You can use Parallels, but VMWare is a much better, more stable product IMHO.

3) The applications you mentioned, Acrobat and MS Word exist in Mac versions if you want a native one, but hey, you can run them virtually, I have and do.

4) All the software most people ever need is free for a Mac (usually). If not you will find a lot of it very cheap. There are even pieces of software like Thunderbird/Firefox etc that can be installed on both Windows and Mac OS X and they share the same user directory. Thus no matter the OS you are currently booted into you are not interrupting any of your activities.

5) The learning curve on a Mac is low. Yes there are things completely different between Mac and Windows and you will have to get used to them, however its pretty straight forward.

D

@ azhrei_fje
Umm Mail is integrated with everything like iCal, AddressBook etc ... what is it not integrated with?

 

[azhrei_fje]

@ azhrei_fje
Umm Mail is integrated with everything like iCal, AddressBook etc ... what is it not integrated with?

Well, Mail doesn't seem to find dates that are just typed in as plain text into a message. I understand that it does now in Leopard, but I'm not there (yet).

I'd like more powerful filtering capabilities. Using KMail on Linux, I can tell it that when I reply to a message in a folder, that the saved copy of the reply should be kept in the same folder. Then I configure my mail client so that all incoming mail is put into the correct folders immediately, so what's left in my inbox is either spam or a message from someone that I don't recognize. Or a newsletter I subscribe to. Then I go through the folders one at a time and if I reply, I don't need to go to the Sent folder and move the copies where they need to be. I know that large populations of people don't use folders any more (they use Smart Folders or Mailbox Filters or whatever your email client calls them), but I have email going back a LONG ways and I like having physical folders for them.

I'd like to be able to run a shell script when a mail message arrives. I can run an AppleScript (I think?) but I'm a Unix guru and I prefer a command line shell. My goal is to automatically select some messages and forward copies to another machine in my office.

One the Mac Mail program sets a color on a message (via a filter) there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off again later. In addition, messages can be "flagged", but that's the only marking that can be applied to them. With KMail I can define my own markings and apply them using filters. And I can run a filter (or filters) against any given set of messages at any time that I want in a manner much simpler than Mac Mail.

I travel a lot and I miss having multiple outbound mail connections defined so that I can choose one easily. For example, many hotels block outbound connections to port 25 (SMTP) so I have Mac Mail configured to send all email to my ISP via port 587 (Secure SMTP). But occasionally a hotel will block that port such that I have to use port 25. It's a pain to reconfigure each time -- with KMail I would just select one connection from a list and click "Use This One" and I'm done.

Mac Mail sometimes displays HTML attachments when I don't want it to and I can't seem to turn that off. If my brother sends me an HTML file as an attachment, Mac Mail displays it. And there's no way to "right-click and choose Save" to save the HTML. So I have to go to "View->Message->Raw Source" and then cut-n-paste the HTML into a file. Ugh!

When sending an email, I can't choose compression, encryption, etc. (Well, I can choose encryption but it's not easy.) With KMail there's a panel at the bottom of the message that lists each portion of the message (text and attachments) and I can click a checkbox to turn compression and encryption on/off for each individual portion of the message.

Whew! And that's just Mac Mail!

I also miss Konqueror (the Linux/KDE web browser and file manager) because I like using urls such as, "print:/" to see the print manager and "man:ls" to see the graphical man page for "ls". There's also a "fish://host/path" url for making a connection via SSH to another host and then using the GUI's drag-n-drop to copy files! Very cool!

I miss being able to right-click on a bookmark entry in a browser to edit the properties of that bookmark entry. On Mac browsers it takes about 7-8 clicks to do the same thing!

I miss having a current Java implementation. Especially one that isn't hobbled by the Mac right-click/Ctrl-click debacle. Although Leopard has Java 6 in 64-bit mode so I shouldn't complain too much about this. But why hasn't Apple released an update for Tiger? (Because they don't care about existing Tiger users. This is what makes them just as bad as Microsoft. Linux developers actually care about users because in many cases they are one-and-the-same!)

Sorry. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

 

[dvvega]

@ azhrei_fje:

okay so your problems are ones of not knowing how to do something in Mail as opposed to it really being not able to do what you need.

I can tell you how to solve most of that stuff almost immediately ... however it is clear from your post that you like Linux and are so used to it that anything different will just confuse/seem wrong to you.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Windows and Linux "suffer" from one problem mostly, I think. And that's hardware drivers.
Some hardware just doesn't have drivers at all under Linux. And while basically all hardware has drivers for Windows, they are therefor sometimes buggy. And so, most Windows faults lie in hardware drivers. And the problem is - you can have this problems right from the start, with the hardware you bought.

Mac dodges a lot of issues by limiting itself to a well-defined and well-tested hardware. The side-effects are a lot more controllable. Hence, you are basically guaranteed to have mostly faultless drivers - and if errors occur, they will probably be so common that Apple will have a fix on short notice.
In exchange of course you have less freedom in the hardware you buy - and very often, the prices will be higher. But for the "average user", these limitations are of no concern - how often do you really upgrade your hardware? Even I, as a software developer / computer scientist just don't do it often. I tend to wait till the computer is so old that a new one is just the better choice.

 

[Rackhir]

It's worth noting that all of the old games you mention are available for the mac as well, though it might be difficult to find a mac copy of Moo II and the expansion for Diablo I was never released for mac. For Moo II there might be the additional twist that you may have to resort to a mac OS 9 emulator! to use a mac program that old.

 

[Steve Jung]

It's worth noting that all of the old games you mention are available for the mac as well, though it might be difficult to find a mac copy of Moo II and the expansion for Diablo I was never released for mac. For Moo II there might be the additional twist that you may have to resort to a mac OS 9 emulator! to use a mac program that old.

Yeah, the built-in emulator that allowed one to run Mac OS9 programs was not ported to the Intel Macs. So any of those computers cannot run those older programs. Maybe they might with Windows emulation.

 

[Rackhir]

Yeah, the built-in emulator that allowed one to run Mac OS9 programs was not ported to the Intel Macs. So any of those computers cannot run those older programs. Maybe they might with Windows emulation.

If I understand things correctly, it wasn't the emulation that was removed, it was APIs for the older mac software. You can get freeware virtual machines that will run OS 9 and programs, the tricky part is getting a mac rom that you need to make it work (well that and an OS 9 CD).