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In Which OS Do You Feel More Productive?
HTMLChecker asks: "I found an article in which the author talks about how she is more productive using Mac OS X.
What about the people of Slashdot? Where do you feel more productive, in Linux? Windows? DOS? Mac OS X? Also, what is the best way to rate productivity in an OS?"
My productivity shoots up as soon as I see a Bash prompt.
No, really, Slashdot doesn't have enough rabid platform advocacy and name-calling. By all means let's put this on the front page and drum up some more.
Serious research is one thing, trolling for a flamewar is another.
-- the_Librarian
Personally it is not so much the operating system as the window manager. I use fluxbox becase I like being able to scoll between virtual desktops with my mouse scroll wheel. The advantage of Linux is that you have tons of window managers to choose from, as opposed to Windoze of OSX where you are limited to the one provided.
There is something to be said for the command line. I don't have a window manager on my Debian box and I always seem to get done what needs to be done. With Windows, I find myself up until 2am browsing the Internet for random shit. All because its available. I guess that makes me an Internet junkie.. I really should fix that. Anyway.. CLIs make me most productive 'cause of the lack of distraction.
What is your penile percentile?
First it would depend on what a person does. I'd imagine someone working in prepress would be rather unproductive in Linux, given the lack of tools, but the same would not be true of a PERL developer.
However, generally, people are the most productive in the environment they are the most comfortable in. They know it, understand it, and thus can use it effectively. So Linux people will be the most productive in Linux, Mac people in OS-X, and so on. I'm also willing to bet that any of those people, properly retrained and acclimated to a new OS, would be basically equally productive, provided the new OS provided the same quality of tools.
For most jobs, a computer is just a tool that gets things done. When you get down to it, the OS holy-wars don't matter since most of what is talked about doesn't affect normal user productivity in a noticable way.
It's different than saying what OS is the best technical solution for a given problem. For example UNIX/Linux have a better text-mode remote access soltuion. An SSH terminal is nearly as good as being at the console. Not so with Windows, you need a graphical remote desktop session, there's a lot you can't do command line. Thus if text mode access is technicly better for a soltuion (perhaps bandwidth is extremely limited), then clearly a UNIX base is a better idea, for that factor at least.
But trying to ask which OS is generally more productive is just flamebait. All the zealots are going to say their OS is the fastest/easiest/most powerful and will probably have irrelivant personal anecdotes about how they can't deal with other OSes. In reality they are all different ways of doing thigns, with good points and bad points, and it's mostly just learning one and becomming proficient with it.
Riding a bike isn't a natural activity. You don't just sit down and do it. None the less, once learned and practised, it's literally second nature. Likewise no OS is so intuitive that all people can use it isntantly as though they'd been doing it their whole life, in part because what is intuitive vaires by person. However once you are used to the methods, you can get quite productive with all the majors.
I would define productivity as the ability to get your work done quickly with the least effort. For any given individual, this will be whatever system they are already familiar with. If that's Windows, Mac, or Linux for you, then that's what it is.
In absolute terms, I think the best productivity would be whatever OS or environment where the tools are forgotten about and your attention is solely focused on the task you are trying to accomplish. I think this might also be tempered by how long it takes to become an expert on the system (and how much effort is required to maintain that status).
Probably command line Unix type environments used by experts who really know the system are the have the highest level of productivity (most useful results for the least efforts). However, it takes a long time and lots of effort to become extremely proficient on the Unix command line.
Plus, comparing them like that is only valuable if you have no experience with computers or else want to maximize your efficiency in the long term at the cost of learning a new system.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Who cares what OS you use?
It seems to me that most users choose their applications first and then find an OS that supports them, not the other way around.
Defecation occurs.
First off, the main problem she cites with GNU/Linux is her constant urge to upgrade, and how upgrading in the particular distribution she chose breaks things. By the time we reach the OS X-fawning section of the article, her urge to constantly upgrade seems to have completely vanished. If she's ok with sitting still on a single version of her desktop manager, the problems she mentioned with KDE simply vanish.
Second, the majority of the issues she complains about with Windows are settings. That means, if you don't like the way it's set up, you can just change it. Since many people obviously don't share her (somewhat bizarre) preferences, this can only be a good thing.
Lastly, I think I'll simply mention the fact that she refers to GUI design choices (which happen to align with her own ideas) as "logical." What a joke.
It so happens that the very features she's so gleeful about annoy me to no end. I wouldn't give up GNU/Linux running XFCE 4 for anything, but I certainly wouldn't spew a load of crap onto the internet about how "logical" the design choices in XFCE are, because that is, in itself, illogical.
Uh, everything DOES "just work through the GUI". But when you want to change key bindings to be congruent with what YOU want, rather than how Apple has done it for the last 20 years, you can do that too.
What's the problem here?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
OSX/Windows people don't care about changing their keymaps to UNIX "standards". People who care about UNIX keymaps can handle editing a text config file.
Again...what's the problem here? Isn't a powerful, usable, flexible OS what we're all after?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Loaded question. You are always more productive in the environment you are familiar with.
~X~
~X~
Obviously it would be a complete waste of your brain to realize those exist on Windows and OS X as well. Terminals are pretty easy to come by, OS X has one, PuTTY is nice and free on Windows, Firefox is on all three now, so I'd call that a tabbed browser, Thunderbird is as robust as I've ever needed an IMAP mail client to be, I've got rsync and mysql on my Powerbook, and I've installed them on my XP desktop before, though they were both casualties of the last format.
If you're comfortable with Linux, that's your choice, but you haven't mentioned a single thing that necessitates the use of desktop linux if you didn't want it. Expressing a preference is one thing, making it seem like a forgone conclusion is quite another.
I find my OS relatively removed from my productivity, after certain settling-in pains. Once I've got my OS customized to my liking, it's irrelevant which one I'm using for day to day work. I can code just as efficiently on Windows as OSX as Linux. Now that my most used apps (Firefox and Thunderbird) are tri-platform mostly-identical, as long as I can launch them and find a terminal with vim, the world is my oyster. If I need something advanced, I've never had any trouble getting it installed, ie: Apache on Windows, MySQL on OSX, recompiling PHP under Linux...whatever. I get the job done.