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?"

Comments

OS X

[BWJones]

To those of us that have either been on the platform for a while (or since the beginning), or have already switched from another platform to OS X, this article will not provide much that we do not already know. However, for those not familiar with OS X, it is a pretty good read. I have used many platforms in parallel for years from the early days of the PC revolution (Apple ][, Macintosh, TRS-80, Commodore, Amiga, Atari, Compaq, Windows) to the later workstations (Sun, SGI, NeXT) and have my likes and dislikes for all of them. Having said that however, my preference has fallen on OS X. It is sooo easy to use, is truly plug and play, is more stable, more secure, has most of the GUI and CLI integration a geek could want as well as a pretty good selection of software that makes things either 1) more enjoyable and/or 2) more productive.

For a long while, I had multiple systems on or under my desk, peaking at one time with an SGI Octane, PowerMac 9600, Windows NT, and a Linux box to perform my scientific work, serve a website, do graphics work and general productivity. All of that functionality now exists beautifully in one OS X machine freeing up considerable desktop space. Also, thank goodness for flat panel displays! I serve a couple of websites up on my workstation as well as use it for computational calculations, a front for distributed computing, writing papers, doing graphics for figures and illustrations, preparing presentations etc...etc...etc...

No other platform offers this degree of ease of use combined with flexibility and functionality.

Re:OS X

[michaeldot]

You make an interesting point, but it sounds to me like you have a fixed idea of how an interface should behave and are going to roundly criticize anything that doesn't conform to that.

Personally, I wouldn't like my Panther system to have ANY of the features you regard as critical:

• I find a common, fixed position, always there menubar is a great feature.
• Apps that need fullscreen can go fullscreen - PowerPoint, Keynote, VLC, DivX player, etc, etc. Having windows lose their title bars is available through 3rd party shareware programs. I don't agree that Apple should make it standard - I don't want it, neither do I suspect do most users.
• Firefox could do what these above apps do if they really wanted, but it's simply not a "Macintosh thing to do" to have windows entirely take over the screen. To their credit, Firefox tends to follow GUI conventions on each of the platforms they support.
• I find case-insensitive filenames make much more sense when dealing with publishing media, eg large numbers of images which may be sourced from digital cameras / emails from clients / FTP sites / etc. Their filenames all have a habit of flipflopping case. I DO NOT WANT THEM TO BECOME DIFFERENT FILES.
• Get used to it, XML storage is the way of the future,.

Treating these choices as "utterly asinine" and "engineers have a track record of making really stupid decisions" really just demonstrates your own point of view.

If you want that flexibility, that's really one of the great strengths of LInux. I think you've answered the Slashdot topic's question!

KISS

[Doc Ruby]

PalmOS 5. On my Treo 650 smartphone. The total integration, mobility, and preconfig'd apps for specific tasks - along with the dearth of options when things go wrong, except trying again, make it the perfect tool. It's practically invisible, while I'm communicating with people around the world, who don't need to have any equipment more special than a regular phone, or maybe any kind of email or web browser.

Love my Mac, but ...

[Chuckstar]

I think that Mac and Windows are both good enough now that the most important thing is which one you are used to. I use Mac at home and Windows at work. I am much faster at Office for Windows, because I use it all day and am used to the keyboard shortcuts in Windows. I can surf the internet faster [I almsot typed "more efficiently", but didn't think that made sense] at home because I am familiar with the Safari shortcuts and have a mouse with extra buttons that I configured for forward, backward and open in new window.

Neither machine crashes very often. Neither has required maintenance voodoo. Each has certain OS features that I prefere over the other. [I hate window-in-window style of Windows applications. I prefer Windows Taskbar to the Dock.] The work machine has some weird remote access settings that IT occassionally tweaks when they modify our network.

I don't use Linux. [I know, what am I doing on Slashdot? :) ]

I'm a switcher,

[MasterOfUniverse]

I finally switched from windows to Mac OS recently (thanks to mac mini). I absolutely love it. Here are few things that I noticed.

1)No popups from background windows poping up in the front, like in firefox or safari. If there is a popup in a different tab's page, it will not popup in front if im not focused on that page.

2) Faster bootup time.

3) when I shut down my computer, I can just click shut down and go away. In windows sometimes there would be a popup waiting for me to click. So I can't leave unless I the blue windows screen.

4) Expose..enough said

5) I have been using this for more than a month now and my Mini only got stuck once. Once! take that windows!

6) No need to install anti-virus software (yet)

7) No worries about the registry hell!

8) I donno why but all the programs (not just apples) works the way they are suppose to work! This is a very strange feeling. In windows world, I never expected programs to run the way they are suppose to.

9) this is just a small thing I noticed, but in real player ( sorry I have to use it), suppose I'm watching a video and shut it down in the middle. The next time i start that video I will see a mark where I left off the last time. This is a small thing but, if you are regular video watch like I, this is very very helpful.

I can keep going and going and going, but seriously, I can't imagine why I did not switched sooner . I'm planning on getting imac pretty soon (and give my mac mini to my dad or something)

OS/2....

[Atomic Frog]

Really. I daily swap in and out between Solaris, WinXP, Linux and OS/2.

By far, OS/2 stays out of the way the most so I can focus on how to do the job within a particular application or task.
OS/2 is equally comfortable and useable either by pure command-line or pure GUI. Currently all the *NIX really suck if you wanted to go pure GUI.
(Go ahead, try one week without ever opening up a command-line prompt in *NIX and see how far you get).

WinXP, on the other hand, is a bitch when I go command-line, for whatever reason. Mostly because most of the tools, and Billy, don't expect the user to go there. Or something.

If I had to jump ship, I'd go OS X.

Re:Easy...Ninnle!

[yack0]

Let's see if they sneak up on you and get big while you're ignoring them.

I too thought that Apple was just niche market, nothing but. Graphics, publishing, edu. That was it. And really, before OS X, I pretty much considered they sucked.

Of course, now they make a product that fits my niche, that of a network guy with an open source leaning.

It's really the best of both worlds. It's the shiny interface that I'd buy for someone like my father or brother and it's got that raw powerful system behind it that I can open up into even in their version of Terminal.

This is half rhetorical and half serious, but please don't take it as a personal criticism, but "How many niches will they have to fit in before they become big enough?" :)

BTW, might want to get rid of that immediate link to the DVD copy crack on your site, http://brainglass.com/downloads.htm Them there RIAA, MPAA and SPA folks are monitoring this site, ya know. :)

Re:Easy.

[jc42]

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, ...

Yeah, and I was expecting to find an explanation of why the common operations in a terminal window are as easy on OS X as on linux (or any X-Windows system). I've been using a Mac for a year or so, and I keep finding that nearly everything that I do is possible, but much slower than on any X-Windows box. It's partly that dumb 1-button "mouse", but there are other problems, too.

I was disappointed that the article only explained why OS X was more productive than Windows. Hell, I knew that. Watching over the shoulder of expert Windows developers is painfully slow. Yeah, you can do everything that you need to do, but it takes so many keystrokes and/or mouse events.

The simplest example is copy-and-paste. You can always do this. But the X-Windows scheme is quick and simple (and doesn't involve the keyboard at all); just three quick clicks or a click-swipe-release-click. OSX is materially slower, though slightly faster sometimes than Windows.

Similarly, linux and other X-Windows systems implements focus-follows-pointer, and doesn't insist on raising a window when it gets focus. This is a huge time saver when you get used to it. As far as I can tell, neither Windows nor OS X permits this. And they don't have a way to lower a window either; in X-Windows it's a single click. This means that you can push a window to the bottom when you're done with it, and get quickly to the next window. With Windows or OS X, you have to go through a real song and dance to locate and raise a hidden window (which you often didn't want to hide).

Now, I know I could put an X server on OS X. I haven't, because I've been trying to avoid falling back to what I know. I wanted to give OS X a chance to show how wondereful it was. So far, frankly, it hasn't been all that wonderful. Nearly everything is slower and clumsier than on my linux box. And when I ask Mac experts what I'm doing wrong, they usually tell me that I'm doing it right.

The one thing that I'd say is better on OS X is drag-and-drop. But even there, I keep trying it, and it either doesn't do anything at all (most often), or sometimes does something different than what I want. It's better than both Windows and linux, but still not all that good, and I can't find many time that I can actually use it while writing software. Dragging text between windows doesn't much work; you have to use copy-and-paste.

Resizing windows on OS X is a real pain, because you can only do it by adjusting the lower-right corner.

Also, it's not just that I'm a dummy. I do keep trying to watch the experts. Windows experts are agonizingly slow, with lots of extra motions for everything. OS X experts are noticably faster, but it's still painful to watch.

It's always a relief to get back to an X-Windows box, where I don't feel like I'm swimming in molasses whenever I try to do something.

Maybe I should give up and install an X server on my PB. If it's still clumsy after a year of experimenting and asking the experts, I've wasted too much time with it. I'd want to get a 3-button mouse, too; too bad I can't replace the PB's button with 3 little buttons.