Mac OS X Versus Windows Vista, The Rematch

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek follows up its widely read review where Mac OS X beat out Windows Vista in a head-to-head comparison, with a reader debate on which is really the superior operating system. From the article: 'Mac users love venting about Windows... Any company that calls their techs "geniuses" thrive in forums like this. They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes. Windows Vista all the way. If Windows sucks soooo much, how come more people are familiar with it than Mac OS X? Last time I checked, Windows wasn't just a business operating system. Tons upon tons of people use it and like it.'"

Comments

We may *use* windows, but like it?

[pdboddy]

Hah, use it? Yes. Like it? Nooooo. Tolerate it like a drunk uncle grabbing your ass at a wedding. Windows sucks ass.

But it's where the games are. First of Linux or Apple OS to get all the games Windows gets, and I'd change in a heartbeat.

Didn't we have a whole trial on this?

[Dark Paladin]

Windows Vista all the way. If Windows sucks soooo much, how come more people are familiar with it than Mac OS X? Last time I checked, Windows wasn't just a business operating system. Tons upon tons of people use it and like it.

I seem to recall a lawsuit regarding Microsoft's predatory practices by making it financially difficult for vendors to sell any operations system other than Dos and Windows - then there's the code stealing (Doublespace), the intential breaking (DR DOS), and other practices that, over time, have helped to lead to not just Microsoft's and Windows domination, but also the discouragement of any other operating systems from gaining hold.

I thought there was a whole court case about this, Microsoft being found guilty or something. But since there was no punishment, I must be wrong.

Re:Didn't we have a whole trial on this?

[Qzukk]

if Apple had made an operating system for the PC.

Remember BeOS? Be was going to bring all the cool, hip video and audio work from Apple back to the PC with its amazing multitasking support. So they went around and tried to get companies to ship their OS on hardware, but wait! Microsoft was banning PC makers from shipping computers without Windows if they wanted to sell a single PC with it. So they went around and tried to convince companies to sell machines that could dual boot, but that was a no-go too, Microsoft didn't allow anyone to sell a PC with a modified boot loader. Be offered a desktop icon and a program that the user could click, that would repartition the drive, install BeOS, and set up dual booting, but MS said "no, only approved partners' icons can appear on the desktop".

I think they eventually managed to convince some company to ship it despite all this, and there might be a few hundred BeOS installs still out there, buried in progra~1, waiting for their owner to discover and install them.

Anyway, explain why you believe Apple for the PC would have been different?

Re:the underlying argument (between the enemy line

[Guy Harris]

(For the record, when it comes time to get some real work done, I go running for the nearest Unix terminal, be it Solaris, HP-UX, Linux... doesn't matter, that's the OS and environment I find put together in the smartest way.)

Same here. Of course, the terminal I usually go running for is called Terminal. :-) (I.e., most of my Unix work these days is on OS X.)

True Story

[4iedBandit]

This happened just last week.

My company has a policy where by all purchase orders must be submitted using a form in Outlook. Forms are the one thing my Mac can't do because Microsoft dosen't want Macs to have Outlook. (Run OS 9 to get Outlook? Get real, I haven't run "classic" Mac OS in over 6 years. It's not even installed on any of my Macs.)

So I fire up my PC. Outlook is hosed. No problem, just uninstall and reinstall from the company file server. Connect to the VPN, go out to the file server and AUTHENTICATION DENIED.

WTF? Try several times, on the phone with company tech support. They check my permissions in the domain, still can't get in. Finally I say, "Hang on, let me try something."

I close the VPN tunnel on the PC. Connect to the VPN on my Mac. Go straight to the file server and login without a problem using the same domain credentials. Download the Outlook installer and then map a drive letter on my PC to my Mac to get the software to my PC.

Ironic isn't it? Windows would not authenticate with a Windows file server in a Windows Active Directory Domain. But my Mac just waltzed right in and got what I needed.

I don't hate Microsoft because of Windows. I hate Microsoft because they made mediocre software the standard.

Re:Wait a minute!

[TheRaven64]

Also, in all seriousness, I would love to know why OSX's VM is of questionable quality. Well, the simplest way of demonstrating this is to write some code that runs in a tight loop allocating and freeing memory. Then watch the system responsiveness die to such an extent that you can't even kill the process.

As I understand it, the problem comes from the fact that the VM subsystem is in the Mach layer. This means that every VM operation (e.g. mapping or unmapping a page) has to go through two layers of indirection, the second of which is incredibly slow.

I wrote some code recently that mmap'd a large data structure (a few GBs). Actually, there were a few back-ends, one used mmap, one used POSIX AIO. On FreeBSD, they were both roughly the same speed. On OS X, the mmap back end was not just an order of magnitude slower than AIO, it was an order of magnitude slower than a userspace demand-paging approach (no pre-fetching). To me, this says something is seriously wrong with the VM subsystem. I should have had more overhead from all the extra system calls and extra copies doing the demand paging myself than the kernel would have had.