Ahhh, retards and OS rants
Wow. I hear a lot of comparisons, to use the term liberally, between operating systems, but sometimes I’ll read something that is just trash.
I really, overall, have enjoyed Windows. At least 98SE, 2k, and XP. I’ve really enjoyed the Mac OS since 8. I’ve really liked linux and unix since about 1999.
Now, would I say that 98SE was better than, say, FreeBSD in 99? Depends, at what task would you be referring? Under 98SE I had a lot of end user stuff to play with, the most important to me being games, as well as easy video and sound. It was, however, unstable as all get out, though perhaps not as bad as 95A-D(was it D?). FreeBSD offered virtually nothing in the way of that sort of experience. Linux had made some strides, but it was still a deathmarch for the newcomer to get it all going well.
So, what if I wanted a server for a small office or home? Well, I sure as hell wouldn’t run a 9x version of Windows. NT? Lord, only if I had to. FreeBSD? In a damned second. Stable, run on tons of hardware without fail, inter-operable, truly multi-user, and with a software collection to make you slap your momma. 2000 took over some of that market, because it offered a pretty easy but powerful implementation of LDAP.
Mac OS 8 and 9 were a lot like 98SE, but with better overall stability and almost no games worth playing. There was a complete lack of certain tools, like shells and network sniffers. Sure, ClarisWorks had a terminal program, but how ghetto is opening your doc editor to connect to a remote terminal? Still, Mac users were easily trained to fix their own problems, and there were plenty of problems regardless of what they’ll tell you.
“Oh, I just have to rebuild the desktop.”
“Let me assign more RAM to that application.”
“Time to zap the PRAM!”
“Let me just delete these pref files.”
Seriously, it was just the lack of a command line that made these people feel comfortable. If they had any inkling what the hell any of that was doing it would make them drop fudge, right there in the office. Ping scared users because it had some deep hacker connotation by virtue of being in the command line, but telling your computer to arbitrarily blank battery backed RAM that contains application references is cool, so long as it just requires you to hold down a handful of keys. And have you seen a pre-OS X error message? Utterly without meaning most of the time. Oddly, I think this is what spawned Mac loyalty. Easily replicatable steps to solve problems caused by outrageous engineering flaws. Windows required you to treat every problem just a little different, and thus caused people to either not use it, or be lazy about it and shove all issues off to the techs because “they didn’t understand these computer things”. Sure, some people got into troubleshooting PCs, but most of them became techs. FreeBSD made you into a man. If you wanted to use it, you had to learn what you were doing.
The BSDs, OS X included, have done nothing but get stronger over the years. Ditto with Linux, especially the primary distros. Windows? It primarily gets by with brand recognition and perceptions of things as they were in 99 or 2000. Sure, XP has served me well, but if you put an XP box in a regular home, it’s infested within hours, has retarded arbitrary versions (Home/Pro/Media Center) that primarily dictate how screwed on upgrades you’re office will be, removes the AppleTalk compatibility found in 2000, breaks QoS, and implements UPnP, a service best described with words from the Necronomicon. Oh, and since it lacks a well defined system and user-land, if you have multiple profiles on a machine then a single infection can cause headaches throughout, as you try to completely scrub each profile so it won’t re-infect the whole box. What does it do well? Video games and device drivers.
Why is that? Why does Windows enjoy that advantage? Well, it’s a misnomer to say they do drivers well. More accurately, hardware vendors spend the bulk of their money on developing for the biggest market share, which happens to be Windows. This has nothing to do with how good or bad a platform is, but rather how many people own it. And don’t start about how people only buy good things. They buy because, at this point, they’ve always had Windows, which was a pretty good alternative to DOS or OS, uh, 1. Apple has managed similar success, but in an odd way. They keep, or rather kept, as much in house as corporately possible. Bam, no driver issues. Also, bam, no upgrade path for the average user, at least as far as components go. Give and take, but with Apple on the smaller share. Except for schools, they owned the schools.
I read articles like that one I linked to, and can’t help but think they’ve accidentally tried something hard. Like Debian, or Slackware, or Gentoo. Sure, I’ve had issues even with the current “friendly” distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE) but not often, and going from nothing to application filled machine from a single install is a mighty benefit. To say that Linux driven desktops will never come to the mainstream is as bad as saying that Windows or the Apple OS will be dropping out anytime soon. Which is to say, willfully ignorant. The biggest sticking points I’ve had, really the only one’s recently, are bluetooth and wireless. Wireless hasn’t been hard lately, but can be quirky. Bluetooth under Linux daunts me.
Two really strong factors have propelled Linux along, and accelerated it to an amazing speed. One, the people behind the kernel and respective distros are highly dedicated, with a developer base that works out of devotion rather than action items. Two, the opensource and mostly free distribution system allows big updates whenever they want. Microsoft can’t push out new versions of Windows two or three times a year, nobody could afford it. Apple releases more frequently than Windows, but the distribution is relatively small, and Mac hardware is expensive enough that it’s worth it to a lot of users. Linux? Screw it, it’s free, and that results in a very organic development cycle.
So long as they hang onto that organic growth curve, it’ll be just fine.