All of us have used windows (95/98/NT/XP) in our lives. I’ve had the opportunity of using a rather neat distribution of Linux and currently am the proud owner of a Mac book, which I am absolutely in love with, so I thought it might be a neat thing to compare the three. I haven’t included Windows Vista deliberately in this list as I haven’t used it myself and don’t know squat about it.
Of course, I might leave out a few details inadvertently. Please feel free to include your comments/suggestions in the comments section. Which OS do you prefer?
Windows (in general… irrespective of 95/98/XP)
- Probably the first OS any of us would have used!
- A nice OS with a neat user interface.
- Very intuitive. Very "Point and click"
- Useful tools (word processing etc.)
- Highly media (movies, mp3s) friendly!
- Extremely gaming friendly!
- Annoying service packs that need to be installed on a regular basis!
- Frequent RAM hogging (keep your computer in ON mode for a week or so and you’ll know what I mean)!
- Terrible for scientific computing.
- Hacker’s first choice in testing their skills.
- After the critically declaimed flop show with Vista, Microsoft is betting high on its latest OS – Windows 7.
- Windows 7 promises quicker startup and shutdown (aren’t we bored waiting for the computer to start and shut down, so Windows 7 could save our yawning time)
Linux:
- Lots of distributions, mostly free available merely off the internet!
- User interface getting more and snazzier by the day! Not really "point and click".
- Highly customizable.
- For all of us scientists: "Open the terminal (kind of like MS-DOS) and feel at home!!!" The best for scientific computing!
- Don’t usually see applications hanging up or crashing (read windows!)
- Gaming is a big minus! Lack of games (some improvement being made in this now)
- Not really a media (movies, mp3s) friendly OS.
- Some popular Linux OS are Fedora, Red hat, Ubuntu.
Mac OS X:
- Very spiffy user interface!
- Highly intuitive and snappy!
- OS X based on UNIX so again, "Open the terminal and feel at home!!!"
- Highly user friendly applications and tools.
- Highly media friendly!
- Quickly replacing Linux machines in labs for scientific computing!
- Fewer viruses affect the OS X (fewer Macs in the world, hence fewer viruses).
- Not really gaming friendly although this is changing now, what with the iPod touch and the iPhone.
- Mac OS X Snow leopard is the latest from the staple of Apple.
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You could mention the large cost barrier to reaching Apple.
Please also mention the freedom one gets with each OS (free as in “free speech” not “free beer”).
Very pertinent points..
As for costs, a windows machine would, on average, cost you $650. Most Linux OS cost zilch but you would of course have costs for the desktop or laptop itself that you’d want to install Linux on. A mac would cost $1000 or more.
I don’t quite get the “freedom” part of it though…
dos was my first
i use windows at home and unix/solaris/linux at work. and i keep at that. linux is best if you have a lot of analysis, coding, scripting, etc. windows is best for almost all other common tasks. linux is yet to grow a lot if it is targeting such a kind of usability.
even in our labs mac is replacing many of the solaris systems.