Windows Vista, Mac 10.4 and Ubuntu 7.10 Linux size up
This sort of comparison has been done before; let me assure you that I know that. So rather than focus on the technical aspects/merits of each OS, I’ll just do a quick sizing up of my personal experiences with each.
A little background
I grew up under the Microsoft brand. the first computer i ever used booted up into DOS and you had to manually start windows 3.1 . frankly, it was a lot better than running stuff directly from dos, which i guess i just did for fun a few times. So it would be an accurate observation that i have used Microsoft for most of my life, and therefore may be biased in one way or another due to length of exposure. i have been using Mac OS X 10.4 (tiger) for about 6 months in the research lab (its a G5 desktop w/ 2GB of ram). i have had Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy gibbon) on my lap top for around 3 months now, dual booted to with windows 6 (vista), which has been on the laptop since purchase, about 8 months. the laptop is a newish Toshiba satellite series with 1 GB of ram.
Windows Vista (home premium)
its shiny, has a few neat, but pointless graphic options that i had to turn off when i was using it. what do i need transparent window frames for? and the “flip 3D” visualization option is pretty useless; alt+tab (window selection) gets me to the desired window just as fast, if not faster. it also takes up quite a bit of room on the hard drive, somewhere around 13 or 15 GB. i’ve never encountered a blue screen of death, but the thing has locked up on me a few times. ctrl+alt+del has been set to open a GUI menu, one of which the options leads to starting the task manager. right clicking on the grey bar at the bottom is a better option, but it doesn’t help the computer recover from being CPU overwhelmed. some of the things that I really like about windows is how well everything works out of the box. all of the drivers are configured, and every time something happens, the computer tells you - a mixed bag, but i can easily see how the average user would really enjoy knowing whats going on.”oh, my virus protection is out of date? I’ll just buy some more” or “oh, yes, that process i started 2 seconds ago is running, this is good news”. I can easily see my mother using it after a brief overview of the features.
Mac Tiger
the learning curve was pretty steep for me with this one. i consider my self a man of average to (perhaps) slightly above average intelligence, so i never understood Mac’s campaign on how easy it is to use the product. for starters, to do what a windows user would call a right click, you have hit “option” on the keyboard, while you click with your mouse. yes, thats right, it takes two hands to right click. to be fair Mac’s suport the 2nd button on 3rd party mice. i’ve never seen any really great graphical utilties that those Mac comericals are always pushing. growing up with windows, i’ve gotten familar with MS paint, and i couldn’t find anything remotely comparable that came standard. the GUI interfaces are pretty slick, and it took some getting use to, but i learned to love the dock. In the time that i have used this machine, it only terminally crashed 2 times, but they were really bad crashes. also, i would have liked to be able to access my files without having to wad though GUI menus to get to my files, and i’m really excited about the unix aspect of these things - a terminal screen that lets me acess the raw power of the G5.
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon
I picked this distrubution of linux because i played around with the OS before on the live CD and even bothered to make my flash drive boot up Linux. and its a fun little toy. out of the box, i was very disapointed. no sound on my laptop, some hardware didn’t work (most did). it came standard with a whole slew of developmental tools, such as a C compiler and Python support. Also, it only messed up really bad once, which i think was my fault. once i got all the things i needed patched up, it is great. i don’t have to reboot to install updates (logout to do that), I’m pretty happy with the ability to add unnecessary eye candy with beryl. installing stuff isn’t too bad as long as it in the repositories. I’m still learning how to install from source. I think that the best thing about Ubuntu, is that its really easy to get into if your interested in hacking your computer. also, its really great getting technical support from the community - a group of people that are just as excited and interested in Linux as you are, instead of some guy centered in India that gets paid minimum wage to answer questions.
