I was assume that over time all of these operating systems would become more efficient on similar hardware.

If anyone is actually interested in an analysis that also demonstrates how off base Jasjeet is, look here: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/05/16/36/

So Jasjeet, while trying to come off as some sort of cross platform expert, all you’ve demonstrated is that don’t know the first thing about performance tuning or kernel theory for that matter. I’d suggest you stick to political science as your skills in computer science are lacking.

Steve

Others have already commented on your lack of understanding with regard to video drivers and such. I would like to let an Apple owner and fan, Kevin Rose, disprove your point of “getting work done.” Watch Diggnation and you’ll hear him repeatedly say that he cannot connect to the wireless because his apple has issues.

Then there is the overheating issue that apple has yet to fix but others have already done so by properly applying heatsink grease.

Conversely, my HP 2000 (sub $900 system with a 14in screen) loaded Ubuntu in under 30mins and I had wireless working in another 10. Since it came stock with XP that means I can connect via two different os’ to any wireless sysem I need and get my work done faster. IMHO, time is money and having connectivity issues costs me money.

Nothing makes me want to avoid puchasing apple products faster then legions of fans who avoid facts. And just to prove my point, XP is horrible at security compared to Ubuntu. Ubuntu on the other doesn’t run some of the games I own.

See, I can be honest about my purchase and still enjoy using it.

Regards

Now, I’m not going to say that all Linux systems are usable by the average person. I certainly don’t set up my own machine in a way that most people would find user-friendly. However, if you haven’t tried Ubuntu, you should really give it a try. You might actually like it. It’s very nice, and most things just work out of the box.

: )

After reading that statement, my opinion that you don’t know anything was verified.

The Windoze box and the Linux box work just fine. The Mini freezes halfway into the second page. And this is after all the BS I went through fixing permissions and other stuff *from the command line* in single-user mode to try to fix the freezing and spinning beach ball of death. OS X is considerably less stable than my other machines. But yes, it looks great.

Macs are very nice, but you’re just spouting 3-year-old ignorance when you talk about recompiling a kernel or having trouble getting a video driver to work. Ubuntu took about 20 minutes to install and configure on this machine. Tiger took about 40 minutes on my Mini. You don’t have a point to stand on.

I use the Mini for sound and video editing; my wife and son use it for word processing and web browsing. I use the Linux machine for work (programming) and browsing the web. I use the Windows machine for things like my son’s Lego Mindstorms.

OS X is fast for some things, slow for others. The point of this article is that OS X is ridiculously slow for some things. If you don’t care about those things, then what are you doing here complaining?

There is nothing complex about it. sudo means to elevate your privilages to root (for security reasons!). apt-get is the package management tool to install/remove packages. && just concatenates multiple commands on a single line.

There you are, now you know debian package management, wasn’t so hard was it?

I’m just a dumb Mac user… Who likes the speed and transparency of my OS X. Why the hell would I want to learn,

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx && sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings && sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

It’s all computer geek gobbledy gook to me.

Get the picture GEEK!!

Does OS X/Windoze XP have this option?

(1) Linux can be anything you want it to be. May it be a server or desktop. It all depends on what software you install and how you configure it.

(2) The guy in this article used ubuntu (according to the linux link atleast). Ubuntu installs X and gnome by default, which together form a complete desktop environment, very much like windows or OS X, except of course it is open source and uses the GNU General Public Licence. If i may comment on gnome itself, i can say with certainty that it’s very usable, even to the novice user.

>>OS X is far and away a faster operating system if you compare your >>ability to actually get work done on it versus spending days recompiling >>your kernel and trying to get your video card to work on Linux

I can install my video drivers and auto configure my system to use them in one line in the console (assuming a debian/ubuntu distro):

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx && sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings && sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

That automatically downloads/installs/configures the nvidia video driver. No hunting around for cd’s/websites to find the correct drivers.

By the way, video drivers don’t require recompiling of the kernel. Infact the only time i needed to compile a linux kernel was when i was install gentoo, in which compiling of the kernel is part of the install process. Note, gentoo is an advanced linux distro, it’s not designed with novice in mind.

>>OS X is a professionally written operating system that has fully qualified >>and fully paid domestic programmers backing it up, with a corporation >>that is on the cutting edge of the industry. Why you would want to give >>all that up for a silly benchmark against a toy operating system like >>Linux is beyond me.

(1) Closed source programs are usually a poorer quality than that of open source software. The reason for this is that, open source applications will undergo a higher degree of inspection and critism from peer review (potentially thousands of other programmers viewing/improving the code around the globe). Under this kind of scrutiny, many flaws and bad practises will be removed/revised and rewritten.

Consequently, patches for bugs and flaws are implemented/deployed much faster, unlike with propriotory software, in which seriously problems are not fixed for a long time.

Also, programmers who are getting paid are usually just doing it for the money. Alot of the open source work is done for interest and thirst for knowlege in the subject matter, which means alot more innovation occurs.

(2) Saying linux is a toy operating system is also saying the same about OS X as they both are historically derived from the same source OS, and that is unix.

You only have to take a quick peak at the GNU/Linux webserver numbers to see that the internet is built on linux systems. The rationale behind this is simple, it’s the most stable, efficient, and versatile OS available.

Windows XP, however, which out performs OSX on these tests doesn’t really. It is as user friendly as OSX, just works in a different way. So your stylish OS isn’t as fast as others. Get over it. If you’re one of the magpies who prefers shiny things over speed you haven’t really got a problem have you?