For the past three months, I have been conducting a series of experiments with rigs and VMs that have a multitude of operating systems installed for testing purposes. The reason for doing this is that I asked myself a very serious question sometime around the month of May after talking to a person at a wedding who stated that Macs were the way to go if you wanted to do any serious work. I then started asking myself what my daily tasks were and how impeded I would be if I didn't have Windows to do my work. The answer I found was also a path of work-enlightenment just as much as a clear view into how most people view their workstations.
I have pitted three operating systems against each other with a list of tasks that "I" (I can''t stress this enough without starting a flame war from zealots in either camp) needed to perform on a daily basis.
Operating Systems
Windows 7
Windows 8
Mac OSX Mountain Lion
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Tasks
Email
Chatting
Installing Software
Multimedia
Development
Email
Let's face it, everyone needs email and without it, most of us might not be able to get our work done. However, this task is no longer isolated to a single operating system or even a single email-client. I used to think Outlook was a gift from the gods when it came to connecting to email services and even setting them up. But, these days, I find myself more drawn to web-based email services and the ease of use they all offer. I use both Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook for my personal/work email and while we could say that these are poor examples of testing email productivity on an operating system, it is a reality that most people are flocking to free services and have been for many years. But, this doesn't absolve an operating system from still having nuances when it comes to using web-based emails. The clear winner here for me was Ubuntu. Why you may ask? Well, it just never hiccuped and was so fast that I never really felt it ever cause any lags or the dreaded "I clicked but it never did anything". The other OSes were sharp as well with both Windows falling to third place simply because no matter what browser I used on them, I always found dead clicks in my web mail. I find this rather odd because with Outlook/Hotmail, I'd expect Internet Explorer 9/10 to really show-up the rest of the web-browser community but sadly it lacked any punch.
When it came to email clients however, Ubuntu got relegated to the back of the bunch simply because Thunderbird was never going to cut it for me. Windows 8 and Mountain Lion moved up the chain but I'd give a bit of edge to Windows 8 simply because I had fewer clicks to get to my destination and the services choice with Exchange support came natively with the Pro package. Let me state for the record that the Email client on ML was superb from a usage perspective but getting started threw me off a bit and while they all really did the same job of connecting to a service and auto-updating my settings to get the data in, I found Windows 8 to do a far better job of mail management and presentation than the Mac.
Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find a modern-day operating system that didn't offer email support that could meet your needs. Ubuntu is a big challenge but if you have services like Gmail or Outlook this doesn't really make a difference and the browser will be far more snappier.
Winner : Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Runner-Up : Windows 8
Chatting
This is another difficult task to really gauge on all the platforms I worked on but with Google Talk being the roost winner here and other services also going to the web, this turned into a browser war again and really wasn't worth the effort. I did however, explore chat options across multiple platforms and came back pleasantly surprised with what I had found. The Mac I was using ran Adium and it did what it was supposed to do, offered me chat. Similarly, on Linux, I was offered Pidgin which has been around for a long time but really does need a little bit of tweaking to get started with Google Talk services. And then there was Windows which really just blew the competition away in terms of functional richness in chat-clients. I did try to be unbiased here but after working in Windows 7 with the chat clients I use on a daily basis, the W7 OS came up on top. Windows 8 moved down the tree to the bottom of the list because it just never offered enough to connect to chat services most end-users would really like to, Google Talk being the most important of them all for me.
Winner : Windows 7
Runner-Up: OSX
Installing Software
Now, this is one place where as a long-term Windows and Linux user, I can truly start to appreciate Macs. The ease of installation and the additional ease with which the UI moved me from download to installation was the best I saw across multiple platforms. I'd put the Windows 8 Store in there but I don't think my installation of common applications on Windows would compare to what the Mac had to offer. When it came to complexity and full control however, Ubuntu just blew everyone else away but also required a PhD in understanding the entire OS to get what you wanted specifically. Linux users don't seem to mind this and I don't either but a person with no knowledge of permissions or directory structures could find themselves lost at just getting an application to install. Updates were also easier on a Mac and while Windows 8 has gotten better, I found that getting to the Update screen wasn't all that intuitive. Linux did a better job here but the Mac just seemed more polished in its approach to installations making them easy enough for a novice to an expert to handle.
Winner: OSX
Runner-Up: Windows 8
Special Mention: Ubuntu (Most flexible)
Multimedia
I love listening to music and watch the occasional movie on my workstation. That said, my experience with music applications on all systems generally left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. OSX and iTunes 11 strayed away from a very good iTunes 10 which would have left me crowning OSX as the clear winner but iTunes 11 was choppy in its performance at best. Windows 8 and the Xbox style music center was no better and didn't offer me intuitive controls to get to my music easily. Furthermore, the folder browsing was god-awful and I wouldn't recommend letting it play your music unless you really have a need to pull your eyes out. Ubuntu was just so short changed when it came to a proper music organiser that I couldn't even bring myself to using any of the options I was presented with simply because they just didn't live up to my expectations of finding tracks and organising them to my satisfaction. As a note, all my music is tagged and has their information downloaded and stores as meta-data because I buy a CD and then just burn it locally for dispersal to my iPod for listening.
When it came to movies it was also a very cagey affair with all platforms offering VLC and the proprietary variants. OSX's QuickTime is a great movie player when it works for me but it couldn't handle certain Xvid rips I had thrown at it. Linux just gobble everything up because VLC is really that good. Windows 7 did the same but the native Windows Media Player is another example of something that could have been better. Then came Windows 8. I was shockingly surprised that it just played anything that I threw at it. In fact, it even outperformed VLC in the load times and content playback. Shocking I know.
As far as clarity went, I could go out on a limb and give Macs the upperhand here but that becomes a hardware issue and not really just a software one. So I am going to say that they all perform rather well once things are setup correctly. The only exception to the software-side of movie rendering falls on Linux where I was able to actually squeeze more power out of the OS by using VLC which I find strange because i'd expect the same power to be squeezed out of OSX as well but it never happened.
Music Winner : No one really
Movie Native Player Winner : Windows 8 (Native)
Development
If you are a hard-core open source fan then Windows is really not your OS of choice when it comes to developing those kinds of solutions. I still find myself struggling to get JBOSS and Ruby to work well in Windows while on Linux and OSX, its a rather painless process (it's never totally painless). Then comes the more OS-restricted development tools such as .NET and Cocoa. Microsoft have gone the extra mile with VS 2012 and I have to say that overall, it is the best IDE you will ever use on any system for building an application. Type-aheads, project creation and even plug-in integration were smooth and seamless leaving me with a feeling that no matter what I wanted to install for augmentation to a project, I could just find and install. With Cocoa and Xcode, this wasn't the case as is with most applications in a Linux/UNIX environment. I didn't think it was terrible by any means but it just lacked the kind of overall polished feel I got with Visual Studio but it is the only place you can develop Apple Store Apps and for what it claims to do, it does it very well. Coming to cross-platform IDEs, Eclipse was one I used to test and Linux blew the rest of the competition away comfortably. I was able to connect to servers and create Java/Android projects easily while on OSX and Windows it seems to be less responsive. I did try and go back to OSX to see if there was anything I had done wrong but considering the install process for Eclipse is really just drag and drop, it didn't really need any tinkering, nor should it ever.
Still, in a world where open-source technologies are making strides both from a server-hosting and thick-client, Linux just showed enough to me for a clear warrant as the most versatile OS for development out there. Windows has .NET and OSX has XCode/Cocoa but I'll be honest in saying that if I really had to single out one IDE that was the best in overall development needs, I'd go with Visual Studio because it really has come miles from the closed shell IDE it used to be.
Winner: Linux (Overall)
Runner-Up: Windows 7/8
Best IDE: Visual Studio
Closing Notes
So, after all of this what you really want to know is "Which one should I get?". The answer is really not as easy as it sounds and the comment made to me months ago holds absolutely no truth at all. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter which platform you choose because the ultimate end-product is whether you are productive or not and if the platform can meet your daily needs.
A lot of people bash Windows because it crashes too much and has no real place in the open world because it is a piece of junk. Some of that might be true and while it does crash a lot (I haven't had a crash in a while), there are some very redeeming qualities. It has any software you can imagine out there, comes with a slew of help online about DIY projects if you have any and in most cases runs applications and connects to devices with as much ease as anything you'll get out there. It also offer the rig-builder's dream of upgrading because drivers are easily available and everyone has a Windows variant.
When it comes to Mac people praise them as being easy to use and I agree with this statement. If you are just getting into computers and want something that gets you running with daily tasks and easy-to-understand interfaces then this is the right OS for you. A netbook might do the same these days but when you say Netbook, all the cool-kids might not invite you into the circle even though you are a minimalist that is able to perform all the tasks they can (joking). Also, I like iPods and if you own one, this is the OS for you. The compatibility is outstanding and the software just matches that (when Apple leaves iTunes 11 that is). Multimedia feels a bit richer and browsing and the care that Apple has put into simple web-tasks like creating calendar invites through the OS and notifications are noteworthy. Is it a clear winner? No. That would involve making it perform every task I could throw at it without a hiccup and there isn't an OS out there that does this ... yet. Development made me feel a bit encumbered at times and while they do offer great support for Open-Source development, Linux does the same and in some respects does it faster.
Lastly, Linux, where do I start here? If you're the kind of person that wants to tinker and just be on top of everything your OS does then this is where you need to be. It's free, offer multitudes of desktop and IDEs to play from, has a burgeoning development community which offers some of the best, if not the best support when it comes to Q+A and it is the only OS I found that wouldn't care if you were running it on a 5 year old machine versus a brand-spanking new one. The issue with Linux is the complexity it has been trying to mask for many years. Sure there's Ubuntu and other variants but it's still not polished enough for my taste considering what you can get as a closed-option (OSX) or a integrated-option (Windows). If you're the kind of person that does everything in their browser and doesn't play any games go with Linux because honestly its fast enough to not make you want to wait and it has so much documentation for tinkering that you'll probably want to start writing your own scripts and making your OS do what you want it to do when you want it to do it. The learning curve is certainly steep but the rewards at the end are staggering. It also happens to be the best OS for hosting and with over half the world running Linux Servers its easy to see why this OS is clearly for the garage-shop user.
Personally, I like Linux myself. I've only run into development issues with having to write applications in Xcode or .NET and then having to switch to those platforms but as an OS it is a joy to work with and I can't see myself tearing away from it as a daily OS until I really need to. It runs my Media server the best out of all the OSes I tried, offers me enough support for development and has some of the best memory management for Virtual Machines I have seen out there. But, I do switch between other OSes just to see what's new and how they are attacking User Experience as a whole on their platforms. Macs have their plus points but so does Windows 8. Whatever you choose, the real question isn't whether its the best OS out there, it should be what can it do for me? Once you answer that question the name of the company, the brand of the hardware or even the nuances of the OS will not matter because you are really getting shit done.
Merry X'mas everyone.
I have pitted three operating systems against each other with a list of tasks that "I" (I can''t stress this enough without starting a flame war from zealots in either camp) needed to perform on a daily basis.
Operating Systems
Windows 7
Windows 8
Mac OSX Mountain Lion
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Tasks
Chatting
Installing Software
Multimedia
Development
Let's face it, everyone needs email and without it, most of us might not be able to get our work done. However, this task is no longer isolated to a single operating system or even a single email-client. I used to think Outlook was a gift from the gods when it came to connecting to email services and even setting them up. But, these days, I find myself more drawn to web-based email services and the ease of use they all offer. I use both Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook for my personal/work email and while we could say that these are poor examples of testing email productivity on an operating system, it is a reality that most people are flocking to free services and have been for many years. But, this doesn't absolve an operating system from still having nuances when it comes to using web-based emails. The clear winner here for me was Ubuntu. Why you may ask? Well, it just never hiccuped and was so fast that I never really felt it ever cause any lags or the dreaded "I clicked but it never did anything". The other OSes were sharp as well with both Windows falling to third place simply because no matter what browser I used on them, I always found dead clicks in my web mail. I find this rather odd because with Outlook/Hotmail, I'd expect Internet Explorer 9/10 to really show-up the rest of the web-browser community but sadly it lacked any punch.
When it came to email clients however, Ubuntu got relegated to the back of the bunch simply because Thunderbird was never going to cut it for me. Windows 8 and Mountain Lion moved up the chain but I'd give a bit of edge to Windows 8 simply because I had fewer clicks to get to my destination and the services choice with Exchange support came natively with the Pro package. Let me state for the record that the Email client on ML was superb from a usage perspective but getting started threw me off a bit and while they all really did the same job of connecting to a service and auto-updating my settings to get the data in, I found Windows 8 to do a far better job of mail management and presentation than the Mac.
Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find a modern-day operating system that didn't offer email support that could meet your needs. Ubuntu is a big challenge but if you have services like Gmail or Outlook this doesn't really make a difference and the browser will be far more snappier.
Winner : Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Runner-Up : Windows 8
Chatting
This is another difficult task to really gauge on all the platforms I worked on but with Google Talk being the roost winner here and other services also going to the web, this turned into a browser war again and really wasn't worth the effort. I did however, explore chat options across multiple platforms and came back pleasantly surprised with what I had found. The Mac I was using ran Adium and it did what it was supposed to do, offered me chat. Similarly, on Linux, I was offered Pidgin which has been around for a long time but really does need a little bit of tweaking to get started with Google Talk services. And then there was Windows which really just blew the competition away in terms of functional richness in chat-clients. I did try to be unbiased here but after working in Windows 7 with the chat clients I use on a daily basis, the W7 OS came up on top. Windows 8 moved down the tree to the bottom of the list because it just never offered enough to connect to chat services most end-users would really like to, Google Talk being the most important of them all for me.
Winner : Windows 7
Runner-Up: OSX
Installing Software
Now, this is one place where as a long-term Windows and Linux user, I can truly start to appreciate Macs. The ease of installation and the additional ease with which the UI moved me from download to installation was the best I saw across multiple platforms. I'd put the Windows 8 Store in there but I don't think my installation of common applications on Windows would compare to what the Mac had to offer. When it came to complexity and full control however, Ubuntu just blew everyone else away but also required a PhD in understanding the entire OS to get what you wanted specifically. Linux users don't seem to mind this and I don't either but a person with no knowledge of permissions or directory structures could find themselves lost at just getting an application to install. Updates were also easier on a Mac and while Windows 8 has gotten better, I found that getting to the Update screen wasn't all that intuitive. Linux did a better job here but the Mac just seemed more polished in its approach to installations making them easy enough for a novice to an expert to handle.
Winner: OSX
Runner-Up: Windows 8
Special Mention: Ubuntu (Most flexible)
Multimedia
I love listening to music and watch the occasional movie on my workstation. That said, my experience with music applications on all systems generally left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. OSX and iTunes 11 strayed away from a very good iTunes 10 which would have left me crowning OSX as the clear winner but iTunes 11 was choppy in its performance at best. Windows 8 and the Xbox style music center was no better and didn't offer me intuitive controls to get to my music easily. Furthermore, the folder browsing was god-awful and I wouldn't recommend letting it play your music unless you really have a need to pull your eyes out. Ubuntu was just so short changed when it came to a proper music organiser that I couldn't even bring myself to using any of the options I was presented with simply because they just didn't live up to my expectations of finding tracks and organising them to my satisfaction. As a note, all my music is tagged and has their information downloaded and stores as meta-data because I buy a CD and then just burn it locally for dispersal to my iPod for listening.
When it came to movies it was also a very cagey affair with all platforms offering VLC and the proprietary variants. OSX's QuickTime is a great movie player when it works for me but it couldn't handle certain Xvid rips I had thrown at it. Linux just gobble everything up because VLC is really that good. Windows 7 did the same but the native Windows Media Player is another example of something that could have been better. Then came Windows 8. I was shockingly surprised that it just played anything that I threw at it. In fact, it even outperformed VLC in the load times and content playback. Shocking I know.
As far as clarity went, I could go out on a limb and give Macs the upperhand here but that becomes a hardware issue and not really just a software one. So I am going to say that they all perform rather well once things are setup correctly. The only exception to the software-side of movie rendering falls on Linux where I was able to actually squeeze more power out of the OS by using VLC which I find strange because i'd expect the same power to be squeezed out of OSX as well but it never happened.
Music Winner : No one really
Movie Native Player Winner : Windows 8 (Native)
Development
If you are a hard-core open source fan then Windows is really not your OS of choice when it comes to developing those kinds of solutions. I still find myself struggling to get JBOSS and Ruby to work well in Windows while on Linux and OSX, its a rather painless process (it's never totally painless). Then comes the more OS-restricted development tools such as .NET and Cocoa. Microsoft have gone the extra mile with VS 2012 and I have to say that overall, it is the best IDE you will ever use on any system for building an application. Type-aheads, project creation and even plug-in integration were smooth and seamless leaving me with a feeling that no matter what I wanted to install for augmentation to a project, I could just find and install. With Cocoa and Xcode, this wasn't the case as is with most applications in a Linux/UNIX environment. I didn't think it was terrible by any means but it just lacked the kind of overall polished feel I got with Visual Studio but it is the only place you can develop Apple Store Apps and for what it claims to do, it does it very well. Coming to cross-platform IDEs, Eclipse was one I used to test and Linux blew the rest of the competition away comfortably. I was able to connect to servers and create Java/Android projects easily while on OSX and Windows it seems to be less responsive. I did try and go back to OSX to see if there was anything I had done wrong but considering the install process for Eclipse is really just drag and drop, it didn't really need any tinkering, nor should it ever.
Still, in a world where open-source technologies are making strides both from a server-hosting and thick-client, Linux just showed enough to me for a clear warrant as the most versatile OS for development out there. Windows has .NET and OSX has XCode/Cocoa but I'll be honest in saying that if I really had to single out one IDE that was the best in overall development needs, I'd go with Visual Studio because it really has come miles from the closed shell IDE it used to be.
Winner: Linux (Overall)
Runner-Up: Windows 7/8
Best IDE: Visual Studio
Closing Notes
So, after all of this what you really want to know is "Which one should I get?". The answer is really not as easy as it sounds and the comment made to me months ago holds absolutely no truth at all. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter which platform you choose because the ultimate end-product is whether you are productive or not and if the platform can meet your daily needs.
A lot of people bash Windows because it crashes too much and has no real place in the open world because it is a piece of junk. Some of that might be true and while it does crash a lot (I haven't had a crash in a while), there are some very redeeming qualities. It has any software you can imagine out there, comes with a slew of help online about DIY projects if you have any and in most cases runs applications and connects to devices with as much ease as anything you'll get out there. It also offer the rig-builder's dream of upgrading because drivers are easily available and everyone has a Windows variant.
When it comes to Mac people praise them as being easy to use and I agree with this statement. If you are just getting into computers and want something that gets you running with daily tasks and easy-to-understand interfaces then this is the right OS for you. A netbook might do the same these days but when you say Netbook, all the cool-kids might not invite you into the circle even though you are a minimalist that is able to perform all the tasks they can (joking). Also, I like iPods and if you own one, this is the OS for you. The compatibility is outstanding and the software just matches that (when Apple leaves iTunes 11 that is). Multimedia feels a bit richer and browsing and the care that Apple has put into simple web-tasks like creating calendar invites through the OS and notifications are noteworthy. Is it a clear winner? No. That would involve making it perform every task I could throw at it without a hiccup and there isn't an OS out there that does this ... yet. Development made me feel a bit encumbered at times and while they do offer great support for Open-Source development, Linux does the same and in some respects does it faster.
Lastly, Linux, where do I start here? If you're the kind of person that wants to tinker and just be on top of everything your OS does then this is where you need to be. It's free, offer multitudes of desktop and IDEs to play from, has a burgeoning development community which offers some of the best, if not the best support when it comes to Q+A and it is the only OS I found that wouldn't care if you were running it on a 5 year old machine versus a brand-spanking new one. The issue with Linux is the complexity it has been trying to mask for many years. Sure there's Ubuntu and other variants but it's still not polished enough for my taste considering what you can get as a closed-option (OSX) or a integrated-option (Windows). If you're the kind of person that does everything in their browser and doesn't play any games go with Linux because honestly its fast enough to not make you want to wait and it has so much documentation for tinkering that you'll probably want to start writing your own scripts and making your OS do what you want it to do when you want it to do it. The learning curve is certainly steep but the rewards at the end are staggering. It also happens to be the best OS for hosting and with over half the world running Linux Servers its easy to see why this OS is clearly for the garage-shop user.
Personally, I like Linux myself. I've only run into development issues with having to write applications in Xcode or .NET and then having to switch to those platforms but as an OS it is a joy to work with and I can't see myself tearing away from it as a daily OS until I really need to. It runs my Media server the best out of all the OSes I tried, offers me enough support for development and has some of the best memory management for Virtual Machines I have seen out there. But, I do switch between other OSes just to see what's new and how they are attacking User Experience as a whole on their platforms. Macs have their plus points but so does Windows 8. Whatever you choose, the real question isn't whether its the best OS out there, it should be what can it do for me? Once you answer that question the name of the company, the brand of the hardware or even the nuances of the OS will not matter because you are really getting shit done.
Merry X'mas everyone.
