DISQUS

D Steele · 1 year ago

Apart from the fact that all the OS's have converged tremendously in the last few years, the most important development for me is virtualization. I make my living programming MS Office; my current main development machine is a Macbook running VMWare Fusion - I can use different virtual machines: Windows XP with Office 2003, Win XP with Office 2007 and SQL Server Express, Win 2003 with VS 2008 etc. etc.

antje wilsch · 1 year ago

You must be a developer :) I can't even remember which VMware environment I'm in half the time.

OS is not important to most end users except for how the browser behaves. I still prefer aethetically the way that most sites look in IE7 over Opera, Safari and FF (even FF3 - not that impressed), but FF is more stable so I switch between them constantly, and they behave differently depending on which system I'm on.

Mark Hamilton · 1 year ago

I suspect there are two reasons I'm still on a Mac (the only other computer I ever owned was an Atari): one is the investment in software (photo, video, audio, etc.). The other is form & function. They don't just look pretty but there are little things (like Mac keyboards) that are a joy to use.

Still, I tell my students that platform doesn't matter. Everybody pretty much does everything the same way and just as well now.

ianbetteridge · 1 year ago

There's an entire blog post about "do rich desktop applications really matter?" here, which I won't write :)

That, really, is what effects whether you're platform agnostic or not. I'm not. There is no Windows or Web tool for managing my to do lists as good as OmniFocus. The same is true for Scrivener, which lets me research, structure and write longer documents better than anything else I've ever come across. On the OS side, Time Machine has taken my backup regime and actually made it work.

And at the end of the day, that's the kind of thing that keeps me preferring my Mac - the unique things that I can't get on any other platform.

Jeff Beckham · 1 year ago

I agree that web-based applications have made operating systems less important to web workers, but I still find that Windows machines tend to run slower and be less responsive than their Mac counterparts. The personal computers around my house all have entry-level to mid-level horsepower, but the older iBook G4 consistently completes tasks faster than its Windows counterparts.

300baud · 1 year ago

I should have guessed you were a fellow Atarian! I wonder if we were on any of the same BBSes. I'm working on a web-hosted simulation of 1980s Atari BBSing right now.

If I find myself worrying about what OS is running, I've probably already failed. It's a very easy mistake! What I think an OS is for and what a commercial vendor thinks an OS is for are very different things. I want to OSes to be like you say they are; freely replaceable, just a small matter of preference. But OS vendors work very hard to ensure that is not the case. You have to shave with Microsoft razor blades and drive on Apple roads, if there is any way they can manage it.

Everything I do is also on the web, but I look at the web from the other side of the screen. From my point of view, Microsoft makes designer consumer products for the purpose of generating constant cash flow. There's an OS in their product somewhere, but it's like the OS that might be embedded in your photocopier; you're not really allowed to use it. I am not terribly familiar with OSX and I am inclined to think that it is not as bad, but Apple has been extremely "innovative" in the area of user lock-in. I assume I'm just ignorant of how the OS helps achieve that goal.

I work hard to isolate myself and my code from the host operating system. I consider it none of my business, and I appreciate it when it keeps out of mine. But it takes a great deal of careful discipline to achieve. So I agree with you philosophically, and perhaps there is a convincing user-level illusion that all OSes are the same... but try and change the OS that hosts your web applications and databases, and see if it's a simple matter.