My Operating System Odyssey
Forgive the overwhelming geekiness of this post, but - no, I take that back. If you don't like this, I hate you.
Over the last week, I've made some big changes to my computing environment at home. I figured that I'd record some of my observations while using each of these different operating systems because - well - I don't really have anything else to talk about. It should probably be noted just for fairness that I'm professionally biased in a particular direction. I'm not going to explain that further, and I'd appreciate it if the folks who know what I'm talking about don't provide any more details.
OS X 10.4 Tiger
Yeah, ok. I finally broke down and bought a Mac. I got the low-end Mac Mini with a gig of RAM. It's a beautiful little system, both hardware and software wise. OSX isn't as great as the fanbois seem to think it is, but it does have some really nice points. It's beautiful, no doubt, and it's application installation model is pretty solid (though, it did take me about an hour to figure out how to install Firefox - it kept running running from the DMG instead of installing).
On the other hand, the task bar (or the Dock - whatever the fuck it's called) is really just annoying. I want it to go away. Forever.
And Boot Camp... not so much. It's a great idea, but the implementation leaves something to be desired - I mean really, Apple. You can't just ignore 64-bit operating systems. Yeah, you've stuck some 64-bit drivers on the disc, but the OS Selection tool is nowhere to be found. The only way I can boot back into OSX is to press the Alt button during bootup. During the whole .25 second window. Seriously, I'm about gotten it to work about 3 times out of 40 attempts. What's the secret here?
Windows Vista Ultimate
I've been using Vista since Beta 1, so I've certainly got more experience with this one. Glass is cool, but overall the OS isn't as pretty as OS X. I've been primarily using x64 Vista, and I've had very few problems with it. The issues that I have had have been because of shitty third-party drivers. Specifically, for my TV capture cards - the drivers apparently don't like the idea of having 4GB or more of memory on a 64-bit address space. Once I limited the memory to 3.5 GB, they worked fine.
Most applications have worked without issue. It's just not pretty.
Ubuntu Linux 7.04
And speaking of not pretty... seriously, guys. Whiskey Tango Fuck? Without any of the desktop effects running, the OS is monkey-ass ugly. It seriously looks like Windows 95. And then, of course, you can add the uber-wonderful Compiz Fusion. Why you'd do that, though, I'm not sure. I've enabled this on my system a few times. Some of this is cool (but quickly becomes annoying), but it's still ugly at it's basic level. There's no font smoothing that I've noticed - and if there is, it doesn't make things any prettier). Anyway, somehow I've managed to get my system into a state where the window decorator doesn't appear to be working. The contents of the forms display, but there's no title bar, control buttons, or frames. I have no idea how to fix this (no, I haven't searched for it. I tooks some time away from the system to write this).
So, yes - I know this has been an overwhelmingly superficial review of these OSes, and that's how I intended it. I'll get into more technical stuff later. Right now I just want to stop typing this.