Smart person’s debate of OSX vs. Windows Vista

For the Windows site i would suggest:

Mark Russinovich and/or David Salomon

Come on, be fair.

Windows Vista VS Apple Leopard (when its released) otherwise your not showing any objectivity between
“latest releases”. Saying Vista Vs OSX is like saying lets compare Tiger Vs Windows.

John Gruber
John Siracusa
Paul Thurrott
David Pogue
Mary Jo Foley
Aaron Hillegass
Dave Cutler
Avie Tevannian

As everyone has already said, the debate is Leopard vs. Vista.
And the issue is moot for Mac users, I can buy a Mac and use whicheve OS I like, and run them simultaneously…

Me for macs.

If you’re looking for a debate among advocates, you’re not going to get anyone sharing weaknesses, and you’re going to see a lot of back-and-forth sniping about whether Apple or Microsoft came up with an idea first, or whether the tweaky implementation details of one feature are better or worse than another.

And more to the point, the choice of an operating system seldom comes down to features. I certainly could use Windows and have done so, but I find its paradigms awkward and clumsy in comparison to what I’m accustomed to. They’re not necessarily wrong (though they may be and some certainly are), but they come from a different mindset and history, and have evolved under different stresses. As a result, I simply dislike using Windows, and find it less productive because of the constant friction between it and the ways I want to work. I’m sure the same can be true for died-in-the-wool Windows users attempting to use Mac OS X (though I’ve had tremendous fun helping a Windows-using friend who just bought an iMac; the answer to almost all of his questions is “it’s just built in”).

I haven’t seen Vista yet, but I imagine I’ll take a look eventually, via Parallels Desktop, because if nothing else, Macs can run Windows just fine. And that, to my mind, answers the question once and for all. I’ll take the OS that can run both Mac and Windows applications, thank you.

Sounds like a fantastic idea (:

Check out the guys at:

http://www.pcmacsmackdown.com/

They’ve been having the debate for a while now. Informative, doesn’t take itself too seriously and fun to boot.

A splendid idea ! Lookong forward to see this materialize.

Michael–you’re getting to the debate before the debate! You should volunteer yourself.

I don’t want to stray from the point of this blog post, so I’ll attempt to avoid taking issue with some of your points. However, there seems to be a common thread of misunderstanding regarding what is NT kernel and what is userland Windows (Win32, etc., at which I think your valid complaints are better directed), and I think that’s relevant to the choice of who is included this debate (which is why I’d suggest Dave Cutler–though it’s exceedingly unlikely that he’d agree–or as someone else suggested, Mark Russinovich). Moreover, there is MUCH misunderstanding about the NT kernel itself (including–or perhaps especially–within academic circles), and I think it would be quite useful on the Windows side for someone to demonstrate the advantages it has over *NIX.

It’s interesting that while many have associated Microsoft with “corporate” and Apple as “hip” and “think different,” on the kernel side, sort of the opposite is true. Cutler saw the UNIX side as being created by a bunch of academic egghead-sorts that designed an operating system around theory rather than real-world practice and needs, and there is certainly an element of VMS and NT being the ‘anti-UNIX’. While Cutler himself would probably never participate in such a debate, I think Russinovich would be absolutely fascinating to add to the discussion. Add Avie and Linus, and wow–you’ve made history.

Robert–did you ever have an opportunity to interview Cutler at Microsoft? Or is that a silly question?

This sounds reasonable, but I’d like to point out the needs of creative users of the OS: musicians, artists, visualists. Particularly once you get into live performance and real-time music and visuals, details of the OS becomes very important. And our Windows vs. Mac shootout would look very different.

I’m sure the same argument could be made for many other market segments. Now, naturally, those markets will do their own shootouts — but taken together, when you have everyone from architects to web designers to guitarists, what you see is that the OS really is about the tiny details, not just the oft-repeated banner arguments.

On the musician/audio pro side in particular, we’re still trying to sort out exactly what will happen with Vista in terms of compatibility: to what extent Microsoft has fixed its plumbing for audio, MIDI, and USB device support, how the new audio API works and for what, what the impact of DRM restrictions will be on audio tasks, what new device driver signing requirements’ impact will be, what overall performance, latency, and reliability is like for the built-in and ASIO audio systems. And the Mac has an unusual edge in audio because of Core Audio and Core MIDI, and general USB and FireWire device implementation, that Windows doesn’t have.

On the visual side, issues like OpenGL implementation, DirectX video support (including the grabber API for using live cameras), multiple monitor implementation (for VJs working with proejctors), and even Java support (for Java earlier than 6) becomes important.

Sure, this may not be as sexy as a big Mac vs. Windows debate (we have Spotlight! we’ve got Windows Movie Maker! or whatever that would sound like), but this stuff matters. It matters a whole lot when you’re a musician plugging in your laptop and playing a gig, or a VJ hooking up to a projector.

I think this debate would be a LOT more useful once we actually know more about the details of Vista in the real world.

To me, it’s specific, subtle points that ultimately make the OS for serious people. The other arguments — all of them valid — we’ve just heard too many times before.

HG suggested the OS equivalent of Wife Swap…

“A much more fun and revealing (and possibly healing and profitable) exercise would be each side swap operating systems for three months. It could be a reality show … Confessional cameras are everywhere. The entire gamut of human drama is on display.

After the psychological debriefing, participants discuss the ordeal in a round-table talk. This would not only be entertaining, but also insightful about our tribal instincts and how we can come to terms with them.”

That would be wonderful.

Though I daresay the audience would be rather smaller than for most reality TV shows.

Perhaps it’d be a hit on YouTube?

We know one thing about humans, we are very good at splitting up into sects about anything. OSX v Vista? Python v Ruby? Bourne Shell v C Shell?

“Death to the infidel!” we readily cry.

Remember the Life of Brian when the Judean People’s Front loathed the People’s Front of Judea?

Extremely common human behaviour, whose absurdity is only apparent to those not caught up in any given war.

Adam C. Engst–one thing about Vista that you’ll miss in Parallels (as well as any other VM product currently on the market) is the Aero interface, including any GPU-acceleration of WPF apps. The Vista Basic interface is um, uninspiring at best from a look-and-feel perspective (in my opinion), so to give Vista a fair shake, you should really run it outside of a VM environment (perhaps in Boot Camp, though performance will be affected a bit by using a slower part of the hard drive–but not nearly to the degree that performance is affected by running it in a VM).

Interestingly, if you’re running a Vista machine that supports Aero and have a Vista install running as a VM elsewhere, you can get the Aero UI for the VM if you use Remote Desktop to get into it.

Why limit it to Vista and OSX? Lets get a Linux team up there too with knowledge of both KDE and Gnome …

What No. 63 said: ‘Smart people’ would be too smart to waste their time debating something as stupid as this.

But … that said … pondering a debate team like this is kinda fun. So, I’d nominate Ed Bott for the Vista side, because he’s a great combination of funny & smart, and no one knows the ins/out of Windows better.

How about getting those two guys who play PC and Mac on those Apple commercials?

If you’re really going to go through with this farce that will generate 10 times more heat than light, be sure to at least get a developer for each side, that can look at things from the development angle.

Buying and trying both is the solution to this question

Buying and trying both is the solution to this question

@ituloy angsulong

Cracked? Well atleast the Vista activation servers have been spoofed to avoid the need to activate Vista from the MS servers.

Should really be a 3 way debate with Ubuntu,OS-x and vista.

Mark Manasi – Windows Team

My name is Brian Boyko – I might be interested in joining up as a speaker (or perhaps even a moderator) in this conference.

I was employed at HardOCP as a computer reviewer from 2005-2006, and I’m currently working on a long-term project for HardOCP, a series of articles where I use different 64-bit operating systems (I’m currently working on Ubuntu-AMD64) for 30 days, writing up my experiences. By the time the conference is available, I should hopefully complete my objective evaluation of Ubuntu-AMD64 and be mostly completed with my evaluation of Windows Vista. I may evaluate MacOSX 10.5, depending on whether 10.5 is out by the time I finish the Vista evaluation, but this will likely not happen until after January 31st.

However, from 2002-2005, I used MacOSX as my primary home operating system. By the time the conference comes around, I should be very familiar with all three OSes from an end-user perspective.

I can be contacted at brian.boyko@netqos.com.

Robert, count me in if you want a Microsoft employee kind of guy present. (This comment written on a Mac.)

OK, so I know this might be a bit self-serving and off course for what you’re really asking, but…

How about a non-Dream Team? Meaning, what about some fresh voices, with non-techie, non-traditional discussion?

I love Leo Laporte, for instance, but he’s a hardcore techie, and he podcasts like a champ. We know where he’s coming from because he’s told us before.

I’d love to volunteer, as the “I recently switched to Mac for work, but have been using both for years” guy.

Jake: that’s an interesting idea.

What might even be more fun is do it twice. Once with “famous pundits” and again with “everyday users” and see how the two panels differ in what they talk about.