From ./: What’s The Best Workhorse – XP, Linux, or OSX?

One comment in this thread really jumped out at me, as I have heard it from more than one *nix admin:

I vote too… for XP I use suse on another partition, started with slackware in 1996. I’ve managed redhat, freebsd and openbsd servers for years. XP at times becomes boring, and I switch back to suse, and fool around with cross-compiling toolchains for embedded arm projects. I play games like Giants, monkey island, and counterstrike. Two of those cant be run reasonably on linux even with winex. I’m also a sucker for predictable UI… like windows has since win95, despite their poor performance/price/feature/flexibility/security records. I can tab between windows faster, copy/paste faster, use alt-tab alt-space, alt-f4, F5, etc heavily and I have yet to find a good responsive WM that does all that, I dont care about KDE/GNOME. By default theyre too heavy, and I’m lazy to remap keys and the likes. Yes I do use nvidia drivers for my geforce4ti 4400, still not QUITE as responsive as XP in the GUI, sorry to say. Also visit flash websites, read PDF and msword and excel files, listen to real and quicktime. I try out/install apps frequently, and making manual links, and command line configuration slows things down for trivial stuff that you’d just want up and running. I also share files between other machines via CIFS, manual mounts are a pain. I used to be all for slackware, until configuring a responsive and predictable GUI overwhelmed me, nothing works well in default (not talking about slackware, but the packages in general, installed manually). So I’m busy looking at Xandros, Lycoris, Linspire etc, while OSX has impressed me. I’ve come to the conclusion that X in itself, while being extremely flexible, is inefficient and suffers from being entirely in the userspace and treated as such. Also come to the conclusion that the window manager scene is still not settled.. the war between kde and gnome is simply a pissing contest and going the way of mozilla.. and not yet firefox, where people have realized the public’s needs, and made a product for usability. I’m not a linux basher. At work I’ve been trying hard to pile reasons to move everyone and everything to linux, thats 70+ machines. The biggest reason why we cant is binary compatibility of critical apps, a much smaller reason is the GUI should act exactly like win95-XP, retraining everyone is much more painful for us than deploying mini macs and osx even. I’m not complaining. I’m explaining why XP still manages to keep people productive until the BSOD, yeah every 6 months to a year you have to reinstall windows, much more frequently if you have spyware. But the reinstall takes less time than configuring x and the wm, mapping keys, setting screen sizes, linking all apps to the wm, and retraining the user. Quite unfortunately, in real life, samba fvwm95 and openoffice’s success are absolutely critical for Linux’s eventual success on the desktop. And ported games help too – Ghazan Haider

I think the points are strong here, and the guy doesn’t come off as having any sort of agenda. I personally think the benefits of OS X overwhelm the negatives mentioned (although the speed issues on a PB are really annoying). I think with subsequent releases of the OS and some solid hardware (a G5, for example), this main issue of mine can become a non-issue.

At any rate, it’s important to highlight the fact that people chosing Windows as their desktop aren’t all newb lamers who don’t have any experience outside of that environment.: