Hey!

I'm just wondering on everyone's opinion and what Operating System they think is the best. Out of Windows, Mac and Linux, which one do you prefer?

I like My Windows XP the best, it's fast, user-friendly, and works very well with all my programs. Vista is also good, but too many programs aren't supported.

I like Mac OS X too, but it doesn't have all the games and programs Windows have. I'd love to have both, I've tried iATKOS and Kalyway, but for some reason my computer doesn't like it

So what's your opinion on your favourite system? Tell us all about it, and why you love it

This is like an age-old debate... you're not gonna get an definite answer and there're already millions of threads like this...
But incidentally, OS X, because it's more stable, more efficient and elegant

Well, thousands of new users, thousands more new opinions!

Sometimes people need to arise the debate again, even after it has appeared several times, to get all those new opinions from different people

You didn't give Windows 2K its own button. Windows2K was better than ME or NT.

And that person who voted Windows is the best should possibly be forcibly ejected from the planet. With their gameboy.

Yeah, I felt uncomfortable at having to pick 'ME' alongside 2000... especially since 2000 was the most stable OS Microsoft have released (although there IS room for debate) and Let's face it... ME should never have left alpha

fixed! win 2000 has it's own now

What's good about 2000?

I've never really used it....... I've only ever used XP and vista and I prefer XP because of it's compatibility.........

Windows 2000 is just more stable I find; it does what it's supposed to without trying too hard. XP seems too focussed on being 'Simple to use' that alot of features became inaccessible and tedious

i really like the look of iatkos...... but it only bugged my system up when i tried to install...... failed each time (with kalyway and iatkos!) at around 5% of installation, which really peeved me off....... especially with all the formatting i had to do!!!!!! lol

Not really.

I wait with anticipation to see how the members on this essentially a "Mac" based forum vote between OS X and Windows, should be interesting.

Yeahhh This argument is gonna be pretty much one sided XD

quite right........... although insanelymac does seem one of the more popular/less annoying forums when it comes to windows, mac and what have you....... so unfortunately some windows fans do show their sides a little even in foreign territory

i love os x more than windows 2, but i'm really peeved at it because iatkos/kalyway etc won't work on my pc.................
lol

os x is also really buggy, i must also admit that vista is full of bugs too. lets face it, all os's currently available suck

The word "better" is a 100% completely subjective and relative term.

As much as I like Mac, Mac does not fulfill all of my needs like Windows does. So, I'm gonna have to go with Windows on this one. Vista. But OsX version, I'd have to say honestly Tiger.

Hi Al X And Er,

Why are you making fun of us? :-(

Or do you actually mean what you are saying? That'd be irritating.

You should not post nonsense like this at a board full of Mac OS X enthuasiasts who love their operating system a lot.

"Let's face it", Mac OS X is several years ahead of the Windows Operating System. You can't compare them, there is no excuse. All Microsoft has been doing in the last 5 years was spending their money on excessive research -> copying Google and Apple.

Mac OS X is efficient, it uses the power of UNIX and the elegance and design perfection of the Mac. It combines two strong elements to provide first class workflow.

And one of the best parts that I do like about Mac is its community. It consists of well educated persons. Macs are mainly used at Science Work, Universities, / productive work (such as e.g. coding/art/music).

You can feel free to agree to Steve Ballmers unpleasable opinion. Quantity is the only thing that matters to them. They don't have any problem to sell their third rate products, because they believe in them. Windows is an operating system for the crowds, and you know it.

Mac OS X Leopard is the first-class operating system for productive users.

Ps. Now it's my turn to make a little fun of you,
Joke of the Year: "Microsoft is an innovative company!" :-D

Yours sincerely,
Puttabong

for me windows due to gaming, but productivity goes to osx

I think fanboys are gay.

And Windows 3.1 all the fricken way.

OMG I still have all 6 3.1 Setup floppies to the right of me XD
Including the 'Common Printer and Hardware' disk (Y)

LMFAOOO

Floppies... I still have my AOL floppy for Windows 3.1

And I remember when we spanned GTA (yes, the original, kiddies) over 40 floppies because CD burners were more expensive than a car.

OMG 40 floppies?? That's 57.6mb of data... wow the good ol' days... I wonder how many floppies it'd take to back up my 1.5 terrabyte setup XD

Well, let's see. 1.44mb per floppy, 1 million megabytes per terabyte...well there you go. More than a million.

I voted Mac/Vista/Leopard. I love my Power Mac G5. I don't know how I lived using an HP Media Center PC and an iMac G4. Loved the G4, but it was slow as hell. Hated the PC, but it was faster. Now, I have a dual 2 GHz G5 and all is well. Runs faster than the iMacs in the store, too.

Vista is the only Microsoft OS that hasn't managed to piss me off to extreme measures yet. This is in part because I don't own it yet and only have it in a virtual machine (yay free microsoft downloads). XP was decent until it completely melted down in my face in a rather spectacular way (I tried to delete an account, and the computer turns itself off and restarts. I'm sorry, WTF?), and I had to system recover it twice, rendering all of my programs unusable (including Object Desktop, VMware Workstation, and MS Office, none of which I have been able to recover the serials from, meaning I have two choices - buy new, or use open source - so now VirtualBox and OpenOffice are in), and creating three random "HP_Administrator" accounts, giving them all crazy names and making it all around impossible to use. Can't format and reinstall, either, because Microsoft in its wisdom declines to give even restore DVDs. So here I am stuck with a crippled XP Media Center Ed (which, so that it might boot up in less than 5 minutes, has been purged of all media center functionality - it's so cute, it thinks it's XP Pro now), that has 1 functioning account, as I had to delete the other two, and that just about did it. Windows 2000 I never had, but my school had it and boy did I hate it. Windows 95 and 98 were 16-32 bit hybrid pieces of crap. Windows 3.1...well I was about 2 years old when that came out, but judging from some nice VMwarization, it's pretty awesome, (gotta love the 16 colors) if completely useless. So there's my anti-Microsoft rant. Although, I love MS Office.

I didn't know anything about Macs until about 4 months ago, when I got an iMac G4. It looked cool, and it was 250 bucks. I loved it. It led me to discover the Power Mac G5, which still had only Panther until about a week ago and was used solely for music editing. Using both the HP PC and the G4, it became clear to me that I had no more use for Windows. I still don't mind using a PC every once in a while, but the design, speed, and functionality of Apple hardware and software was what convinced me. Now, I don't think Apple's perfect. Far from it. There are several things that flummox and irritate me about Macs that I think Windows got right. The first is the close button, which doesn't actually do anything. If you want to quit a program, you use Command-Q or choose it from the menu. But if I want to close it, I want to close it, by god. Some programs are sensible like that (System Preferences, Disk Utility), and some I can understand why you would want to keep open, even without a window open (i.e. web browsers with downloads ongoing). But System Profiler? What bonus do I get from having System Profiler without a window? Okay, Mac-rant done.

Final thoughts: Apple is awesome. Microsoft would be if it weren't so hard to do something and not crash. Macs are expensive, but truly are awesome desktop computers. Their laptops are nice, but honestly not worth the price, in most cases. Unless you're getting a last gen Powerbook or something, I'd say a PC laptop would be just fine. Linux...well...I just don't get those /bin, /dev, /etc, /mnt, /usr, /var folders. I tried Linux for a month or so and still don't have the faintest idea what they do. Fluxbuntu is pretty cool, though, and at least I can use the terminal.

omg........ and to think we even used floppies once......... i really, really, really want a mac, they are soooooooo cool...... but iatkos and kalyway doesn't work on my pc and i can't get a mac for about another 3 years...........

I feel your pain. I'm trying to get some actual money so I can buy a decent old Powerbook, even. A G4 aluminum, maybe. But until college (yeah, it's 3 years. I'm a little child ._.) my parents aren't going to finance anything.
Mac recycling is a good thing, though. Some very nice G4s and G5s pop up on ebay and craigslist.

Windows Vista Ultimate x64 = Tower
Windows Vista HomeBasic x86 = Laptop
WIndows CE 5.0 = DreamCast
YellowDog Linux 6.0 = Ps3

sry no room for OSX any were

I must way windows all the way for gaming... and linux for the ps3 becuz u can not install windows out of the box on a ps3...

I'd have to say Mac is the best OS. Simply because Linux is overly complicated and Windows is well...Windows. The best Windows version is Vista. Why? Microsoft is finally starting to head in the right direction. Best OS X is Tiger. Why? Well, it's what started the whole OSX86 community. Good old 10.4.1

Yep, and in two or three more years they may even catch up to OS X 10.4 once they get all the features they copied to work right.

windows 2000 professional was lovely to work with, fast, stable, XP was built upon that so i guess that's why we are all so fond of XP these days.

Vista is just ugh

I love Mac OSX but i think finder is very annoying to work with, nowhere near as officiant as explorer or thunar (linux) etc.

To be honest; I find Finder much more streamlined and sensibly integrated than Explorer or the Linux shells I've used, Well, Vista's Explorer anyway. Let's face it; Vista is just about as useful as M.E....

You call really huge amounts of bloat, a really bad network stack that breaks, a new audio stack which is total crap and changing the driver code right at the last minute totally screwing up nvidia/ati/intel drivers all at once requiring everyone to start over? UAC? and wmp11...boy they ruined that in vista.Microsoft went hugely in the wrong direction with vista, aero has no functionality, it just looks nice, for a short while...after that you realise its just trying way too hard to look pretty to distract you from just how slow the OS is, try it without aero off and be amazed at the slowness and clunkyness of the UI.Then there is the constant UI inconsistences across the OS, everything looks out of place with everything else.Could go on forever *Misses longhorn days, vista looked so promising back then...Anyway 7 is on track...it's shaping up to what vista should have been and it's actually ALOT faster already, unfortunetly still the same crap aero interface.Hmm, big difference of opinion here, i feel very restricted while using Finder in all honesty.Explorer would be great with multi-tabs, other than that i cant really say much bad about it.What do you find good about finder? i really cant think of anything, sure it fits in well with the OS but it's pure hell for moving files about and arranging them properly, imo.

I don't know; I just Finder to be alot more sensibly designed; whereas Explorer (in Windows 6.0) seems rather topheavy and impractical. Finder does what it's supposed to without bloating out the OS and causing bugs, something Explorer seems incapable of

But finder doesnt remember your folder views (constantly changes for me) and even so you have to set it for EVERY folder you go in, this is pure hell if you have folders 5-6 deep or have alot of downloads/movies/encodes etc, makes it extremely stressful.

And the random icon movements, i get sick of aligning them out then they go out of place when i delete a file, infact, i got so annoyed with finder i removed leopard all together, just not practical when you use the PC/Mac for downloading etc.

Explorer is MUCH better in that respect.

Explorer in vista really doesnt make much sense (why do i have to alt+tab just to bring up the old file, edit etc? grr!) the sidebar isnt consistent either, i had to modify it soon as i got in vista, but then, there is nothing i like about vista anyway, i get annoyed with it within 10mins of use, so im pretty much stuck with XP, linux annoys me as well, lol.

I like Leopard, way better than Tiger and runs smoother even on the older Macs. I'm usin Mac OSX Leopard 10.5.3 atm on my macbook and 10.5.0 on a PM G4 Quicksilver.

The best Hackintos distro is Kalyway. It just works better than all the others

Best Windows is XP. I've used it without major problems for a while now for gaming. Still a bad OS for everyday use.

no apparently the aero interface in windows 7 is only going to be during the testing phases, while they're developing a new interface......... apparently it's going to include the ribbon included in office 2007, and there's gonna be some new major feature called HomeGroup or something that allows you to LIVELY sync with other computers, mobile phones, tv's, even cars, live whereever you are. sounds pretty fancy! anyone heard about the proposed new 'snow leopard 10.6?' apparently it's going to have around 3000+ features which is more features that were included from the first OS X to leopard.........slowly, at the moment XP is better than vista in most aspects.... but more products like VMware ThinStall are coming out where you can run any program from any copy of windows on any copy of windows, so all of those incompatible programs that don't work on vista are runable....................quite fascinating.

Btw, you don't need to "Alt+Tab" to get the menu bars; just press Alt and they appear. Also, I believe they can be configured to stay permanently in Folder Options...

levkovski...................you must have a pretty good pc to be quad booting, what pc do you have? (specs etc)

Home built... but kept upgrading. I'd say my spec's more mediocre tbh though...
2gb 677mhz Kingston RAM,
Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS
4*500gb WD HDD
2*LG Lightscribe DVD+DL writers
Intel Pentium D 3ghz Dual Core 64x

pfft sounds awesome........






my sucky laptop is constantly overheating and iatkos nor kalyway works with it................ what's up with this new EFiX thing? maybe it'll work on mine.................also, what system are you using now? presumably osx?

Yeah... OS X Ftw =] After migrating I really can't look back... It takes a quarter of the time to boot as Vista; so I configured BCD to boot OS X automatically.

Tbh I'm not so keen on the who Efi-X thing; It seems to take the 'challenge' away from the whole OS x86 scene, if you get me? I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way... it just seems like an 'easy way out' sort of thing...

Err, the interface in 7 is not gonna change much and they are keeping aero, windows 7 is mostly going to be about touchscreen, we wont see many UI improvements at all.It's going to be all about performance/speed.Quad Core QX96508GB DDR3 @ 1833MHZ2X8800GTX Sli3TB Spaceetc here...overkill..for now...but i know it will last me for 3-5 years so its money very well spent.

yeah............................................i'm just wanting to try it because i can't install it.... it's kinda weird how i can't, it boots into the installer and all, i format right and stuff, followed tutourials and been guided by friends who have done it, but each & every single time, at about 5-10% it just stops and has an error about some 'Intel.1.5.1' package could not be installed thing...... Tried iatkos, kalway and all. maybe i could get the latest iatkos 2.0? would that solve the problem? only issue is that my internet is really slow (512kilobits) and I only get 7gig to download per month, don't ask why it's just the way the internet works in my house lol

Hmm. At a first thought I'd say it's your installer; but if you've tried different ones, it rules that out. booting from the DVD with cpus=1? Or turning off any extra features in your BIOS that you don't need?

btw levkovski, how much did that home pc cost u inc. all the bits and bobs? (USD)yeah, well the problemo is that this is my school pc....... kinda managed by the schools it dept. the options in my bios are what you'd call scary, like you search them in google and not even google gives you an explanation lol..................

I like in Rip-Off Britain... and all together it cost around £670, which would be $1310.32 in USD...
You get computers supplied by school? How lucky is that XD
the computers at my school are pathetic little Dell Dimensions with 60gb HDDs and 17" Monitors XD

Is there any option to turn off one processor core?

yeah i think there might be...... i'll have a look sometime when i backup all my stuff...................

yeah we have to pay for the laptop's, but the school provides them, we HAVE to get them otherwise we can't be at the school

:S Bizarre
That's a little harsh aswell...

lol it's not really your average school, it's a private one, about $20,000AUD (about $18,788.00 USD) per year, per student!!!!! (very, very expensive!!!!)i love mac hehe

Re: bloat - Yeah, Vista's fairly piggish, but by 2008 standards it's not so out of place. On my Macbook Pro with OS X 10.5.3, I have Safari, Colloquy, and MSN Messenger running. Total RAM in use currently is just over 1.1GB. I have yet to install any recent desktop version of Linux on real hardware, so I can't compare it. Maybe someone here can show some information?

Re: network stack - I'm not sure why you are having problems, but my Vista (and Windows in general) networking has been problem-free. Whether I'm on wired or wireless, I have no complaints. The Vista "Network and Sharing Center" is a little odd, but I'm slowly getting used to it.

Re: audio stack - while I'm not sure I'd say it's "total crap" I can say I am annoyed they ditched hardware acceleration. I've been a loyal Creative Labs fanboy for years JUST for this, and it pains me that when I upgrade my gaming desktop and move it to Vista I won't be using a Creative Labs card. The audio stack definitely needed a re-write, I don't think they did as good a job as they could have.

Re: driver code - Obviously someone knew something, as ATI's drivers at Vista RTM, while not stellar, were far more mature than nVidia's. ATI didn't even miss a monthly driver release cycle, while nVidia got really quiet and had a strange driver schedule from that point on pretty much.

Re: UAC - a popular Vista dis. Ya know, on my laptop I put Vista x64 on, and I decided to keep UAC enabled. It really doesn't bother me much, and when it does I don't mind it. It could use some tweaking, and what I wouldn't give for some kind of verifiable "whitelist" function to say "this app with this hash is ALWAYS safe" but for now I don't mind hitting "allow" on the rare app that wants it. OMG ONE CLICK. And of course, UAC can be disabled for the really whiny people that REALLY hate it so much.

Re: WMP11 - Not sure what's wrong here. It seems to run OK for me. I even fool with the 64-bit WMP11 and got some codecs for it. Not sure there's any benefit to that, but hey, 64-bit is the FUTURE!

Vista has grown on me. I wasn't sure I liked it at RTM, and while I ran it on and off on my laptop most of 2007, I still ended up back on XP64 (or OS X). SP1 kind of cleared any doubt for me, and I decided to give it another shot, and so far it's run really well for me. I still have my gripes, some of which are fairly serious (WTF is with Media Center installing a bunch of crap the first time it's ran?) but overall it's nice to look at without being too gaudy, runs very smooth for me, and is modern. Whether being modern is good or bad, who knows. It's a little of both I guess.

I like both Mac and Windows and if you use windows right it can be a lot more powerful than OSX. Every system has its faults.

Please explain...

f*$# i just spent 4 hours trying to get rid of 29 trojans on my pc!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lol