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As someone with a mixed OS environment, I like finding articles (especually real technical ones) that compare and contrast the benefits of Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu to see if there are any previously unknown strengths or weaknesses I can take advantage of. So I’m reading through just such an article on PC Magazine called OS Wars: The Battle for Your Desktop and I come across this gem:

The current version of Mac Leopard costs $129 direct, or $109.99 at Amazon, where you can also still buy 10.4.5, aka Tiger, as well. With Apple, users pay every year (or so) to get a major upgrade. Microsoft provides its major Windows upgrades, called Service Packs, free of charge. Paying more for Mac OS upgrades is a bit galling when you’ve already paid a premium for the hardware.

Are you kidding me? I almost immediately thought this was some sort of Microsoft fanboy article until I remembered, this is PC MAGAZINE! It’s galling to me that the person who wrote (and edited) this didn’t know the difference between Service Packs and OS Upgrades wrt to Windows. For the record, Tiger is to Leopard as XP is to Vista - i.e. a major upgrade AND a separate purchase. There’s no magical service pack that you can use to upgrade XP to Vista. And it’s not free. And mischaracterizing the Tiger to Leopard upgrade as “galling” is piss poor journalism.

In reading the entire article it became clear that the writer was very familiar with Microsoft products, but seemed to rely on others to provide the expertise on Ubuntu and Mac. For instance:

The Ubuntu core, however, is a text-based OS—something Windows spent years getting away from. And unfortunately, you still have to use terminal input to install software or configure settings far too often, even more often than you had to use DOS command lines in Windows 3.1. Until Ubuntu can do away with the terminal for all but the most geeky uses (as the Unix-based Mac OS does), it will never become an OS for the masses.

Anyone who’s even played with Feisty Fawn, Gutsy Gibbon, or even Puppy Linux knows that synaptic and other similar package manager guis have been around for a while. I can’t speak for other distros, but I’d assume it was the same there too. What’s funny is the author mentions this later in the article. Huh??

On a more important note, does this guy understand how Operating systems work? The knock on Windows is it’s stability - something that *nix systems have in abundance. I recently ran an ipconfig /release on my Windows XP box and it shutdown on me - closed all my open applications and only gave me 60 seconds to save. And I consider myself lucky I didn’t get the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death).

OS architecture on Windows rears its ugly head when it comes to viruses and malware. In *nix based systems like Ubuntu and Mac OS X, programs that are installed play in their own space. No need for a single-point-of-failure registry or possibly overwriting shared DLLs like in windows. If you install something that needs to be a bit more invasive, it always asks you for your password - so you know when something nefarious may be afoot (like the Sony Rootkit). With XP it’s come one come all wrt editing system files. As long as you have admin access (which most people with XP Home have) you can do what you want. Vista fixes this with a band-aid approach by asking you to confirm everything - sometimes twice - and getting in the effing way. Again - it’s all about the design.

And now for the best line of the entire piece:

among them the slick Internet Explorer 7 (especially slick when compared with Safari on the Mac, a bad browser)

Internet Explorer is by far the most bloated, memory hogging, malware attracting browser on the planet. The whole BHO (browser helper object) architecture is simply ridiculous - no wonder virus writers lick their chops when a new exploit is found. Safari may not anything to sneeze about feature-wise, but if it is “a bad browser” then IE is “a worse browser!”

Come on, PC Magazine - I expect better than this!

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