31 May 2010

[design] I Like Windows 7 - But I Still Prefer Mac OS X. Here's Why.

2425.Just like a lot of people trained in design, I love Apple. And the previous post where I solicited public comment on the idea of using a Mac Mini as my design center made me think about why I was so set on staying Mac.

I love Apple.

Well, let me qualify that a bit.

I like the company. Jobs sometimes leaves me with that "uh-oh" feeling. But I love Mac OS X.

I've had a foot in both the Mac and PC worlds almost ever since I owned a computer. I've known friends who swore by their Macintoshes while we were piecing together Windows machines before we could finally own a Mac. I've seen and used Windows 7 and I've got to say that, within the Windows paradigm, all the upgood press you've heard about it is dead on the money: Win 7 looks good, works good, and is the most well-behaved Windows yet.

But, given my choice I'll stick with the X.

Why?

One word: Darwin. Another word: architecture.

Installing applications in X is a breeze and, even though the under-the-hood works has changed since the days of the earlier Macintosh OS's, the basics are still the same: for most applications, uninstalling still remains a matter of simply dragging the file to the trash.

I've just never been able to do that in Windows, even Win 7. And what dependencies there are are pretty easy to find. I don't need a "wizard" to install or uninstall a lot of things. That's simplicity because I can see what's going on. DLL? What's that?

The organization of the file system makes a great deal more sense to me. It's more intuitive. I also know Unix ... not as a pure power user, but enough of a power end-user that if I need to find something, I can break open Terminal and go looking. To me, the command shell of DOS is was always like a kind of poor-mans Unix, that doesn't quite work the way it ought to. Unix command line cryptic? I took one look at DOS Power Shell and my eyes instantly glazed over. And, unlike Windows, since Darwin is a flavor of Unix, it has a bunch of nifty and useful things installed that I'm well familiar with – vi, ftp, rlogin, ssh, all sorts of stuff that I learned to use effectively a long time back.

So, it's my hat's off to Win 7. It is indeed everything they're selling it as. But I'll stick with the X, because the X makes a whole lot more sense, and I feel a lot less lost in the Darwin environment.

It just works ... for me.

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2 comments:

Benjamin Lukoff said...

Hey… but… Windows 7 was my idea! ;)

Samuel John Klein said...

And a good idea it is Benjamin ... almost like using a Mac. Good job!

B-)