Originally posted by: slugg
Going down the list, on the side of Windows/MS...
Email - Outlook/Entourage is way better than Apple's Mail.
Personal opinion. I mostly use the gmail webpage. I use apple mail only for times when I have no network access and need to find an email.
Originally posted by: slugg
Calendar - Outlook/Entourage
Personal opinion again.
Originally posted by: slugg
Terminal - Putty? I mean, you _will_ be remoting, right? If not, then yea Mac OS X wins.
Putty is a crappy terminal for ssh. No real terminal work is done that way. Even cygwin/X and xterm is a better choice.
Originally posted by: slugg
Database access - Oracle, MySQL, and various MS databases...
Your point? I can access any database I want, and most importantly, every database I need to.
Originally posted by: slugg
Programing - MS Visual Studio. Hands down. MS is a software giant - their tools are the best in the industry.
Personal opinion again. I can't stand visual studoo. I flat out hate it. Even when I was forced to do .net work I did not use visual studio.
Originally posted by: slugg
Data protection - Ehh... many options here. All operating systems have something good.
Nothing as easy for what my work has licensed. As I said, vista business doesn't have bitlocker, and truecrypt is full disk encryption, which is more then I really want. In linux I can encrypt my home directory easily. In windows I'm SOL unless I convince my boss to needlessly upgrade our licensing to the next tier.
Originally posted by: slugg
Photoshop - Hey look at those Windows versus OS X benchmarks
I'm using a notebook, do you think I'm doing heavy work. I'm a software developer. I need to make a small button now and then for a website, or an icon.
Originally posted by: slugg
Flash - I must also mention Silverlight. Good luck developing Silverlight apps on a Mac.
Good. I'm trying to get rid of flash, the last thing I want to do is replace it with another plugin required piece of garbage.
Originally posted by: slugg
Browsers - IE, Firefox, Opera, and what's this... SAFARI. Everything you need, one OS
Firefox, Opera, and safari. Everything you need, one OS
I fixed that for you. The fact is, testing is not my job. So I need browsers I want to use. Safari on windows horrid. I think apple makes it horrid in some strange attempt to make you think windows sucks.
Originally posted by: slugg
SCT Banner - I have no comment on this. Not familiar with it.
Hundred thousand buck software that almost all real universities use as their core business logic.
Originally posted by: slugg
Remote desktop - OS X's solution is through VNC, which is absolute crap compared to MS's RDP.
and? I can RDP to windows machines if I need to, and no one ever needs to remote to my machine. It's a notebook after all.
Originally posted by: slugg
Office - MS Office is worth the money. Open Office is fine for super basic stuff, but there's so much more support and you'll spend a lot less time doing your work with MS Office. Not to mention, Outlook is the best money can buy.
More opinion. But yes outlook is the best money can buy. But the free stuff is better ;-)
Originally posted by: slugg
Added:
Engineering Apps - Mathematica and Matlab run like crap on Linux and Mac as compared to Windows. Matlab isn't so bad, but there's a huge difference with Mathematica. Also, CAD software is extremely limited on Linux and Mac.
Gaming - I'm not a gamer, but a lot of people are. Windows wins.
This is relevant to my switching how? I guess my job could suddenly change to windows game testing, or maybe I could become a CAD designer. Probably not though.
Originally posted by: slugg
So my point is... yes, OS X and Linux have advantages, but Windows offers a _LOT_ of compatibility, more so than any other OS. The development tools available on Windows dwarf those on Mac OS X and Linux. There's no denying that Microsoft .NET technology is amazing. Hell, these forums are running on .NET! Same with Newegg and MySpace. Direct X is also at the top of the food chain for consumer multimedia applications.
Again, opinion. I personally do not like .NET and have turned down jobs that required me to work in .NET. Mainly because I do not like visual studio and most jobs will require me to use that. Further more I think VB.net is garbage in terms of language syntax and that the VM is useless because it is only officially supported on windows. If I was going to write for windows only, I'd stick with C++ which I know very well and doesn't require me to use some kind of magic box. When I want cross compatibility on the web I'll use python, php, ruby, java, hell even perl if you want. (Ok so not perl). This is my personal opinion. DirectX is nice, but has no baring on my ability to work. I'm not a game designer nor would I want to be.
Originally posted by: slugg
To completely drop an OS for the sake of doing it is kind of pointless. I use all three platforms so that I can get my work done as fast as possible. I _COULD_ completely switch to any one platform, but then that's just limiting myself. Why would I stop myself from using Visual Studio if I have the opportunity? Why should I refuse to use MS Outlook? Why should I use my Mac for newsgroups, when NewsBin (Windows) is the best news client out there? It just doesn't make sense.
Again, you assume I dropped it solely because I hate windows. I didn't. I dropped it because I am more comfortable working in OSX. I have the tools I need in the format and environment I enjoy. It wasn't some "Gee, windows sucks, lets drop it". I can't think of a single reason I would want to use windows. I have no windows computers in my home and haven't had one for years. I used linux, then moved to mac. Why would I want to use an OS so dissimilar to one I use at home at work? That's why microsoft took off in the first place, because people wanted to use what they used at work at home.
To use windows just for the sake of using windows is pointless. I gain no advantages as I can do everything I want on mac, and I don't have to figure out the "windows" way of doing what I want. I can't use automator, I can't write applescripts to manage gui apps. I can't write bash scripts to manage command line apps. I don't have to keep screwing up and typing ifconfig when I mean ipconfig, or ls when I mean dir. I will stop getting ticked when I hit alt-c to copy because my hands are used to command-c. I'll stop hitting the non-existent dashboard button to see my stocks and the weather. And my expose key will actually be there. When I hit command arrow I'll move the cursor like I expect. Also, a minor thing but my touch pad will be 3 times bigger then any windows touch pad and my keyboard will have a back light.
Originally posted by: slugg
Follow the money. If Windows was so bad, large corporations wouldn't be using it. They have demands that Microsoft is able to supply solutions for at an overall cheaper price than other competitors. If this wasn't the case, MS wouldn't have so many customers. Simple economics...
Never said windows was bad. Not once. However, in my market (education) microsoft is losing huge footholds. For example, we used to have our own imap server. We wanted something easier to manage, so we compared exchange and google side by side. Google won. It was easier to manage, the users took to it better without training, and it saved us about 15 thousand bucks a year. Not to mention the 30 thousand it would of cost to start up exchange. We did a study on moving from novell to active directory. We found after brining in 3 or 4 companies to pitch it that we couldn't come close to what novell can do for anywhere near the price we pay. We found that 95% of our users can meet their needs with open office, so we are moving that direction. We moved the campus to firefox and found a 5% drop in calls to remove spyware and adware (not that we had many). By moving our servers from windows to linux we freed up enough overhead on our ESX servers to add 5 more servers then we had additionally plotted for. The servers moved were our web server, our repository server, or "cron job" server, our data warehouse server (big database server), and our reports server. We also moved many kiosks to linux and found a reduced instance in support calls to fix broken kiosks. (They are just big web browsers and word editors anyways)
But it's not just Microsoft we are picking on. We are also dumping Sun like it's going out of style. The market is tight and we have to pick the solutions that make sense. We have moved major business logic from solaris 9 servers to CentOS instead of solaris 10. This allowed for a huge drop hardware and support costs.
So unless I find one thing I just have to have to do my job that requires windows, there is simply no point of having a windows computer. I simply do not enjoy using them. As you can see in my comments my reasoning and your reasoning come down to simply opinion. I didn't see any technical reasons why I would want to use windows. I have also not listed many technical reasons why I do not (aside from some apps I like on mac that linux and windows do not have). This was also not a anti windows post. I didn't leave windows alone. I also left linux. I don't use linux at home anymore, and I don't use windows at work anymore (still have linux servers and that is probably not changing for a long long time). I still have a few windows servers to manage (our MFP machines require a windows server to manage access for example). But my personal machines are now all mac, and I like it that way.
It seems to really distress a lot of people to think that people can be happy without windows. I can't understand why. People tell me how I NEED windows to do real work. Maybe they need windows, or maybe they just like windows more. But the fact is unless you can show me a better way to do my job on windows (which is again opinion) I simply don't need it.
To me OSX is the best of both worlds. I get the few pieces of commercial software that are important to me (and the few games on PC that are important as well) and all the things that made me switch to linux (bash, hundreds of open source tools, etc). On top of that I get a user interface and development tools for that environment that I are more intuitive to me then anything I have found on windows and linux.
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