macOS vs. Windows vs. Linux

[dedobot]

Overall personal daily use -Windows, business office - Windows AD, windows desktop with mix of linux where is it possible. Niches like video edit MacOS , servers of all type - *nix.

 

[Multicore]

That's because they want to force their hardware on you.

I can think of commercial/engineering reasons for Apple to move off Intel chips. That's not one of them.

 

[DLS79]

I can think of commercial/engineering reasons for Apple to move off Intel chips. That's not one of them.

As a company they lover their walled garden!

 

[Multicore]

I'm not talking about current hardware!

That was confusing because you wrote in reply to me mentioning Apple's plans to move from Intel (to their own ARM) chips. So I guess you don't mean CPU arch. What current hardware do you mean?

 

[Multicore]

As a company they lover their walled garden!

Of course. All tech firms love a walled garden if they can muster one. Same with the AWS cash cow: the deeper you get into it the more it costs to get out by some grotesque power-law function. Monopoly rent extraction is the dream for all true capitalists.

 

[DLS79]

That was confusing because you wrote in reply to me mentioning Apple's plans to move from Intel (to their own ARM) chips. So I guess you don't mean CPU arch. What current hardware do you mean?

depends how far back you want to go, they have done many things over the years, for example.

Wired removes Hackintosh video after Apple legal threat

newVideoPlayer("/wiredhackintosh_gizmodo.flv", 475, 376,""); Remember the video that Wired posted on how to hack a Netbook to run OS X?

www.zdnet.com

 

[DLS79]

Monopoly rent extraction is the dream for all true capitalists.

their is a difference between being a capitalists and a ...............

 

[Axo1989]

I'm not talking about current hardware!

Ahh ok, I didn't follow your thread/train of thought from @Multicore's post there (I just went with your present tense).

 

[raif71]

Remember this caption back in the day, "Real Men use DOS" ?

 

[Multicore]

Remember this caption back in the day, "Real Men use DOS" ?

No but I remember reading a printout of Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal when it must have been nearly new. They actually had a Cray in the building where I had that summer job, though I never saw it. There were a lot of those Real Somethings [Don't] Use Something" back then but the Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal was a hilarious send up. Unfortunately not everyone recognizes it as satire.

 

[Multicore]

their is a difference between being a capitalists and a ...............

Real men know market competition is ruinous for the rate of return on capital. Only quiche-eaters believe otherwise.

 

[DLS79]

Real men know market competition is ruinous for the rate of return on capital. Only quiche-eaters believe otherwise.

Well, the company i used to work for made a little over a billion a year in profits, and we didn't waste money on all crap like I've previously. We simply kept out innovating/developing the competition.

 

[terryforsythe]

If I remember correctly OS/2 had window compatibility mode that you could assign to an application. No idea how good it was thu.

It was 31 or 32 years ago, but if I remember correctly, it would not the Windows version of AutoCad - I think I tried. There may have been a version of AutoCad for OS/2, I don't know, but my work at the time only had Windows versions. They let me use one license on my computer since I often did work from home.

 

[TonyJZX]

Microsoft to offer consumers paid Windows 10 security updates for the first time

The extended support will be an annual subscription.

www.theverge.com

funny

 

[Berwhale]

Microsoft to offer consumers paid Windows 10 security updates for the first time

The extended support will be an annual subscription.

www.theverge.com

funny

It seems reasonable of Microsoft to offer the option to people that want to stay on a deprecated OS and pay for the privilege. As an enterprise consumer of this programme, I can tell you that it's not cheap, but neither is the cost of maintaining the old code or paying the developers who do it.

 

[somebodyelse]

Given the change in hardware requirements, upgrading to Windows 11 isn't an option for a lot of people unless it's with a new computer. So will people pay, jump ship to something like a linux or ChromeOS option, or just keep using Win10 regardless? Given how long Win7 hung around after its end-of-life my guess is many will pick the last option.

 

[Berwhale]

Given the change in hardware requirements, upgrading to Windows 11 isn't an option for a lot of people unless it's with a new computer. So will people pay, jump ship to something like a linux or ChromeOS option, or just keep using Win10 regardless? Given how long Win7 hung around after its end-of-life my guess is many will pick the last option.

Given the choice between running an unsupported OS verses running Windows 11 on hardware that is unsupported because of fairly arbitrary hardware requirements, I would opt for the later.

If people want to keep really old hardware running with Windows 10, I would suggest that they disconnect it from any networks once support and security patches become unavailable. If you want to keep the hardware running with it connected to a network, then I would install one of the mainstream Linux distributions, that is designed to be familiar to Windows users, such as Linux Mint.

 

[CherylJosie]

>MacOS is okay for people who don't want to think and don't need to do anything fancy. It just works mostly.

Seeing so much of this^^^

Software is the most advanced tool humanity has ever created and it's usually built on macOS. The most advanced tools are built on/for macOS. There is no second best. There is no comparison. There are incredibly narrow specialties like aerospace built on raw iron, and gaming built on windows, but outside that it's macOS. The entire world including most websites are built using macOS. I understand you're not in the industry so you don't know.

20 years ago my colleagues were writing their code on Solaris. We had SPARCs in our product.

It's been a while for me, and I've been mostly out of the loop since then.


But regarding 'doing fancy' I'm referring to virtualization, web servers, databases, file servers, embedded, shell scripting, IC design, industrial control etc. etc. etc. none of which are typically hosted on a Mac because a premium priced desktop PC with modest hardware capability and software bloat is a completely inappropriate place to do any of that.

At least, that's how it was 20 years ago.

Maybe something changed since then, but I still view a Mac as a PC that just works, if you want to compose music, author a document, create art, edit video etc. without having to futz with software/hardware integration and build to specification. Plus you pay through the nose for a well debugged platform out of the box.

I guess what you are referring to is the software development platform and that (apparently from your comment) applies to cross-platform development where the functionality is tested in virtualization under a Mac hypervisor? I guess things like Matlab etc. that handle primarily data won't care about hardware drivers so much, as long as they have basic video and audio functionality for the display.

Meanwhile a custom Windows gaming PC will blow the doors off anything else out there for gaming, including a Mac desktop, because it's bleeding edge hardware and software.

Virtualization comes with some compromises when running on a desktop system. I'm talking about useability, rather than technical limitations. For example, what happens to all your virtualized workloads when you put your desktop to sleep?

Personally, my desktop runs Windows 11 Pro (on the Insider Beta channel). I use a tiny 35W i3 based Dell micro PC as a Vmware ESXi host running virtualized and containerized workloads (on Ubuntu server VMs) and a couple of Synology NAS doing file, backup and media server (Plex) duties.

None of my Linux PCs sleep. The P states or whatever aren't working because the motherboard drivers aren't there. The file server is running NFS on RAID and the RAID won't sleep without getting corrupted. It's okay because the solar array supplies all of my power anyway and it doesn't cost me much to burn extra with my true-up refund at wholesale prices anyway.

The thing I'm particularly curious about is virtualization. My impression was that a hypervisor has to apportion control of the hardware amongst the clients. The issue is that if the hypervisor doesn't have good hardware drivers it can't handle that well.

For example, if Linux hypervisor has one Mac client that wants to access the sound card for music composition, and another Windows client that wants to access the sound card for gaming, the result won't be pretty, especially if the hypervisor doesn't have a good driver it may not be able to provide the DSP firmware to the sound card and then what happens? DAW's are pretty much hardware-locked.

Or what if one client is running a TV tuner and recording OTA shows, but the Linux hypervisor doesn't understand how to access the tuner card because it doesn't have adequate drivers for the Windows-based card?

I've had a problem with Windows plug-n-play hardware running under Linux where the basic sound card functionality is barely there with none of the downloadable DSP available, and I frankly can't see composing music without access to sound effects.

That's the part I don't understand, is what to do in the case where the hardware needs firmware download. It can't be downloaded for each client or they will crash each other, and nobody is going to write drivers for the hypervisor that emulate proprietary firmware running in the sound card hardware (that may not even be possible because of copyright/patent). The hypervisor isn't going to reload all the DSP firmware for each time slice either if two virtualized clients are accessing one piece of hardware simultaneously.

This 'rant' is all based on 20 year old understanding of how hardware functions via driver download of DSP for things like sound cards, wireless, etc. that typically aren't well supported under Linux. Maybe DSP is mostly handled in software now because CPUs, memory, and buses got so much faster, except the GPU that now doubles as a parallel processor? I don't know, I'm out of the market on my disability income.

Help me out here. Assume I'm running a home theater with gaming on a PC and I want to virtualize the system so that I can use both a Linux desktop for the media playback of my totally improvised music/movie collection that I've hosted on a Linux NFS file server, and works well for free under a Linux desktop. I would like to experiment with remote shell etc. too so that I can learn a little about Linux network administration.

I also want to run Windows games that need solid hardware support, but I don't want to install another PC just for gaming because I don't have the room or the budget.

I also want to compose music in a Mac application such as a DAW with a separate music composition suite and add video or live AV to the final result, but I don't want to invest in a pricey Mac that I'll never be able to afford on my budget.

Am I going to install a hypervisor in Windows so that the game has full native access to the hardware via the Windows drivers in the hypervisor, and so that the Mac music editor/DAW/video editor also has full access to the DSP in the sound card?

Or am I going to install a hypervisor in Linux that doesn't have a clue about the sound card firmware and adds a slow layer of complexity to the video shading and rendering (if it works at all) while completely breaking the get-rich-slow bitcoin mining program and the audio DSP functionality for the DAW/music editor?

This is why I haven't even attempted it yet. I'm giving up the gaming and the music composition because the home theater works fine under Linux and there's no budget for another PC or OS licensing right now. My son tried installing Steam and the support for Linux gaming is sparse.

I guess the ultimate question is how does a typical home computer guru handle the diverse needs of entertainment systems without proliferating a lot of expensive hardware and software, with much of that capability being redundant simply because it's not fully inter-operable?

My 'favorite' OS would be the one running the hypervisor in that case, and I always just assumed that for hardware compatibility it would have to be Windows even though I'm currently using Linux exclusively even though I really like the look and feel of Mac OS.

That leaves me open to all the abuses of Microsoft because they'll have full control of my home theater PC (but I'll never turn over my file server to them).

Point a way out of this maze of poverty please and maybe I'll change my vote. For now, FOSS Linux is working fine.

 

[darrellc]

Early PCs were CP/M and various operating systems, then mostly Mac once it came out until I started working for Microsoft then back to Mac the day I left. Played with various Linux distributions for a while but now I’m just busy with running a business and no time to mess around so all in on Apple ecosystem in the company and at home as it just works.

 

[Philbo King]

In the beginning, there are only 2 computer operating systems which are IBM PC DOS (now become Windows) and UNIX (now become LINUX and Mac). Is this right?

Nope. There was CP/M for 8080/Z80 systems like the Altair. There was Apple DOS for the preMac Apple II. There were similar ones for Commodore, Atari and various other 8 bit CPUs.
Then, of course, the VAX PDP OS...