From the little I’ve seen, neither Vista nor Leopard wow me. Leopard, by the looks of it, is “flashier”, which I dislike because I want an instantly responsive system, not one that takes “time out” to show me pretty animations. Ubuntu Beryl is by far the worst of the lot: with full options enabled, the contents of windows wibble like gelatine when you move them (WHY?!), windows “pour” down into the dock/taskbar-equivalent, and ignite in a ridiculous, poorly rendered firestorm when you close them.

Yes it does. It is not enabled in the basic-setup. But you can switch it on and see it at the bottom of the Finder window. The folders in the breadcrumb trail are clickable as well, enabling you to instantly access any part of the trail.

Despite a lack of knowledge about Operating Systems, I do know something about computers. I have a notebook that will boot with either Ubuntu or XP. I program in C# and Python.

I had a computer running XP and updated to Vista. To do this I got a new video card and upgraded the memory to 1.5 gigs.

Changing to Vista was a big mistake. It takes it a good four minutes to boot the thing and I cannot tell when it is finished starting itself. So, if I click on Outlook too soon, the OS crashes. Every time. It will not respond to anything. It also crashes about once a week and it is terribly slow to do just about anything. My guess is that there is some sort of problem with the installation. I’ve spent several hours fiddling with it to no avail.

My Panasonic PV GS35 camcorder does not work with Vista at all. This despite spending hours updating the software for Vista.

I’m down hundreds of dollars with less performance than I had and don’t want to think about trying to get back to XP.

So, I went to a Mac store. Timed the boots on a couple of machines. The biggest meanest one took almost two minutes. Gosh, that’s not good. One iMac did boot quickly, in well under a minute. However, the lousy boot performance of the most powerful Mac in the store discouraged me from purchasing one. In addition, everybody I know who owns one, (they are all older machines) say they are slower than PCs.

Meanwhile, my old slow laptop boots Ubuntu in under a minute and it only crashes, quite reliably I might add, if I leave it for an extended time. Presumably it goes into some kind of power down mode that the operating system can’t figure out. It’s never gone down for any other reason that I can remember.

Well I think these comments must sound naive to most who might read this. However, non sophisticated users still count. I want the operating system to work quickly and reliably with the software that I want to run. I do not want to make a hobby out of learning to make the computer operate. Unfortunately, I do not think anything is quite up to snuff. Generally, and quite surprisingly to me, Ubuntu seems to be closer than the others . . . but it’s short on the software availability end . . . and, it’s right on the edge if any kind of uncommon task is attempted. I’ve got no interest in “sudo apt” kind of stuff. It’s easy to spend hours and hours on it and get no where.

Finder, beating Windows Explorer? That’s a laugh. Seriously. I find it amusing how people are quick to brand Flip3D as useless, yet give praise to what is by all rights, an equally “useless” feature of Apple’s — Cover Flow. At the very least, Flip3D adds a tiny bit of ifunctionality onto it’s predecessor, Alt+Tab, in that you can use your mouse scroll wheel or click passing windows to bring them into focus.

Cover Flow, if anything, is a BACKPEDAL on file management. Pretty? Yes. Can I see what every file is at a glance? No. You have to be hovering or focused on that file, and then it will give you the filename beneath the eye-candy. Then, for extended file information, you can look at the list pane below. Oh, wait… that’s… a list — not Cover Flow. Cover Flow is eye-candy — quite literally NOTHING else.

And Finder… has no address bar, compared to Windows Vista’s breadcrumbs-style address bar, which is probably one of the most badass new features of Windows Explorer. Not to mention the “Favorite Links” feature, which — while I’m aware Finder has had that for awhile now, Vista matches. Then there are the views, sorting methods, and grouping methods in Windows Vista, and a very dynamic and scalable interface. Thumbnails, previews, and whatnot — all of them load VERY fast in Vista, much moreso than in XP which — admittedly, Finder kicked rightly in the arse.

Then… Aero? Taking up “inexcusable” amounts of system resources? Sorry sir, Aero is otherwise known as the “Desktop Window Manager,” seen in the task manager as “dwm.exe.” On my 1920×1200 display with a notepad window open, Firefox with five tabs open, my Outlook 2007 main window open, a Skype window open, Paint.NET 3.10 with two images open, a Windows Explorer window open, and my task manager open — dwm.exe is taking up a scant 20 MB. I am more than willing to sacrifice 20 MB for a MUCH better looking, more modern looking, and more useful interface. It’ll pave the way for some very nice-looking, graceful, UI-driven applications. Thanks to Aero, all windows are DirectDraw surfaces — which lets me use Switcher for Expose-like functionality (only, I have about ten times the level of customizeability) with full Aero window previews (even while playing a windowed game of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch or watching a 1080P HD video… or both!).

That. Is not. “Inexcusable,” in fact, compared to Beryl for Linux which has trouble running on a Radeon 9250, it’s damn good. I’m not entirely sure if you can Expose while QuickTime is playing 720P or 1080P HD vdeo… but I can.

I feel inclined to add, you have not “written about your thoughts on that nightmare.” The link you provided to us so we could read about your thoughts on the “nightmare” of the “inexcusable system resource consumption” of Aero contained, in fact, NO COMMENTS on Aero, or just how many resources it ate, or why it was such a bane to Windows. In fact, that article was more-or-less a fest of bashing Vista because some of your third-party, non-Microsoft programs didn’t work.

I won’t say you didn’t have some legitimate complaints — IIS7 was designed “for the Windows Vista platform” and is a Microsoft product, and I can’t see any reason why your triple-display setup wouldn’t work short of, well… third-party drivers not having matured yet. Three-way displays aren’t terrible common, however, so I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. It’s still in it’s first year, Vista has some issues, without question. I have several friends who had some Vista teething issues — any OS will…

In retrospect, Microsoft probably did release Vista “early,” if you’re looking at it relative to the state of XP vs. the state of Vista at their same ages… but if you consider actual development timeframes, Vista was quite late. The industry, expecting Vista sometime in 2003, according to Allchin, didn’t get it until FOUR YEARS LATER. That’s not “early,” and frankly — Microsoft should be commended for NOT giving the industry another ME, and keeping the product in development ’til now. Vista is no ME II — it’s suffering some teething issues as a new operating system that has entered it’s life in a RADICALLY new IT ecosystem, with, if possible, even more hardware combinations and an even greater clientbase this time around. This is 2007, not 2001.

The rest of your reasoning to put OS X on a pedestal above Windows is almost biased. I had no trouble getting my HP printer installed on my Windows Vista setup. I also had no trouble getting my mother’s HP printer installed on my setup — via the wireless network. Actually, I just hit “Start,” then “Network,” and then there was my mother’s printer.

Getting my Canon HV20 to play well with Windows Movie Maker was… a non-existent task. It just did. Period. Getting it to work with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 was a similarly non-existent task. Now I have nice, crisp, 24P or 60i 1080P HD video to enjoy. Without having to burn Blu-Ray discs. Go me.

And the only virtual machine I’ve had to install is a Windows XP virtual machine, because even though Age of Empires II does run quite well on Vista, it has a harder than normal time playing LAN games with Windows XP clients. I surmise that, once everyone in my LAN group jumps to the WOW, I’ll no longer need my virtual machine and will be able to save myself 4 GB of disk space.

I’m not trying to bash OS X. It really is a good operating system. But credit’s due where credit’s due — Vista is a pretty good match for OS X, and will only get better.

I find for the real geek experience Linux is the ticket. Until recently my opinion of running Linux was right up there with self-mutilation, but how things have changed! I have started (dual boot XP / Ubuntu) using Ubuntu and it is if not ready for prime time, on the edge of prime time for average users and a dream for the geek.

I heard that Linux had changed and just started using it to stay up on the changes and found out that it has dramatically transformed. If you will humor me; if Linux gets more user centric it may hurt Apple as well as Microsoft. Ubuntu at least has the potential to be as friendly as the Mac OS and the “let’s mess around with the innards” of the Windows systems if not more so.

I would like to see a series of articles doing a “geek-off” three way comparision of XP, OS X and Ubuntu.

Incidentally, maximize on a Mac has always been “fit to contents” not “fill the screen.” A good app should be smart about how you use your windows and remember the last size used. A lot of people have adjustments to make with that. I hate to use my favorite phrase again, but “document centric” is once again the reason.