Saturday, October 27, 2007

OS War - Fair and Balanced

The post's title may be familiar to any Fox News watcher (although usually they are neither).
Last week, I've blogged about 2 Vista competitors (Leopard and Gutsy Gibbon). My intentions were not to bash Microsoft (or Vista), just to demonstrate that there are other alternatives out there and that, perhaps, Microsoft lost this round in the OS war (and I mean quality-wise, not sales-wise).

Here are some news items that will show that nothing is perfect in the other camp as well:
  1. Many people who tried upgrading their Mac OS X to Leopard this weekend, got a... blue screen of death??? Wait a second, isn't the BSOD trademarked by Microsoft?
    It appears there is a problem with some upgrades. Apple Support people are flooded with calls. They have a workaround, that would require you to open a terminal window (for the Windows-only crowd: that's like a command window) and delete some files. Still, not the best way to launch anew OS. Read about it here, here and on Apple Support forums here.

  2. Not everyone seems to be blown away by Leopard's new interface. This guy thinks it's actually a step back.

  3. An IPv6 issue with release 7.10 of Ubuntu forces some users to downgrade to 7.04. I'm sure it's a fixable issue, but the title attracted my attention ("not so gutsy").
Being a software developer, I know that not everything is perfect the first time around (although a major issue in a major release can usually be tracked back to poor QA).
Apple and Ubuntu will surely fix those issues soon. I'm still waiting for SP1 for Vista to see if Microsoft can fix their annoyances.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice blog. I prefer gutsy to fiesty, leopard and vista. Vista just got a lot bigger and cpu intensive. It doesn't have much features when compared to XP ( based on the size of the os ).

Traveling Tech Guy said...

I heartily agree.
If you check my Vista SP1 review, you'l find that Vista gobbles up resources, even after installing the famed "SP1 savior".

When people ask my opinion about what computer to get, I say - "get a Mac".
If they say, "I already have PC, or would like to stick to one" - I either say "get XP SP2" (for regular people) or "get Ubuntu" (for computer savvy people).
Vista is not recommended.