The (Holy) OS Wars
My colleague and I have been talking about the holy wars in IT - wars that involves people's preferences of operating systems. Unfortunately, these wars are happening frequently everyday; for proof, just look at the IT forums on the Internet. For some people, it turns into a religious war full of name-calling with insults and mud-pie thrown at each other's faces.
One of my friends happens to be like that. He is totally convinced that the OS he's using is the best in the entire world, and nothing else comes even close to the reliability, stability and robustness of the platform. When given alternatives, he would shrug them off, saying that "that OS is a piece of
Luckily, we are both on very good terms, so although we do get into a discussion on the pros and cons of each OS, we don't get that far that we launch into ... errrm ... a full scale heated discussion. :D But for me, I have a somewhat different approach to the whole subject at hand.
I prefer to think of the whole environment as an ecosystem, and each operating system occupying its niche inside it. Windows is an extremely mature desktop operating system, and it operates as such where others don't foot the bill. Linux and Solaris are excellent for server grade stuff, things that you want to run 24/7 without interruptions and crashes. OS X is brillant for DTP and graphic design houses. And the list goes on.
One interesting thing about being a Unix engineer is that I get to touch many different distributions of *nixes. A particular aspect that I have come to appreciate is the power of open source and its effect on software. A prime example is the desktop environment : right now, I'm using OpenSolaris on my laptop with Gnome as its desktop environment, and it is remarkably ... no, make that exactingly, similar to the Ubuntu machine I have at my work desktop that also has Gnome. To me, that shows the flexibility of open source and how it has allowed software to be ported and integrated into different operating systems.
And yet, I am vividly aware of the fact that despite those similarities, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu remain very different beasts under the hood, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Just take a look at the Unix Rosetta Stone to see the differences. And so the same goes for not just OpenSolaris and Ubuntu, but also Mac OSX, Windows XP and Windows 7.
Thus, it is pointless to argue whether any OS is better than the other if the needs are not explained in the first place. To me, the strengths of that OS can and will qualify it for the environment's needs. All in all, the OS with the most strengths is the one that is most appropriate for that workload.