There is no question that Macintosh has done a very good job of putting a ‘happy face’ on Unix, without sacrificing the core. If I simply wanted to use a computer, Linux would not be my first choice right now. Not yet.
And mind you, Linux is basically “what I use.” Linux and Macintosh OS/X.
Should probably no step in this arena, but why I choosed macs and now with Os X get all i need :
I suffer windows at work, and while a well configured and freshly installed W2000 or XP run smoothly, you can be prepared to reinstall everything in six months. this costs time that at home i found too valuable to do boring tasks i never need to do with Os X (The old G4-400 has seen all versions of Os X installed on top of the previous one since develloper preview).
Linux, let me laugh, the amount of work needed to make things running as i want them is too high for home (and i used to be an Unix administrator, it is not a knowledge problem, which is the 2nd burden of linux).
Like a well tuned linux, os X just work and wont destroy itself as M$ products do. Simply no tuning needed, run well straight out of the box
uptimes are generally the amount of time between 2 upgrades as i never bother to shutdown my 2 running macs, simply suspend activity (fridge effect, it start again in split second). performance almost never degrades with time up.
Hardware quality. while it is a bit less than previously (but macs used to cost an arm and a leg), the hardware is perfectly reliable and just work (again). this is a bit less true of the imac/ibooks. powerbooks screens are miles ahead of almost all PC screens in term of accuracy and angle of vision (there is PC with same quality, they cost usually more than a mac). I wait for rev 1 of new models though. Hardware is also well balanced, and while processors or some parts may be inferior as the equivalent PC part, being integrated by the vendor, they run more smoothly on the computer than the average PC.
no virus. at all. perfectly secure out of the box, without interfering with internet use.
vastly superior networking capabilities. you need to have tasted rendez-vous and airport to understand what a mobile computer should be. Solutions exist on windows side, none works as smoothly. linux has nothing more than BSD which is the core of the apple OS.
But the real gem is not there :
In 2001 (for Os X launch), i was saying in a french usenet group as a joke :
“Five Long Years” d’attente vont prendre fin sur des “Good News”.
We Are “Talkin’ 'Bout Revolution”, là et “Mr P.C.” est dans le “sorrows”
Ok, il faudra “Learning To Fly”, mais “You Can Do Magic” à pratiquer la
“Rhapsody in Blue”.“A little Bird Told Me” qu’avec les “Giant Steps” que sont Darwin et
Cocoa, on sera sur le “Stairway To Heaven” Personellement I “Feel Like
Going Home” sur un système qui sera la “Beauty and the Beast” et I will
“Never Going Back Again”. il n’y a “Rien A jeter”, dans cette “Precious
Thing” et moi je dis : “Respect”…
“Rememberin’ Stevie”, il aurait pu “Take the Money And run”. Mais non,
il a dit “Let’s Do It” et créé quelque chose qui pourra peut-être nous
faire dire que c’est “Another Day In Paradise”De toutes façons c’était “Now Or Never”, Apple aurait disparu sinon,
mais là, “Everything is Okay”. “Isn’t This A lovely Day”.
4 years later, i was right and never had any regrets
I run winXP, here are my views on it…
I don’t have performance degradation issues… like lukep my uptimes are limited by the frequency of upgrades (although mine are more frequent because installing windows updates requires reboot half the time)
I never re-format/re-install stuff, and I haven’t had this issue with programs killing themselves off. I’ve heard many people claim this of Windows, so I’ll assume that there is a method of having programs stop functioning after a while. I’ll also assume there is a way of preventing this.
Spyware/viruses: I use Symantec’s realtime virus protection, so hardly gets through. Even though I use IE, I’ve never gotten anything major that a biweekly virus scan and adware scan haven’t taken care of. I assume users of Firefox/Opera/Konquerer have even less problems.
Hardware: Lukep’s post kind of hit home here. I’m using a laptop right now that boasts “high quality LCD.” I was fine with it until I got a better CRT to use as a secondary monitor. The color difference is surprising. Also, about once a year or two, a hard drive will lose something important, and I’ll have to use some disk utility to persuade my computer to start again.
So many people say Windows crashes, and has to be re-installed, and has all of these other issues. I have been using XP for about (I think it’s) 3 years now and I have NEVER had a Windows related crash, of the very few crashes I have had. (To be honest, most of them were Blender related because I did not have enough RAM or something.) I use Norton and FireFox and I never get viruses. Spybot is great for cleaning spyware which I usually do once a week and it only takes 5 minutes.
So to all those that say Windows sucks: 
-Laurifer
i agree, laurifer
although there are several reasons for thinking that macs are internally better than windows, i have acutually never had a windows crash that was ONLY due to a microsoft instability or fallability.
the only concern that i had with microsoft was safety, and these were cured by scanning bi-weekly with norton, spybot, and ad-aware. i also use firefox.
Regards,
~Delta
Lucky you.
I remember when I first started running XPpro I was ok with it. After a few days though my computer wouldnt boot up and it gave an error message. I checked microsofts website and it had a rather informative article outlining what the problem was and how to get the system back to its original state (it took over an hour I think) but not how to fix it. The article simply stated that it was a known issue with winXP, was not easily reproducable and could happen at a moments notice.
Oh and it also said no fix was availible nor would one be in the near future.
Lovely that.
Zarf
Don’t be so sure, virus can plant themself with in norton anti virus and even other anti virus program
It can, but the question is if it wants to 
I’ve seen some configs with Windows and some are nice and stable (I know a guy who formats every week(likes to have clean pc) and his system never hangs) and some that are very unstable and unprotected. I personally had blue screen once on my XP, but I use it for VEERY long time, and i use to have every software junk i can get into my pc, and my registry is loaded with fake entries… but i’m too lazy for changing to linux and mac.
Yeonil
If something drastic were to happen to my computer that would be bad, but not so bad. I have all of my important files (mostly .blends 
) safely stored away on RW discs. I always keep all of the CDs that came with my computer, so if I needed to, I could reboot all of it back on. But this is breaking topic so I will stop, and also this has nothing to do with OSs.
-Laurifer
I like linux more then Mac OS. I can go compile source code in linux w/o fear of it breaking, and if It does I usally can go find out the problem and maybe fix it.
On mac or window me handling the source code is a nightmare! TOo many c++ compliers and one little errors always leads to massive errors. I’d rather spend more time downloadiung the executables then the source to compile! UNless its blender of course! 30 megs of source code + 20 mins compiling just to make it run more eeffcient doesn’t beat 3 megs of downloading
You say that untill you come across missing library, in linux you have to switch between 5 cd and keep reading manuals, then you have a great lack of help and hardware that isn’t set for you. “Dsparts gl-117” Who the hell is going to know that or get acess to a ltmodem driver that doesn’t work with the modem in the first place ? You now I still can’t get a good print out on the computer ? The inkjet head alighnment doesn’t even work and how the hell you suppose to know which program will work ?
“Microsoft is Microsoft”…is that a correct answer ?
There is no reason to HATE Microsoft no…but maybe there is one to try different things (such as MacOS, Linux, BSD, Sun, Solaris…)
Bye
This has got to be the most idiotic thing I have ever heard. OSX ships with a gcc toolchain as part of its development tools and I download and compile sourcecode all the time without fear of ‘breaking something’. Actually you have less chance of inaverdantly breaking something on OSX because Apple knows that 99 percent of their users don’t know what they are doing so the root account is disabled by default on OSX (and yes, you can turn it on.) ‘Porting’ linux apps to OSX is many times just a matter of typing ‘make’. Other times it might require a bit of work, but thankfully between apples free tools and projects like fink a lot of the work has been done for you.
Furthermore OSX’s system layer is based on BSD unix, which has been around a heck of a lot longer than Linux. Linus had even said that if he had known about BSD he would never have written linux.
Where do you people get this crap?
Zarf
Linux wasn’t written as a operation systom, it was written to show how Unix work, at least that’s what I recall.
Well, Linux is here, now, and it is now the most widely implemented Unix-variant in the world. So, I suppose we have to live with it. 
You recall wrong. Minix was written by a college professor to illustrate how unix works, and I think was distributed with a book about it. Linus was a student when he first read about and used minix, but at the source code level they are not connected in any way.
Zarf
Yea that’s right, just recall after I went to bed. Linux is being widely advertise on tv, so they must be doing something right. I wonder if freebsd will fall under the SCO scheme
Quite the contrary. Original BSD existed long before SCO acquired the rights on ATT Unix from Novell (read the history of BSD for details, but Bekerley had a license to ATT Unix; when this license was voided, they created their own split which is fully theirs) and a previous judicial settlement (http://daemonz.org/bugs/history.html) seriously undermine SCO claims in linux case, the same disputed parts being available in BSD and the settlement stating no further legal dispute can occur.
Ok. Not gonna get too involved with this discussion too much, cause I haven’t used neither OSX, nor Linux. People are just way too obsessed with their OS’s. I’m sure there are reasons why some people dislike windows. I have had no serious issues myself, using some common sense - but 90% of all windows-bashers do it for the wrong reasons. Face it, it’s in to hate Microsoft.
I dislike microsoft because in my experience it their product was unstable, plus I don’t like the direction they have things headed in either.