Recently I stumbled upon a comment made by one of our long-time membersā¦
Sooo, without wanting to start a whole civil war on which operating system is better (I have had enough of them after following tech influencers on X whose jobs - I suppose - is to pit Android against iOS in most of their posts), how have your experiences with Studio been like on MacOS, on Windows, or on Linux?
And, outside of Studio, which OS(es) do you use most of the time, and why? (maybe the design is nice and intuitive, or that it can run most of the programs that you need).
@albert.vu kindly read my further replies, where I was mentioning that I was trolling and provided further advice.
For that topic, yes, mac was crap at first look.
Sue me! Balcanic humour.
So I hope will not be a civil war, but flame cannot be avoided.
But yeah, worth a debate, since each and every platform has particularities, with pro and cons.
From my side, as the comunity already knows, I am a linux promotter as it gives me the most flexibility:
it is free as in free beer
it is mostly opensourced which gives additional freedoms but some restrictions also
it suits my needs
Cons: have a learning curve which is not trivial.
For mobile segment, I mostly stick with Android, for the only fact that is originating from Linux and ā¦ yeah, the shitty Google sync on which I depend somehow.
I came at those decissions after years and years of distrohopping and using various.
I steel keep a windows install available on my PCās due to laziness to find proper linux drivers for my printer.
About Mac, i know only that have a beatifull hardware selection but I cannot fully test because my wife will cut my fingers (I will have to put first Linux on such and run benchmarks to see if the magik comes from hardware or software)
More thoughts on Mac ā¦ well, Apple products, IOS may be more relevant here.
If one may compare the hardware spec for a certain mobile device Android based, may noticed that the requirements are huge compared with IOS.
Why is like that? well, and here the war will start.
Apple develloped software in use optimized for the hardware platforms they use.
The good old practice, where every bit counts. Google used to do that also at the early beginning, no longer the case.
Thx to M$ accelerated development and aggresive marketing, developers became more and more lazy. Yeah, we have res available, we donāt give a dam!
And I have a strong feeling this is reflected very well in using Chrome on Mac (which is not written with MacOS optimization in mind) compared with various native apps written for Mac.
Actually, Chrome is optimized for nothing.
It performs better on certain Linux distros due to the cleanup and rebuilds performed by the distro maintainers, but this is not true for each and every distro.
For Winā¦ you get only what they provide, sometime works ok, sometime not.
But ofcourse, those days we start to see users blaiming Apple because āthis is not fair and you donāt give as the freedom to install third-party appstores on our devicesā
Well ā¦ this is it. Users are asking for crap, crap they get! One day Apple will give up on this and ā¦
On the other side, the native browser for Mac is yet another abomination (Safari, I am looking at you).
Optimized for low resources usage but far behind with current technologies in use by competitors.
As someone who has worked professionally with each for several years, Iād have to go with OSX, simply because itās so close to linux, which makes certain dev tasks a bit easier. But honestly, in the modern day, the two are so close that it doesnāt matter most of the time.
Except the kernel.
OSX is using bsd kernel at the origin (a proprietary variant since the BSD licence afford it), so it is more unix, close to freebsd, openbsd and so on.
Linux is slightly different. Is ālike unixā also (has been modeled after it) altough some people tend to say it is the short from āLinux is not unixā.
The ācommon groundā in between, having the user experience in mind, are various opensourced tools (CLI commands) and the GNU OS plays an important role into this.
For the rest, everything is different, kernel, filesystem and so on.
So, one may feel OSX is similar to Linux, but the truth is, is somehow opposite, since BSD is more close to Unix than Linux.
A (very) short history of the three (unix, bsd and linux) is here: Exploring the Evolution and Diversity of Unix BSD and Linux.
Disclaimer: we donāt speak here about the UI, which I hate (yeah, sue me). I never get used to it, one of the reasons I donāt use Mac, alongside the lack of customizations and ofcourse, the price. For the rest, I consider it excelent.
The very first Desktop Environments for Linux (Gnome and KDE, I donāt remember right now which one was the first but I think was Gnome) were modeled after Windows. Those days, we have a plethora of other DEās available, some of them resembling a MacOS experience, some taking different approaches.
Thank you Bionel and Brandon for your insightful comment.
I have to ask though, supposedly someone in your family, or your friends is asking you to recommend them an operating system to use, which one would you recommended and why? (taking things like hardware, software, usability, integration with their other devices like phones, etc. into consideration).
depends on the budget first but also on the user knowledge.
and the hardware already available.
usually, windows i recommend firts, but licenced (no more cracks, been there, done that) and those days plenty devices came with decent price and M$ lic already included.
for this case, pair it with android mobile device (my advice) through google sync (will force the user to use chrome as main browserā¦ or alternatives, paid or not)
windows mobile devices are stil crap. and creepy (send a lot more ācall homeā compared to androidā¦ and no, i will not disclose my tests, you have to trust me or ignore this)
For the decent budget people, definetly Apple. My wife is pretty happy with this brand and saves me from plenty debug sessions.
It is pairing beautifully with Apple mobile device with their cloud.
By far supperior compared with Windows or Google products at least in this area.
For paranoids like me, go to the dark side of Linux.
Everything will have to be settled by you, in every aspect.
I managed to do some simple Linux setups for my mom and she was pretty happy, on ancient hardware devices.
But her needs were only a browser and yahoo messenger at that time. I only had to make some desktop shortcuts and was fine.
Attempting to do the same with my sis, got into a lot of debug sessions, since she have more complex needs. So my advice for this case was, back to windows, but leggit.
So I can classify as:
Windows for poor / lazy as Uncle Roger will say
Apple for decent budget people
Linux (or BSD) for the braves
Disclaimer: I donāt cover in the above the use cases for gamers.
In such case, particularily if addictive to shooters, stick with Windows.
Otherwise, go for a console.
Gaming was never a bussines target for Apple.
Linux became better those days in this segment, thx to Steam mostly, but it is still behind Windows.
Disclaimer2: the above is for friends, family etc which are using the machines for simple needs (mortal users)
For developers (demigods) and gods, is another story, but more on this in next chapter.
Disclaimer3: the above are recommendations for new hardware purchase. For hardware reuse, if at least windows10 is not supported, and no budget for new machine, go Linux.
