anti-m wrote:And Roymond, I know this conversation sucks, and leads to all kinds of posturing on all sides of the OS divide, but people like you (people who are "Bi" I suppose... or "Tri") are the ones I'm most interested in hearing from. People who've had experience using a variety of OSes will be better acquainted with the pros and cons of each.
Well, sorry to disappoint, but I'm pretty much done with the OS wars. I say use whatever works for you. I wouldn't run mission critical systems on anything but Solaris on the big side, have had lots of luck with Macs running pretty heavy asset management systems and such, and hated having to reboot Windows servers every week. However, much of the video transcoding world is Win2003 server based, though some are now porting to Unix since Windows doesn't scale well at all.
There's an amazing company called Agnostic who makes grid transcoders and uses blocks of CPUs to attack very fine grained high res video processing. The code genius was comfy with Microsoft, so there it is. But they've had to build in themselves the error handling, memory management and disk management that sucks so bad in Windows environments and works so brilliantly in Solaris. They are porting to Solaris now, slowly.
In the end, it all just happens however it happens, right? UI is a personal thing and everyone has their hot spots. It's like national elections, the candidates really aren't all that different (at least they all are somewhat qualified in something), but we love whoever supports our main issues, and hate whoever rubs us wrong. It's natural.
So that's my wimpy answer. Aside from the fact that I still miss OS7. The reason I lean toward Macs is that they're designed for the things that most inspire me. Postscript is part of the OS. Graphics and audio were there from day one in 1984. But then they've fucked up with certain things along the way, too. So it's a lot of the "that's my people" thing going on. Which I guess is valid. Why fight it?