More OS = Morose?

[howeird]

A basfa regular posted publicly on his FB page  (we're not friended, so I can't comment there):

Really, if you have to choose sides between PCs & Macs, aren't you admitting you're too dumb to learn two OS's?
<heads to fallout shelter>

My answer is a resounding "no".

Through the years I have owned and/or used at work CP/M, Unix, multiple flavors of linux (starting with Mr. Torvald's first Internet uploads), every flavor of DOS (including Gary K's non-DOS) , every flavor of Windows except 8, almost every flavor of Apple OS, as well as special embedded OSes from HP, Sony and various startups.

Every one of them has its learning curve, most have some advantage or other over their rivals, all have some disadvantages compared to their rivals.

For personal use, I choose Windows. Photoshop, video editing software, the Microsoft Office suite and Roxio CD/DVD burner software I have run side by side on Macs and PCs, and I like the look & feel of the Windows versions better on all of them. I tried the open source office suite on linux and Windows, and ran screaming back to Microsoft Office on Windows. Linux's Gnome and KDE look like childrens' art compared to Windows.

There are some things I find easier to do in linux/unix command line than anywhere else. Searching for a particular word in all the files on a machine and replacing it with another word in all those files. Seeing folder by folder how much space is used on my hard drive. Monitoring network activity. Windows 7 comes close to supporting the latter two.

It's not a religion for me, it's simply what I prefer after having tried them all. 

I can think of one exception to that. A couple of years ago I put away my Sony music players, which have superior hardware and codecs, in favor of an iPod because Sony kept their codec proprietary  and did not build in any graphics support. My iPod is my car's music player, the Kenwood system I have in the car can display album covers. It can also show titles in multiple languages so I can read my Thai, Hebrew and Chinese song titles instead of a row of blocks.

  

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

I think "choosing sides" is a bit past "just using one."