About three months ago, after going through yet another uphill battle with Windows on my laptop – I finally decided to call it quits and switch to a Mac with OS X. Since then, I have been surprised to hear I am not alone. Several people have told me they have switched to the Mac recently because of increasing flakiness with Windows.
It seems like the very reasons which have made Windows and the PC platform such a runaway success are now haunting them. The vast ecosystem that exists around them have clearly led to a lot of innovative stuff being developed, but there is a huge combinatorial explosion that causes pretty much every machine to have its own unique configuration of software and hardware similar to an individual’s fingerprint or DNA. The trouble is that most of these configurations have never been tested and are therefore highly fragile and failure prone.
It seems like Linux on the desktop will likely suffer the same fate.
At least in the short term, the Mac being a somewhat closed system seems to help. In the three months I’ve owned mine, I’ve had to do one update and subsequent reboot which is pretty amazing given I was at about two reboots a day with Windows!
I hope for my own sake that the Mac does not become too successful – shhhh, don’t tell anyone you saw this 
Well, I have been a MAC user for 3 months too. Love it, but it does freeze once in a while. The things I love the most are (i) its install process for new programs is a beauty and (ii) I can always do a unix shell command..
Anant,
I too have had individual applications freeze on occasion (with the multi-colored spinning wheel showing up instead of the mouse pointer), never the entire system. Under these circumstances, I have found if you move the mouse over to the Apple icon on the top left, you can click on it and use the force quit option to get rid of the offending application. Nothing else appears to work at this time except for clicking on the Apple icon.
Firefox seems particularly prone to freezing in my experience …
firefox on mac is really buggy, and causes the most rainbow spinning wheels. eventually the blue apple log on upper left is responsive, and i can kill firefox.
i agree with your general +ve views.
Hi Shankar,
Hope you are doing well!
Happened to read your post. I was faced with looking for an alternative for Windows for my home machine few months ago. Didn’t want to spend money on apple, so went with Ubuntu. The only issue with it is that it doesn’t interface with my printer. Other than that my experience with Ubuntu has been better than with windows so far, and it runs faster on a beaten up T40 1.6 ghz than windows xp on my t60p from work.
I can live with having to use my windows for home print needs, since I don’t do much personal printing.
Curious if you explored that option?
Regards,
Hari
Hari,
Good to hear from you.
I did wipe out Windows on my Thinkpad and put Ubuntu on it. Been happy with it for sure – Firefox and Thunderbird work well (sometimes web pages a slightly messed up) and the Open Office stuff has really come a ways (I tried a reasonably complicated spread sheet as was very impressed). I tried ROR, PHP and Java/Eclipse which all work well. I did run into trouble installing Aptana for some reason.
The Mac still comes out ahead especially from a work perspective. Office is critical if you have to exchange documents with others – the Mac offers Office. Mac Mail is also very nice. The iWork and iLife packages are very very slick. I have had no problem with ROR, PHP, Java/Eclipse and Aptana. At work we use a VOIP client with our IP based Cisco PBX. EVen though Cisco does not provide a client for Mac, I have been able to find an alternate. There is nothing available for Linux. Skype, Yahoo and other IM providers have clients for the Mac (even if they are slightly back level).
Overall, I’m very encouraged to see there are growing alternatives to Windows as a desktop.