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Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

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Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#91

Post by andreyf »

mixmax wrote: post #78
ratsbane wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a breakdown based on referrals from YC to a short essay I wrote about a month ago comparing Bing Travel and Kayak. There were 2382 uniques from YC over two days to that page: 45.5% Windows 37.6% Mac 15.1% Linux Comparing that with an e-commerce site I work with which has a less geek-centric audience, during the same two days: 84.94% Windows 12.46% Mac 1.55% Linux

Interesting to see those and grandparents numbers and compare them with the poll. Seems like there's a discrepancy somewhere, and I would say that it's users voting for the OS they would like to use as their main OS and not the one they actually use. The little tricks that psychology plays on us...

It seems more likely that OSX users (like me) are much more interested in a "what OS do you use?" poll versus a "Microsoft product blogpost" story.

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#92

Post by timdorr »

antirez wrote: post #27

I've two laptops, one with Mac OS X and one with Linux. I use both for development but as a client I prefer Mac OS X that Just Works. It was fun years ago to hack on config files and even to write my own device drivers when it was needed, it was a game with the benefit of learning a lot of stuff, but seriously, I expected Linux to be mature enough after a few years... instead it's the same problems again and again. A…

Speaking particularly about hacking on my OS of choice, I've got to hand it to the MacPorts crew for making that kind of thing possible without serious headaches. I've got a custom build of Apache, PHP (yes, I know...) and MySQL alongside my desktop OS tools that I love to use. It's a best of both worlds. Mac OS X from the developer's perspective is basically Linux done right.

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#93

Post by Zancarius »

jodrellblank wrote: post #47
dtf wrote: post #30

Question for Mac/Windows users: I develop on Linux, but occasionally on Mac or Windows. To be honest I'm pretty happy with a text editor and a few terminals on any platform, but one thing I miss is fast window management. Specifically: * Focus follows mouse * Alt+LMB drag to move whole window * Alt+MMB drag to move nearest corner (ie resize) The default Mac interface in particular I find difficult, as there's just on…

There's an app called KatMouse for Windows which might be able to do focus follows mouse. (I really use it because it lets me use the scrollwheel on any window, without bringing the window to the foreground or giving focus to it).

I'm not so sure about Vista/Win7 but Windows XP's tweakui allows a primitive form of "focus follows mouse." It doesn't work exactly like I'm used to with other managers, but it also doesn't require loading additional software (well, beyond going to MS' site and downloading tweakui).

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#94

Post by nanijoe »

minus1 wrote: post #77
ratsbane wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a breakdown based on referrals from YC to a short essay I wrote about a month ago comparing Bing Travel and Kayak. There were 2382 uniques from YC over two days to that page: 45.5% Windows 37.6% Mac 15.1% Linux Comparing that with an e-commerce site I work with which has a less geek-centric audience, during the same two days: 84.94% Windows 12.46% Mac 1.55% Linux

Thanks for the information. These numbers seem more plausible given my own anecdotal evidence. Now compare this to the poll percentages: 21.37% Windows (199) 40.28% Mac (375) 35.12% Linux (327) My conclusion is that a Linux user is far more motivated than a Mac or Windows user to respond to this poll, making the results interesting, but not accurate.

It's also possible that a lot of the Windows users are not registered here and are therefore not able to vote in the survey

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#95

Post by Xichekolas »

minus1 wrote: post #77
ratsbane wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a breakdown based on referrals from YC to a short essay I wrote about a month ago comparing Bing Travel and Kayak. There were 2382 uniques from YC over two days to that page: 45.5% Windows 37.6% Mac 15.1% Linux Comparing that with an e-commerce site I work with which has a less geek-centric audience, during the same two days: 84.94% Windows 12.46% Mac 1.55% Linux

Thanks for the information. These numbers seem more plausible given my own anecdotal evidence. Now compare this to the poll percentages: 21.37% Windows (199) 40.28% Mac (375) 35.12% Linux (327) My conclusion is that a Linux user is far more motivated than a Mac or Windows user to respond to this poll, making the results interesting, but not accurate.

It's also possible that linux/OSX users are less likely to be interested in a Microsoft product (bing) or an article about one.

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#96

Post by zimbabwe »

path wrote: post #89
zimbabwe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what OS we're using, not what OS we're using. From my own experience, using Gmail is a different experience in each OS. I can't stand to use it on OS X, whereas on Windows it was always open.

What's wrong with Gmail on the Mac, the experience on Windows is identical ( practically)

Gmail stays the same; the external set-up changes. I saw no advantage to using Outlook over Gmail, whereas Mail.app offers substantially more than the Gmail webapp does, even when used with Fluid.

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#98

Post by minus1 »

Xichekolas wrote: post #95
minus1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the information. These numbers seem more plausible given my own anecdotal evidence. Now compare this to the poll percentages: 21.37% Windows (199) 40.28% Mac (375) 35.12% Linux (327) My conclusion is that a Linux user is far more motivated than a Mac or Windows user to respond to this poll, making the results interesting, but not accurate.

It's also possible that linux/OSX users are less likely to be interested in a Microsoft product (bing) or an article about one.

It's certainly possible, but I don't think it can account for the full difference. Hopefully PG will provide some recent server stats.

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#99

Post by zimbabwe »

duairc wrote: post #85

I use Linux exclusively. I did try OS X before (I have an iBook), but I just couldn't get into it. Linux users trying OS X have already commented on problems with window managers etc, so I won't repeat what they've said. The real thing is that I just can't stand about OS X though isn't about practical like not being able to get a certain application or type of application working or anything like that (I do generally…

It's simply that it's non-free, and the whole ecosystem of software for it is generally non-free. I know lots of Mac users and this doesn't seem to bug them or occur to them at all.

That's because the exchange for a lot of OS X stuff is: You pay a small sum of money in exchange for developers that work their asses off on making your user experience perfect. Delicious Monster, Cultured Code, RealMac, Blacktree, Panic Inc. - especially Panic Inc. Then there are the developers who don't make commercial Mac apps but who are part of the same developer scene: Coudal, 37signals, Neubix, on and on.

They're actually why I bought OS X: Once upon a time, I used Virb - designed by Neubix - read their blog, and slowly came across these other developers and their blogs, and fell in love with all these small development teams whose lives focus on developing their applications and making a profit. When I got my Mac, I started with a few of those teams' applications. Specifically, I bought Panic's Coda and demoed CC's Things. The experiences I get with those applications are stupendous.

Coda's the only thing I use that makes me love coding; without it, I get bored easily with the processes. I'd say it's absolutely been worth my $100 purchase. A hundred dollars for a code editor, FTP transmitter, CSS styler, a set of well-formatted reference books, and in-app browser testing? That's a damned good deal. And yes: I can do that for free, I could open emacs next to Safari, download free guides online. But it's worth my money not to ever have to bother with that stuff at all.

The license agreement... I don't find the license agreement at all frustrating. You click "Accept" once, then never see it again. MobileMe I got almost immediately: It syncs up everything I've got, gives me a nice email system, and it's worth the money I pay for it. I've seen the free alternatives, and they're not worth paying money for.

As for the "trivial bits of software", I've found I need very few applications to complete my Mac experience. I used the free OnyX to tweak my settings, I got Dropbox, and outside of Coda and iWork I find I rarely need anything else. I used to use Fluid.app to run web applications I liked, and that was free. Max converts every file format I need converted, excepting WMVs which I can convert using iTunes in a virtual simulator, and I need to convert WMVs very rarely.

Some people need free. Some people think that everything should be free. They're absolutely allowed to go that route. But most Mac users don't find it outrageous to pay developers for their time. A hundred dollars for a product is nothing, when that hundred dollars ensures never once having to look in a help manual to get something done or dealing with a crash or a slowdown or anything, really. It's similar to the thousands of dollars spent on the Mac itself. You don't pay that money for the RAM, or the screen. You pay that money because Apple tries to guarantee that things don't fuck up for you, and the impressive thing about Apple is that things really don't fuck up. I've been on my current set-up for a year and I've had five total crashes, each from weeks of multitasking processes without ever putting my computer to sleep. I have no problems that I can't find an app for. A lot of things on the Mac are so simple that I now have problems using Windows and Linux because they can't handle the functions that I use now. So no, that doesn't bother me, because for my money I get trust. Working with Ubuntu bothers me, because things don't feel like part of a logical whole. It's a matter of personal preference.

Re: Poll: What OS do you use everyday, or most often?

#100

Post by zimbabwe »

mixmax wrote: post #59
dtf wrote: post #30

Question for Mac/Windows users: I develop on Linux, but occasionally on Mac or Windows. To be honest I'm pretty happy with a text editor and a few terminals on any platform, but one thing I miss is fast window management. Specifically: * Focus follows mouse * Alt+LMB drag to move whole window * Alt+MMB drag to move nearest corner (ie resize) The default Mac interface in particular I find difficult, as there's just on…

Related question for Mac users: Don't you ever view windows in fullscreen? It seems there's no easy way to get windows to fullscreen, except for laboriously resizing and dragging to make it fit with the screen. This is one of the things that threw me off Mac (I bought one that I used as my main OS for about half a year, but I just never really liked it) So do Mac users simply not like fullscreen windows, do they all…

The reason: Apple designed OS X to focus on using multiple windows at once, and they didn't want developers making single-window apps that ate at the screen. It's why, of their own applications, the only ones that allow full-screen are their video players, the iWork suite, and the pro apps. Those are the only applications Apple thinks ought to be maximized.

There's an application called Mega Zoomer that gives all Cocoa apps a sexy fullscreen view. But mostly, the answer's that Mac users don't like fullscreen.

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