Operating system war : The Great OS experiment
John Halamka , 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, a practicing emergency room physician, one of the first person to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body and also, who is going to become the first human to have their DNA sequenced and their full genetic makeup posted on the Web had experimented with Windows , Linux and OS X operating system for his personal / enterprise need. He came out with many interesting findings.
About OS X:
"MacBook didn't crash or freeze once during the month I used it. And my work was never interrupted by automatic antivirus or antispyware updates-a frequent annoyance with Windows."
"When I was on the go, OS X switched flawlessly from one wireless network to another, which he thinks makes the MacBook a great tool for mobile knowledge workers. The MacBook never skipped a beat as I went from a meeting at Harvard (which uses the WPA/PEAP wireless network) to a meeting at CareGroup (which uses EAP-FAST client) to an informal meeting at Starbucks (which uses a public network)."
"Because Apple governs much of the hardware and the software in the Macintosh world, Apple can preconfigure its machines with all the proper drivers installed."
"I found what I needed in Keynote, which is refreshingly simple compared with PowerPoint."
"MacBook's reliability far outweighed any challenges I had with the learning curve. Though I am not ready to deploy it yet, I think it has potential as an enterprise platform."
About Linux:
"Neither RHEL nor Fedora could recognize a USB drive when I plugged one into my laptop. Each time I added one, I had to mount it manually by writing a command. Thus, moving 250MB of files from his MacBook to his Lenovo X41 took him two hours"
"I had to activate the wireless connection each time he wanted to use it."
"The OS-at least the RHEL or Fedora versions of it-is not ready for prime time. In fact, I was surprised that running Linux on the desktop was so problematic, even though I knew getting it all to operate properly the first time would be a challenge. It is the fact that [Linux] can work most of the time [only] with tinkering."
About Microsoft Windows:
"People are risk averse. They don't like to try new things. It's inertia that holds Microsoft in place,"
"Microsoft Windows and its products are overburdened with features, and that this complexity leads to bugs and security vulnerabilities."
"Having used XP since 2002, I had noticed that the more applications I install, the slower and more unstable the operating system becomes. So to keep it in tip-top shape, I am keeping my software stack simple. I vowed to install as few additional applications as possible and to install only Microsoft manufactured and branded software at that (except Firefox)."
"Microsoft can work with files created 10 or 20 years ago. Microsoft offers such flexibility. It's hard to replace a computing environment that provides that level of compatibility, even if it is bloated and buggy."
Conclusion:
"After three months of experimentation and comparison, I concluded that my dream machine is a Dell D420 notebook that runs OS X. Unfortunately, such a machine doesn't currently exist out of the box."
"I prefer Dell's hardware over Apple's because it weighs 3 pounds less than the 5-pound MacBook I toted around for a month, and it emits far less heat. [That's] the only thing preventing me from using the Mac,"
Interesting? Isn't it? Read the full story Here
Tag operating system,linux,OS X,windows
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