Topic: Unix vs Windows - with reason(s)

Same old debate, but a slightly "new" perspective.

I am now working with Vista a lot. It's shiny and all, but I hate it. I don't dislike it, I *hate* it.
I am still on Kubuntu at home, mainly - buying more and more recent mac stuff by the day, to finally switch fully.

Anyway, my personal "tastes" are no argument to fuel such a debate : a good and solid argument that I came to understand
through usage and comparison, is how those systems manage TIME. How they "get old".

And it hit me hard today : Windows changes itself over time. Think about it : fragmentation to speed up
accesses to disk ends up mixing file parts (and slowing down stuff). The registry, a core component of the OS, grows over time to the point
of making startup darn slow. And so on and so forth.

Unix-Linux-Mac OS environments, on the other hand, do NOT suffer that kind of "age effect": they have upgrades, they have config files individual
to each and every "component" of the OS, there even is a device database now, but there is no such thing as disk fragmentation
or a registry, eg. no "core items" of the OS get modified by their own activity.

So, Windows cripples itself up by design, by a design that drifted from technical purism to commercial concerns,
"pleasing" the audience to the point of trying to bend reality, trying to push progress beyond the boundaries of what can realistically be achieved.

It's not "information at your fingertips", it's more "glowey innovation up yours", mind you.

What good can trying to push, rush, dope things do? In general I mean, in life?
If you answered "none, it backfires most of the time", I am 100% with you. And with the Unix legacy.

About to sleep, but just a quick observation from a scan of your text: OSX DOES change itself. Heavily. Even the simple task of uninstalling can be a chore. Sure, plenty of apps...you just delete them. Plenty you don't, and there are all sorts of frameworks left around you don't realise about!!

But personally? Yes, I hate Vista. XP has its place in my heart, but OSX'es place is ever growing. And I still very much like linux. But they genuinely are all suited best to different things. My ideal situation ATM is OSX with XP under VMWare or parallels, and access to a linux box or VM for those special needs. Oh, and quad core plus lots of RAM to back that up if at all possible! :P

Ok, what I mean is, and it is partly a "question" : can you mention a CORE component of the OS (X) which gets modified over time outside of a software update
process? Being BSD based, I see no reason for OSX to behave differently (than UNIX and derivatives).

The difference is subtle, but real here : by core components, I am talking software libraries and data stores used by those.
By configuration items, I am talking configuration files namely, and user interface software components.

In Windows, the structure of the file system gets "old", and the core data store (eg. the registry) does that too.

Might just be me, but I think you're misunderstanding the cause/nature of fragmentation; particularly under Windows. Can you mention a CORE component of the OS (Windows) which gets modified outside of a software update process? I mean, other than the registry data in a system upon which software is constantly installed/uninstalled.

Hm. Answering a question with a question? And "other than the registry" is quite like "other than the building foundations", but
I'll come back with more (end of a long work day on a Windows 2003 server with SSIS).

In the meantime, care to answer my genuine OSX question with.. an answer? ,)

Well, the system files fragmentation problem on Windows can be fixed...

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/pagedefrag.mspx

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Reminder before ranting some : the initial point was "Windows grows old during usage compared to it's opponents".
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Am going to kill an urban legend here : turns out ext (linux) filesystems do cause fragmentation - happened to learn that recently.
This is due to the very nature of partitionning, itself depending on the very nature of HDDs.

...Funnily enough, it turns out that many of the features of a Windows system (and flaws) are not in the corresponding DOS :
you can perform the same tasks (massive directory listing for example) a lot faster.

Could it just be the multithreading which is more stable and realistic in OSX or Linux / Unix?

OSX now seems to me like the next prominent OS : with the trend I see around me, I am expecting it
to lead the market sometime soon.

OSX is based on BSD's, BSD's are linux with a particularity in the maintenance process and validation of new packages.
So it supposedly is "one of the most stable Linux distributions". (Am now swallowing info about OSX to understand
what makes one more powerful over another - but in Mac OSX / cocoa, I can already say the philosophy is all
about the same intuitive simplicity as in Mac computers usage)

My understanding was that fragmenting is unavoidable, but that the average Unix FS diminishes it much better than either Windows FS.

I was under the impression that the very nature of the inode/vnode structures used in the virtual file system instead of those file systems with huge separate index tables was the main factor making *nix systems more resistant to fragmentation than the file systems used by Windows. *nix file systems still have fragmentation issues, just caused by far more infrequently occurring circumstances.

As for directory listing speed, both Explorer and Finder have entirely different algorithmic complexity for doing it than you'd have if you did it in the shell on the same system. The reasons for that have to do with exactly what they do with the files (they actually do much more than just list them) and also with how they do indexing and caching. For example, they have to read icon data for files which the shell doesn't need.

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