Apple Do you agree with the assessment?

Not sure where this goes considering it is a general OS question, so I chose the first on the list...Apple.

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/31/1859220&from=rss

onehitwonder writes "Well-known CIO John Halamka has rigorously tested six different operating systems over the course of a year in an effort to find a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows on his laptop and his company's computers. Here is CIO.com's initial writeup on Halamka's experiences; we discussed their followup article on SUSE. Now CIO is running a writeup on Halamka's take on Ubuntu and how it stacks up against Novell SUSE 10, RHEL, Fedora, XP, and Mac OS X, in a life-and-death business environment." For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."

What are your thoughts of his assessment?

 

John who?

That conclusion is rather misleading as it initially made me thought "so his attempt to find a viable alternative for Windows is to replace it with an additional 3 other OSes depending on usage?". It is an interesting article although there are parts I disagree. I could offer my opinions but it'll end up far longer than Halamka's article and as I have found in the past, these discussions tend to lead into the use of fists to settle what's what. Personally, I feel his article is somehow biased towards Mac. He also doesn't elaborate on many points nor does he go into pros and cons of his arguments to give it a balanced viewpoint.

One particular point of disagreement is where his discussion on disliking Windows "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". There are no mention of the huge hardware options available for customers under the Windows / Linux platform as oppose to the extortionate prices that Apple charges for parts and upgrades and so forth. There are pros and cons to preconfigured machines but at no point did Halamka address that issue. His workaround solutions to each OS makes me question his knowledge of both the Windows and Linux platform (or maybe I'm being a bit harsh here ).

In all fairness, I give Mac credit for stability and security. I won't hesitate to recommend a Mac to someone who uses a PC for general use. But the severe limitations of Macs ranging from software availability to hardware options and preconfigured systems isn't ideal for everyone.

The problem with comparing different OSes is how they are approached. People often view these different OSes from the wrong direction or get blinded by media, rumours and/or hype that falls short of expectation and that usually ends in a long, endless heated debate. Personally, I find each OS has an ideal/specific target audience. Each OS has evolved slowly to accomodate a wider target audience (especially the Linux distros available today). They can be compared but to try and single out any one of them is like picking a needle from a haystack.