When using Mac or Linux, I often find myself stumbling upon features which I just find ‘nice’.
I love the built-in support for VNC. On Mac, it is as simple as waiting for the remote computer, providing it’s on a local Bonjour one, to appear in Finder. And enabling it is a checking a box in the Sharing preference pane. (connecting to a non-local machine is done through going to Connect to Server in Finder and prefixing the computer’s location with vnc://). Support varies by distro for Linux, but generally the service is pre-installed.
I love how I can mount SFTP and FTP shares in Nautilus under Ubuntu and in Finder on OS X. Unfortunately, support on OS X is read only. Whilst Windows has limited support for FTP and WebDAV etc, I personally find it very cumbersome and not nice to play with at all. I’d happily use Nautilus to put files onto my website; but on Windows I’d have to use Filezilla!
Faces in iLife 09 is great. Whilst there are better commercial (and probably free) options, it is just nice that is there. But it doesn’t intrude, whilst in Windows it no doubt would somehow majestically stand out to make it obvious that such a nice gimmick is included!
Desktop search is nice. I don’t think Windows Search can compare with Spotlight or Beagle. On Windows, I’d probably download Google Desktop Search. But no need on Mac or Ubuntu, as they’re already there.
I also love the simplicity of Linux commands like dd. On Windows, you’d need something like Acronis to do the same job, just much worse!
So, bringing on the flame war. What do you like in your operating system which isn’t in others?
Flame war? I agree with you and could probably add more. But I feel a little ignorant for not fully understanding things like WebDAV =(
if I sat down and thought about it, I could come up with over 100 things thats just nice(er then max/linux), but I settle for two right now (my mind is blank atm
)
- Compiz is not on either of the other OS’ss
- Better OpenGL support in Linux
I love the time machine function in Leopard. finally backing up isn’t a huge project anymore.
However I’m less keen on Apple’s revised ‘preview’ mechanism in the Finder. The fact that you can no longer fast-fwd / rewind is very frustrating. This would have been solved by the space-bar-play-big option which has a transport control on it, by by some massive oversight stops playing as soon as you move focus from the finder.
Immensely frustrating all round.
I think rather than having a flame war, which in my opinion makes everyone the loser as soon as they get into it, we should keep some dignity and discuss what we would like to see in the operating systems.
Flame wars accomplish nothing. Constructive discussion accomplishes something (a cooperative community, if nothing else).
At a basic level its things like the dragndrop functionality in Mac that just does what you’d expect. In Windows it sometimes does, other times does something different and sometimes doesnt want to play at all.
It’s got to be spaces and expose. Just so useful when designing. And it is sort of about on Windows Vista, but it’s no where next the standards of Macs. It all very unstable and feels like it will crash on Windows. Just everything on the Mac is really fluid!
Windows does come with built in FTP, in an explorer window type the URL of FTP server in the address bar and fill in the user name and password in the prompt box, built in FTP.