What is your main OS and why? (Poll)

[RCBH928]

I am a mac user and 100% prefer OSX over Windows, but even I would not chose Macs for creative work. They had that trash can mac pro for years without update, I believe, with crazy prices. It was made more like an Italian designer item than a computer for creative production/heavy lifting. There aren't any OS X only software except for Final Cut and Logic Pro which I heard many Pro users prefer Avid and Adobe Premiere Pro any way. Not sure about Audio production. With a wintel machine you can build the PC you want however you want, upgrade it with whatever you want and it sure supports more software than MacOS not to mention legacy software. My only guess is that MacOS might be much more stable than Win10 but only guessing, many enterprises run day and night on Win10(or earlier).

The funny thing is, the argument has been moot for a long time. Macs are PCs. It's now all about iOS vs. Android.

Macs are PCs, I think Apple invented the Personal Computer market as prior to that computers were seen as a work/company only machines. They just use the term PC to refer to any generic computer able to run Windows as they can run other OS's too like DOS and Linux. There isn't much iOS-Android war either, everyone seems in a very comfortable zone. Apple just reached a first ever valuation of $2T in human history and Android is being used on majority of cellphone market not to mention their expansion into wearables and home theater pcs.

The funny thing is, the argument has been moot for a long time. Macs are PCs. It's now all about iOS vs. Android.

I've heard though that Macs are switching off of Intel.

Yes they are switching to ARM/RISC which should be very exciting since we haven't seen a full fledged computer running on this architecture in over a decade. The only ones are the weaker SBCs like RPi. Microsoft had an attempt but I heard it was not successful.

[Ziggy]

Yeah, I totally get it. That's just one of the reasons Office has the market it does. If you've been using the same program for the past twenty years, guess what program you're gonna upgrade to?

I mostly just do word processing so Excel doesn't have much of a draw for me but I get it. Office is nice to have.

I've been just fine using LibreOffice (with one big exception: the line separating the main pages from footnotes!), but I thought WPS Office was supposed to be very close to Word (and likewise to Excel), more so than LibreOffice's Writer and Calc.

Which is also why MS Office is available for OSX, which when I first found out seemed as crazy to me as when I first found out that I could get a Sonic game on a Nintendo system!

The last time I was using office was Office XP. I thought the ribbon interface was silly when I first saw it, but it is actually very intuitive. It instantly made the old archaic menu systems outdated, such as the one Office XP used. Still, I didn't care because at the time I wasn't using Office professionally. I started using Open Office because it had new features that Office XP lacked, like being able to convert a Word document into a PDF. And then later I started using LibreOffice. And I was using Mozilla Thunderbird for email which was great, especially after it got the calendar add-on built into it. But now it seems Windows 10 comes with a simple email client built in.

And I still like LibreOffice because it has a free and easy way to organize pages in a PDF document with the Draw app. Sure, you can technically edit a PDF with Word now, but it converts it to a Word document then you have to convert it back to a PDF. That can mess with the formatting. But more importantly, with LibreOffice Draw you can simply add, remove or reorder pages in the PDF without having to convert it first. This is important if you want to edit a PDF that isn't just a text document, like an instruction manual scan for a retro game.

So I was happy using LibreOffice until I started using MS Office professionally. Then like I said, I got use to MS Office so it would take me too long to figure out how to do stuff with LibreOffice. When I built my new desktop last year, I decided to just get Office 365 as my main office suite. The professional world uses MS Office, and that's not going to change any time soon, so I'd like to use Office at home so I can stay sharp with it. I hated subscription apps when they first started doing that, and there's still some things I really don't like about it, but there's also some reasons that it makes sense. Office 365 is only like $5/mo, and for me is worth it for what I'm getting out of it. 5 cross platform installs with sync/cloud capabilities, it's always up to date, and I get to stay sharp with the office suite that the professional world uses. But still, if there were no chance of me using MS Office at a job in the future then I would just switch to free products again.

[o.pwuaioc]

Ziggy, have you tried WPS Office? I use Excel at work, too, but fortunately I don't need to bother with it at home. Oh, also, Macs PDF reader allows for easy rearrangement of pages within a PDF. I think more and more readers are doing that these days.

[Ziggy]

Ziggy, have you tried WPS Office?

No, I haven't. I just checked a couple of screenshots and it looks like it's copying the ribbon UI. Is that right? I see there's a Linux version, maybe I'll check it out there.

[o.pwuaioc]

Ziggy, have you tried WPS Office?

No, I haven't. I just checked a couple of screenshots and it looks like it's copying the ribbon UI. Is that right? I see there's a Linux version, maybe I'll check it out there.

Yep, I didn't play with it for very long, but it's definitely closer to Office than LibreOffice is.

[fastbilly1]

Most of the folk I know who use macs all work in pro video and it is required*. Up until a few years ago the Red Rocket card worked better on OSX, mostly because its a locked hardware/software. But these guys buy 2-4 Mac Pros every generation completely maxed out and they are terrified that Apple is about to screw everything up and itll be like the late 90s again. Because even though Fugaku is running on Arm, it has A64FX chips at $18,000 per, so it is not even in this conversation. Apple already announced that the chip will be an A14x which is the next gen version of the chip that they are using in the Iphone 11 line. Like I said, we will see.

*I know one guy who runs a video recovery company with multiple editing bays of 25 mac pros (each bay handles 24 frames + controller). All the software for that world is OSX only. He already told me that if the world moves past 8k he may just have to retire.

[RCBH928]

Most of the folk I know who use macs all work in pro video and it is required*. Up until a few years ago the Red Rocket card worked better on OSX, mostly because its a locked hardware/software. But these guys buy 2-4 Mac Pros every generation completely maxed out and they are terrified that Apple is about to screw everything up and itll be like the late 90s again. Because even though Fugaku is running on Arm, it has A64FX chips at $18,000 per, so it is not even in this conversation. Apple already announced that the chip will be an A14x which is the next gen version of the chip that they are using in the Iphone 11 line. Like I said, we will see.

*I know one guy who runs a video recovery company with multiple editing bays of 25 mac pros (each bay handles 24 frames + controller). All the software for that world is OSX only. He already told me that if the world moves past 8k he may just have to retire.

Every generation or every version? Also surprising there is OS X pro software only that is non-Apple made, some seriously niche market that is. Why would he retire if video goes past 8K? Wouldn't hardware gets updated to match that just like in all past years? Or is it going to cost him too much to upgrade the 25 Macs?

[fastbilly1]

He works in film recovery for the film and music industry. He runs one of the few companies in the world that can take damaged film from over two dozen formats, and make it look like it was never damaged. Their setup is 25 pcs since most film from the 30s on is at 24 frames per second. So one mac per frame and one to control them all. He has four setups. But they only master at 8k and release at 4k. If they have to master at 16k and release at 8k, the current hardware would take three to four times aslong to process films. Which cuts into profits.

And yes the software is super specialized and there is no alternative because the market is only like ten companies woirldwide.

[marurun]

So, despite really preferring the Mac OS, I run Windows 10. I run it because I used to enjoy gaming on my PC and because up until very recently I was heavily resource constrained. The combination of the two means Windows was my only option. So I built my own PCs to maximize my gaming ROI. And laptops were necessary but as cheap as possible, and since I needed access to office, Windows was my only good option.

I'm now in a better position financially and I simply don't have the availability to game on my desktop PC. Once I need a new PC to do work from I will probably pick up a Mac laptop. Maybe one of those ARM models down the line. Then I can enjoy Mac OS and that ecosystem again. My desktop will probably always be a custom-built thing capable of gaming, but I probably won't need a new one for years, until I have time and availability again to use it for gaming. The gaming PC I built 4 years ago is still perfectly sufficient for doing work and will likely remain so for another couple years. I could see us getting an iMac as a family PC, once my kiddo gets old enough to start learning to use a computer and once we need a family workstation to share and use for stuff like Facetime (still the best video chat around). Most schools provide Chromebooks for education purposes, so he'll have a school-provided laptop once he's proper school age.

Yes, the cost of a Mac is largely what has kept me out of the Mac OS ecosystem. And while many can and will argue that based solely on stats like CPU power and available gigabytes of storage and memory the Mac is a poor value, but I find Apple's industrial design and durability is unmatched. When looking at annual durability reports, Mac users by and large use their PCs far longer that most equivalent PC users and have fewer problems. Part is because not all Mac users can afford to replace them as readily, but another part is that Apple's hardware designs are generally very good and very high-quality. No, they're not flawless. But Apple has much tighter design tolerances, tends to source parts exclusively where they can, and therefore has much more predictable manufacturing outcomes. That means that barring some design flaw warranting a recall, you're much more likely to get a computer that will survive the years when you buy from Apple. Of course, you have to want to live in that OS ecosystem, but I do. I find OS X, on the whole, more usable than Windows. Again, not perfect. Apple stubbornly sticks to form over function for a number of UI conventions, but outside of those, Apple generally has a more human-friendly interface than Windows, IMO. Microsoft will occasionally make some strong user-focused design changes (the Office Ribbon - people complain but it was usability-tested out the wazoo) but equally often they seem to want to change stuff just to change it.

[Ziggy]

He works in film recovery for the film and music industry. He runs one of the few companies in the world that can take damaged film from over two dozen formats, and make it look like it was never damaged. Their setup is 25 pcs since most film from the 30s on is at 24 frames per second. So one mac per frame and one to control them all. He has four setups. But they only master at 8k and release at 4k. If they have to master at 16k and release at 8k, the current hardware would take three to four times aslong to process films. Which cuts into profits.

And yes the software is super specialized and there is no alternative because the market is only like ten companies woirldwide.

Not to go too far off topic here, but speaking of this, I recently skipped through a video about restoring Star Wars in 4K. The video is nearly 3.5 hours long, so I only just skipped through it. But from what I gathered, the process is pretty cool. He's grabbing multiple film sources, each on their own is in horrible condition. But between all of them collectively, there's enough to pull a beautiful 4K image for each frame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3W_O-tp0_g

Microsoft will occasionally make some strong user-focused design changes (the Office Ribbon - people complain but it was usability-tested out the wazoo) but equally often they seem to want to change stuff just to change it.

The ribbon UI is awesome. I thought it was stupid when it first came out, but after using it more I realized that it really is very intuitive. And it's great having the same basic UI structure across your entire platform.

Windows 10 settings, on the other hand, is horrible. It's like they intentionally made it hard to navigate and find what you're looking for. When I need to change a setting, very rarely do I not use the search function. Otherwise, it usually takes me forever to find what I'm looking for. Even with the search function, certain things are still a PITA.