I've spent quite some time with OSX systems... although haven't touched one in a while. Esthetics aside (which is a matter of personal preference, and eye candy), it's a fairly solid Unix system. Downside is that if your drivers are not available you have to go and hope somebody on a forum somewhere had the same problem, or become the expert and recompile the drivers yourself. Back in the day (circa 2004) I've spent days trying to get Samba sharing to work. At the end I had to hack some obscure number on a config file, which the Man pages forgot to mention...

Bottom line, since then I've felt that OSX is good if you want an unix with better support than open source, but you have to be ready to fiddle with the system. WinXP is more useful if you just want to get stuff done.

The situation may have improved since then though. I'm currently running a Xandros install (EEE PC) and it's not too bad; but it's not my main PC either so I'm not that picky.



[download a life]