[Discuss] os x = poop?

[Daniel Barrett]

Our network has iMacs, Macbook Airs, Mac Minis, and Ubuntu systems. I
like them all of them for different reasons. But in my experience, the
Macs are not as reliable under load, and applications can more easily
crash the OS (particularly MS Office).

My wife regularly runs 20 Mac applications at once (with sufficient
RAM). The number of times I have added some innocuous little
operation, like opening Terminal, and watched the system go down are
uncountable. The number of hung applications that haven't responded to
the Finder's "Force Quit" command is also large. (Thank goodness for
"kill -9.")

There was a period of about 5 years where rsync refused to copy the
entire Mac internal drive to an external drive. It would always die
somewhere in the middle with an alleged external disk error. Tried it
with 5+ different external drives. Nowadays I run ssh+rsync from a
Linux box to back up the drive.

So, Macs are friendly & useful but I don't rely on them for anything
intensive.

The only time our Linux boxes crash is during hardware failures, or
maybe once a year when something goes nuts and spews out a zillion
processes. Even then, they sometimes recover by themselves. Linux has
other issues, but reliability under load is not one of them. :-)

--
Dan Barrett
dbarrett at blazemonger.com