One nice thing is that we do have choices. Another plus for Mac is that it can probably also easily run 'nix.Mac OS X is 'nix — it's Darwin BSD with a proprietary layer on top. It's no easier to install a Linux or other operating system on a Mac than on a PC, though.
More security maybe, but that's half the problem - it gets in the way so much, to do anything you need to say "unblock" and "allow" all the time which gets really annoying, I know you can switch it off, but I think they went a little too far into trying to keep it virus free.Not quite. The security itself is fine: it's reasonable to require confirmation (and, preferably, a password) for risky actions. The problem is that Windows applications are used to running with administrator privileges, and many of them therefore require administrator privileges to do things that they needn't. Really, only the initial installation process should be system-wide: the day-to-day running shouldn't need to do anything that requires greater-than-user privileges. This is the system used by Linux and other UNIX-style operating systems, and it works well.
Also, it's a very resource hungry OS, you need 1.5GB of RAM just to keep it ticking along, and at the end of the day who cares about flashy graphics that slide and do animations if it's going to be less efficient? I know some people will, but I really don't care about the graphics, just as long as it works.There are, traditionally, three types of performance usage:Necessary, where the performance goes towards implementing vital features; Bloat, where the performance goes towards implementing interesting but perhaps not so useful features (this usually being optional); and Crud, where the performance is lost accidentally through poor coding or design practices, and doesn't bring any real features in exchange.My main issue with Vista is that Microsoft have introduced a whole new category:Theft, where the performance goes towards implementing mandatory features for the benefit of the manufacturer and other parties, which actually restrict what the user can do on their own machine.Effectively, it means that Microsoft are using your own computing power against you. That's kind of like stealing some of your money and using it to buy a gun with which to shoot you in the foot. In no way can it be condoned. Microsoft, of course, insist that it's not their fault and that the big corporations who make money out of attempting to prevent copyright infringement are forcing their hand, but I note that this has never been the case before: why should they suddenly change their minds? Whoever's behind it, it leads to a less-than-wonderful system. The interface, too, is particularly restrictive. This has always been an issue with Microsoft products: it's simply good coding practice to build one abstraction layer on top of another, allowing the user to fall back a layer if the upper layer proves insufficient, but Microsoft have failed to do this, removing command-line support almost entirely from their operating system, and have thereby taken it upon themselves to attempt to define in the GUI every operation that a user will ever want to perform with the operating system. Unsurprisingly, the abstraction is incomplete, though this in itself represents no great failure on Microsoft's part: classical GUIs are originally flawed in that they disallow chaining and re-use of components, and will therefore always be incomplete in some way.
*coughs and steps down off the soap-box*