I guess I'm gonna say I'll see yet as preferred xp pro for a while, like two years to say 'ok, now that vista thing, no other way around...'
but am crappy with hardware, tend to buy just when I cant simply avoid it.This machine is certainly not the last trend.
Btw, for several reasons I had to handle several flavours of suse, Redhat (the eldest(I yet remember installing with diskettes, back in '95 or so) ones, 4.0, in multi OSes boot (yep, win included, was allways curious by most systems)) , Mandrake (...till 8.1 or 8.2) , Ubuntu, pure Debian, and Kubuntu. Was/is pleasant. Just several of the comercial softwares I use are not ported -neither I think they will- to win32..
Also handled win2k at a company, win 2003 server, win 95, and my still loved Ms Dos 6.22 (I just hate how diminished it got in the win9x and then in xp...)...
I certainly learnt to hate one OS: WinMe (came with a friend's computer)
And for what I have seen of Vista...has a similar philosophy with hardware resources, probably using em well, but...actually eating 'em all and beyond...Also, too much of that silly trend in several OSes of adding nice uber resource-wasting fx to desktop elements, effects, animations, 3d...heck, I want a system that eats the least so to reserve all that for my softwares!!
Robbing me one gig of that expensive ram to put a freaking logo, and also actually putting by default the hungry graphical beast per interface, even expecting 3d powerful cards and shaders 2.0 to lemme open several windows and copy files, is something I sincerelly dont get.
I dunno, I work in making gfx and lots of computer related stuff...One needs speed more than anything...
For me is ok if they'd allways worried to release a not uber expensive "sensible" Windows Vista, call it "Vista Clever", that would use ridiculuos quantity of resources, put ugly grey windows, and ye old controls, I freaking dont mind, I do the candy myself as am an artist...dont need my cpu all time dealing with putting a window fx in the background...
Vista will certainly be imposed, anyway, but now imho is not the moment.
mac os x is my big unknown..only handled a very tiny bit, I almost dont know how to walk there...
What I'm told is Photoshop flies with it, G4 even had a cpu instruction specially dedicated to it if I remember well, I guess now is even better...
But again, I need all software I need to run...
Havent seen a way to configure my vmware with a v machine with Macosx...and surely anywway i'd need a purchased Mac OSx, logically...not as easy as download an ubuntu VMWare machine and just use it...
If anyone can throw a light here...great.
Btw, more and more am coming to a point I dont need *really* propietary software, well...except Photoshop. Tho v.7 is said to work very nicely in Wine. I don't feel that well with Gimp, tho it is quite nice. Am specially fast with the adobe thingie... But in 3d, Wings, and Blender are my main tools, and they 're ported perfectly to the 3 platforms, so...
I dont have much that of the versus thing, as my jobs have often require me use whatever the OS, whatever the software/tool...(not specially against Vista, seen it and loks ok...but imho they should start to concentrate on not wasting so much computer resources...)