purpleravenhawk
No one has ever told me what makes MAC or Linux so awesome. stare Will someone please tell me! gonk Linux: Open source origin means that people around the world work on making Linux work with their unique hardware. Modern Linux apparently supports legacy hardware better than Windows does. Open source also means that you have the power to fix a broken problem should you run into it.
As a popular platform, lots of work is also being put into getting windows programs running on Linux. Multiple solutions exist, but by going with popular packages you also get popular solutions to problems.
Having access to the complete source allows for trivial installation across multiple platforms. It can be installed on a Mac, for example. If it's not a Macbook Pro with an x86 processor then you can easily find PPC builds of Linux.
OSX: This is the name of the OS shipped on Macs. Based upon OpenBSD, I think? An open-sourced Unix (similar to Linux ; older than it, actually) that can be fairly reliably added to, but unlike Linux's GPL licenses, the Unix licenses does not force people who modify the code to release the modified source ; indeed, Apple has made proprietary modifications to some Unix code (mostly around the GUI, I believe.)
However, Apple offers a complete product ; they don't just sell the OS, they sell the computer. The GUI is really well polished with Apple's OS tweaks. In addition, unlike Windows which enjoys forcing you to upgrade hardware, OSX is known for running with similar capacity to Windows but performing better on older hardware. As a rough example, the old PowerBook G4s from 6 years ago here at work easily run the latest OSX versions without needing any sort of
Also, it's noteworthy that both are considered more "secure" than your traditional Windows installation. Windows Vista looks like a really good step in the right direction, takling on a security approach similar to Linux and Unix.
I believe that the DRM situation in OSX is better than Windows and Linux is better than both... I don't have time to elaborate. I need lunch.