Is Osx/linux More Efficient With Hardware Than Windows?

[frozen.fish 0]

man the replies for this post are big enough to scare anyone

but then also i will take some courage to reply to this..............

i am using ubuntu for almost past 1 month and its really hard to install a new hardware such as pendrive or connect my own cellphone to the computer but in windows is easy and really plug and play but not in ubuntu as much as i lnow so i prefer windows to install a hardware and use it in windows only and really ubuntu is a bad idea for installing a hardware.................

replies are too long to read!

but i want to share my 2 cents too! lol

 

Have been itching to try ubuntu for quite a while now, but I cannot leave windows.. There are no development for Linux on bigger software makers like Adobe or even Corel, I wish support for linux will grow soon.

 

Apple is too expensive so have no experience with it, Windows needs "tweaking" to be efficient honestly..

 

I can say windows is not efficient because half of the installed services on it is never used by ordinary users.

Edited April 6, 2009 by kerco (see edit history)

[random truth 0]

Right... I figured that the whole driver process was already in existence, but if that was the case, wouldn't it [the device] include a "way" of communicating with the OS and thus have direct communication with Windows without having to jump through a driver [kernel] layer, like what Linux seems to do? I'm guessing this is a much more complicated deal than I'm making it out to be... or is it?
And as for Mac OSX, would it be safe to say that any non-Apple-approved upgrades, hardware, or devices would work much less efficiently than ones that already have been placed into an approved list of components? If that's the case, that would mean that OSX would have a device list... which means that it doesn't differ much from Windows on that aspect except that it would be a much shorter list. But if the whole vendor ID concept exists with what I mentioned in my previous post, why would Windows be different than OSX in terms of the efficiency in utilizing hardware if both have a device list that they work off of to ensure compatibility with devices? (I can see why Windows would boot up slower than OSX as Apple would have a much more refined list of hardware that have been "approved" for OSX... but this leaves the efficiency question.) I'm not really saying that since both operating systems utilizing a modified microkernel that they must be the same... but in the way that I'm understanding how both of them work with hardware, there doesn't seem to be much difference, or at least there's a way to change things so that there isn't much of a difference on the hardware management on the kernel side of things.

Alright I will try to answer some of your questions.
Right now, most OS use drivers to work at a kernel level, OSX, Windows, and Linux. However Linux and OSX support user space drivers. Also OSX and Linux are Unix based so Ill explain why that matters in the end...

Yes, it is far more compilcated then you are making it out to be. You see, vendor ids mearly exist so the computer software can reconize the hardware. How do you think the software knows you have a logitech xxxx mouse, instead of just a Mouse. The vendor id does not contain any software it is just used to identify the device.

Mac OSX is optimized for computers using an efi capable motherboard with apples firmware, with the PPC or AMD64 (intel core 2 duo) architecture, and using dual channel ram. As long as your using Apple Hardware their will be no change in efficiency and you generally will not have any problems upgrading hardware that is not a graphics card. Also Mac OSX works best on Apple hardware that has matching ram cards in each slot. That way dual channel ram can be utilized. This is also why apple only sells ram in even numbers (2gb, 4gb, 6gb, 8gb, 16gb, 32gb). When you are running OSX86 which is on non apple hardware it is going to be slower. This is because pcs made for windows use the bios. This is because Windows Vista Ultimate x64 is the only version of windows that supports efi. Mac OSX only supports efi. So when it is running on a PC made for windows part of the cpu needs to be used to emulate the efi functions. Also most of the hardware does not support dual channel memory, which in turn slows it down. Then you most likely would need to use drivers that were designed for a hobby by the OSX86 community which are often at a lower quality.

Windows and Minix uses Microkernels. Linux and BSD use Monolith kernels, Mac OSX uses a hybrid kernel. ll explain the difference later.

Their is so much differences in OS's that the hardware rarely even matters any more when comparing performance of similar computers. They all use different windowing systems (xserver, dwm, or Aqua), manage ram differently, manage gpu's differently, different rendering engines, manage cpus differently, hard drives, etc.

Now to explain classes. Any certified Unix system (Linux, OSX, BSD, UNIX) uses classes. What this does is assume that you, the user are the biggest security threat to the computer. So by default you do not runs as root (admin) and the system blocks you out of certain specific things. Processes and files are divided among classes using a permission system. An example of this would be. So a system boots up the operating system tells the bios or efi to start the hardware needed for bootup and may run some quick hardware checks, then it finishes loading the kernel, these processes will be under the class "Kernel". Then it will proceed to boot up the system. Once the system is booted those processes would be in the class "System". Then a few daemons and drivers will be loaded as "root". The login screen will pop up at this point. Here the user lets call them "User 1" and say they have admin rights to the computer. They will login with their user name and password. Here any processes they start will be under the class "User 1". So User 2 logs in. Starts some processes. These will be under the class "User 2". Will say that User 2 is non admin. User 1 will only have access to his/hers home directory, a public folder, user space drivers and maybe the applications folder. When he/she needs to access something in one of the other folder he/she is not allowed in it will report a permission denied error. To do this the user would need to go into root mode by entering their login info again. This will give them "User 1 root" which will allow them to modify files labeled under System or Kernel. How ever unless User 2's settings allow it User 1 can not modify User 2's files. To make it even more secure each program is sand-boxed from each other. So this helps with security and prevents viri. this is how. So User 1 visits a malicious page in firefox. it downloads a small daemon, and trys to install it, it will get a permissions denied error. Or, it could hijack firefox. When this happens on windows the system is at the attackers will. On Unix based OS's then the application will only have access to the files that the application "firefox" has permission to access. So lets do an example of a trojan then. The idea is that when the user downloads the application on (mac osx) the user would wonder why it needs a password because most things dont need a password or on (linux) the user who would fall for that would not most likely understand how to install something not from the package manager.

The difference between a micro kernel, monolithic kernel, and a hybrid kernel. In a micro kernel the device drivers and services are not included in the kernel. In a monolithic kernel they are. In a hybrid kernel most drivers and services are included with the kernel, but some are not.
Hope this helps.
Edited April 15, 2009 by random truth (see edit history)

[iGuest 3]

@random truthHaha, Mac OS X more optimized? for the years that Mac OS was running on G4s and G5s; exactly none of the Operating System was optimized for Altivec, whereas the linux kernel is optimizable for altivec. This is the reason you got very little performance gain out of the g4 processor unless you were doing nothing but encoding MP3s all day long.The real secret of the performace of Mac OS is Quartz's use of video hardware.On the PPC boards apple used OpenFirmware (which is awesome) and now on the x86 and x86_64 boards they use the EFI, which is anything but open.-reply by hal68k

 

[random truth 0]

@random truth

Haha, Mac OS X more optimized? for the years that Mac OS was running on G4s and G5s; exactly none of the Operating System was optimized for Altivec, whereas the linux kernel is optimizable for altivec. This is the reason you got very little performance gain out of the g4 processor unless you were doing nothing but encoding MP3s all day long.

 

The real secret of the performace of Mac OS is Quartz's use of video hardware.

 

On the PPC boards apple used OpenFirmware (which is awesome) and now on the x86 and x86_64 boards they use the EFI, which is anything but open.

 

 

 

-reply by hal68k

 

<p> </p>

I said optimized for apple hardware. You really think that Mac OSX would work better than windows if it was forced to run on all hardware configurations. I also stated that on the powerpc (g3, g4, g5) architecture it used open firmware, or on AMD64 (every intel processor higher than core duo) efi. Also if you were to look into google, efi is an open standard.

http://www.uefi.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface

I would make sure you have your facts right before trolling.

[frozen.fish 0]

the endless war of windows vs apple vs this vs that.. good luck! but if i can afford apple ill go for apple.