Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard

Windows 7 was released for general availability today, and there has been no shortage of digital ink extolling the virtues of the new operating system.  The reviews have been mostly favorable and indicate that Windows 7 should be a marked improvement over it's immediate predecessor, Windows Vista.  Not surprisingly, this has led to a countless number of comparisons between Microsoft's latest release and Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which was released less than two months ago.  Most of those comparisons, like this CNET Prizefight, give kudos to both operating systems, but give the nod to Snow Leopard.  And I have to ask--are they running a different operating system than I am?

I have been running various betas and release candidates of Windows 7 for almost a year now.  And I have only one problem with it (which I'll mention below).  I haven't had any blue screens of death or system crashes, nor have I had any application crashes.  The somewhat annoying user access control dialogs of Windows Vista have been nearly eliminated.  And the application compatibility seems to be even higher than it was with Vista.  I was able to get Serious Sam running, a game that hasn't worked properly since Microsoft released Windows XP Service Pack 3.

My one problem with Windows 7 has been with the lack of drivers for the new system.  I'm a bit of a packrat (my wife would say that's an understatement), so I am still using hardware from the early 90s, e.g. my HP LaserJet 6L parallel printer.  Unfortunately, there's no driver for that printer on the Windows 7 disc, and neither HP nor Microsoft seem to have any interest in releasing one.  And while that's a bit disappointing for me, it's also completely understandable from a business perspective not to support hardware that's 15 years old.  My printer remains hooked up to an older laptop that actually has a parallel port and just enough memory to run Windows XP.

Contrast this with my experience using Snow Leopard on two computers.  I've already had a few total system failures through kernel panics, something that never happened to me over the three years that I was running 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard, even on non-standard (read, hackintosh) hardware.  Applications crashes seem to happen to me a few times a week.  Sure, I used to have to restart Firefox, a notorious memory sieve, after running it continuously for weeks at a time.  But now it happens with Cyberduck, muCommander, VLC--you name it.

And that doesn't even include the applications that no longer work since the upgrade.  VLC required an update after I upgraded to Snow Leopard.  My CLEAR drivers still don't work (though I blame the Clearwire/Motorola folks for that).  Current reports suggest that Apple won't support Boot Camp for Windows 7 across their entire line of Intel-based Macs.  I can't imagine the furor that would erupt if Microsoft or vendors stopped supporting four-year-old hardware.

Don't get me wrong, Snow Leopard is an incredible operating system with an interface that has lines as clean and modern as an Apple store.  And I still run my Macs continuously for weeks at a time without a reboot necessary.  But when compared directly against Windows 7, I find Microsoft's OS to be just as elegant and even more stable than Snow Leopard.  I still see that Mac OS "wait for it" spinning beach ball more than I like.  So in a head-to-head comparison (which I don't necessarily find to be especially valuable) I would have to give the nod to Windows 7 based on my own anecdotal experience.

Ironically, when I'm doing computationally intensive browsing tasks, I actually find myself using Linux a lot more these days.  Not only is it very stable, but the multitasking is nice and smooth, even under a load.  It seems to make good use of limited resources even on older systems.  It doesn't have the application support that Windows and Mac OS have, but it provides an A-1 user experience.