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X vs. XP is a topic that's recently been discussed on a mailing list to which I subscribe. Someone quickly pointed out X vs. XP the website, a well-designed, simple guide. However, I thought I'd collect the list's responses and organize them for our own little "master list." It's important to take stock of where an OS is, so after the "things it gets right" list, we'll tackle the "vice versa" list: what XP does better than X.

Nearly none of the below are my words, though I have tried to edit to remove duplicates and condense items where possible.

How X Beats out XP

1. AppleScript. Windows XP has methods of inter-application communication, but nothing quite like AppleScript.
2. User is expected to do far less hardware/driver configuration and general maintenance.
3. Easier to learn, more consistent overall user experience.
4. Can host both consumer apps as well as industrial strength unix software.
5. Better overall security policies.
6. Some of the best consumer digital media apps anywhere.
7. Developer tools are free and fully featured. On Windows, you either have to pay for Visual Studio.NET or CodeWarrior.
8. Excellent application frameworks. The ease and speed of Cocoa means that tons of people use these underlying unix tools and never even know it, even if they don't know a command-line from a line dance.
9. Open source core.
10. No product activation. Windows XP suspects everyone is a pirate until proven otherwise. You don't have to call Apple when you want to install software on a different machine than it was originally installed on.
11. Superior aesthetics and user interface. Mac OS X has window sheets, window drawers, helpful error messages and alert panels, no MDI, no "maximize to fill the screen" command, standard ways to tell if a document has been modified, a better way of informing the user that an application is loading, etc.
12. Far_more advanced speech synthesis and text-to-speech abilities than Windows XP out of the box.
13. No registry. Instead, user defaults are typically saved into individual XML files, and it's actually possible for the average user to guess where a preference key is located and what it does. This is very difficult to do with Windows XP's registry system. Also, some crappy uninstallers over on Windows do not properly delete entries from the registry.
14. It can be cheaper than Windows. Don't let the "Macs are expensive" crowd fool you. If you need multiprocessor support in Windows XP, you need to pay an extra $100 to buy XP Pro, whereas Mac OS X supports up to 24 (?) processors in the standard release. Also, the $999 OS X Server comes with an unlimited user license, while Windows 2000 Server costs $1,199 for just 10 users. Imagine what you'd have to pay to support more than 10 users on Windows... And that's before we add in any extra TCO costs, like the amount of money required to support Windows users, etc.
15. Apache. The server versions of Windows ship with IIS, which is sometimes known as the "Insecure Information Server". The client versions of Windows generally don't come with personal Web servers.
16. Instant access to all those Unix tools. OS X is instantly a "player", and things like sed, awk, grep, emacs, vim, python, perl, etc etc etc are all available, whether you know it or not.
17. Fewer keystrokes to call up a menu option or perform an operation.
18. More Mnemonic keyboard shortcuts even in the same industry leading applications (e.g. Adobe, MM products).
19. An ability to give freely meaningful names to drives and CDs.
20. More accurate mousing, in Windows it always feels like the click and selection are disjointed.
21. Better screen fonts and character placement in the Finder, in windows "r" s merge with "n" s to look like "m" s.
22. More screen real estate through better designed menus, windows and dialog boxes.
23. Easy viewing of multiple windows in multiple apps at the same time.
24. Easier application installation (by far).
25. Less porn, spam, obtrusive commercialism and viruses.
26. Far superior drag and drop.
27. Better rendering of fonts on screen for increased legibility
28. Built in accessibility capabilities right into the OS.
29. Fewer process to get things done - X is generally more efficient.
30. Networking is a breeze.
31. I've never had anyone lust after my hardware or software when using a Windows box.
32. Altivec - when used Altivec can increase speed of some operations by orders of magnitude, look at the recent macbibble stuff.
33. iLife/Digital Hub intergration - the simplicity and ease of using all these apps together is amazing, i mean i was able to pull pics off my USB digital camera and order prints from within iphoto and there was no hassle, no driver install or anything.
34. Lots of little things that make more sense - like you pop a cd in the drive and it mounts on the desktop for you. I still do not understand why it takes 3 or 4 clicks to get to the CD on windows and then it might run an application not let you browse the contents. That is so damn annoying imho.
35. Bbedit 😉 - Basically X has better quality applications overall. Office v.X beats the pants off of Office 2000.

How XP Beats out X

1. XP can use a CD as a removable disk, copy files to it, eject, reinsert, add more etc.
2. XP has better connectivity with PIMs and external devices.
3. It feels faster. It may not actually be faster, but it feels it.
4. Switching logins without quitting all running apps.
5. Free or Cheap ways to deal with creating VCD/SVCD/DIVX. Utilities like TMPEGEnc and Virtual Dub are common on windows.
6. Open/Save dialogs present different views than just column view in X.

Okay, the list is a Mac OS X list. What did you expect?

P.S. Please note that many things did not make this list because they are platform issues, not OS issues. "Wintellian systems" have more games, for example, than Apple-based systems. The distinction between OS and platform is often tough, but in many cases, it's fairly straightforward.

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