Can of Worms Now Open: Mac vs. PC

[robogone]

That kinda depends on the knowledge about the OS and the computer you're installing, robojam. I've got more problems of how to cut all the unnecessary bloat from W7 these days . I rarely had any problems with XP and PC builds, ever, and all of the problems stemmed usually from badly written drivers, maybe a little buggy BIOS, so nothing to do with the Windows itself. Then drivers and the BIOS get polished after some time... sometimes sooner, sometimes later, and then it all works fine.

I didn't mean between 7 and XP, I meant between OSX and any Windows OS.

I'm not suggesting that OSX is bug free or without problems, but I do think setting it up is a lot more straightforward and problem free (IMO).

[DuX]

My apologies, robojam. I misunderstood, yeah.

Indeed, OS-X is definitely easier to setup properly than W7 [and XP even more] for a computer newbie or those who just don't want to know, or those who don't know much about it, and artists usually don't want to "mess with that crap" [quoting just about everyone I know that make music but don't know computers]. I absolutely understand that, and I often feel like that myself. I somehow learned to separate my creativity from a computer maintenance guy in me, and gosh how it makes me angry when some plugin brings down the whole project. No, I'm not going to put a "smiley" at the end because that's never funny, far from it. However, what I do is just never use that plugin that brings it down again, or I use it very cautiously and save very often.

[EvilDragon]

That's where Reaper's firewalling plugins feature comes in handy, right? Never crashes the project along with the plugin.

[robogone]

Well much of it depends on the OS architecture too. Windows and OSX are very different beasts under the hood, so the reason for crashes can be very different.

One thing that always sticks in my mind is the fact that Windows does not provide access to source code at all to hardware manufacturers who want to write drivers. This would be useful as developers would be able to debug their code if it fails when making Windows API calls. About 15 years ago I worked for a consumer electronics manufacturing company, and spent quite a bit of time one day talking to one of the driver developers who bemoaned how difficult it is to work with Windows as you're essentially debugging code with some of it being in black boxes - you know what goes in and what comes out, but you don't know what's really going on or even if you're potentially sending something that's triggering a bug in the API.

Not really sure how open OSX is though, but I do know that it doesn't share memory between processes, which is one of the big problems that causes drivers to crash.

[DuX]

Spot on, robojam.

Yap, firewalling plugins in Reaper comes extremely useful in Reaper, EvilDragon. Also when you want to give 2GB to a very memory consuming plugin like Kontakt, under a 32bit OS.