> FYI, there are OS distributions that do not crash.

Yes, I have heard that LepriconSoft's UnicornOS runs quite well on the Hypothetica-9000 processor but everything else has the same real-world problems with faulty hardware and drivers.

You might have a stable setup but that's also true of well over 99% of Mac users – they just also don't tend to go on forums and say “Yeap, everything's still fine here!”.

I'd say LepriconSoft's UnicornOS is actually Windows 8.1, as strange/infuriating as that's going to sound to many HN readers.

I used Xubuntu or Fedora (dev), Windows 7 (Office), and OS X (XCode) for hours every day for years. I had two self-built machines running Linux, a laptop and a self-built machine running Win 7, and OS X running on a Mac Mini and later a MBA.

Since then, I've also had another desktop and a laptop running Win 7 and Win 8 (though enough coworkers use GDocs now that I've stopped using Windows at all).

Both Linux distros and all OS X versions (from Snow Leopard to Mavericks) have crashed countless times on me. How much they crashed has varied a lot between setups.

Windows hasn't crashed for me (or any of my friends or relatives for whom I'm their IT guy) since Vista came out. It's also never crashed on my old Mac Mini, which is my HTPC setup now.

Whatever you think about the finished products or companies behind them, it's really just a matter of testing and incentives. Windows 8 was tested for 1.2 billion hours before it was released, for example. Microsoft can do things slowly, but when they release something, it has to be rock-solid for their enterprise customers.

OS X, for Apple, isn't a moneymaker and its stability/security obviously isn't much of a priority. They didn't even give it a significant design refresh in years. That's how little they care about it.

The latest version of Ubuntu's desktop edition will ship with at least one head-slapping, show-stopping bug, even though it has a company backing it.

Windows 7+ does seem to be quite stable – Microsoft has obviously put in time improving the OS to be more resilient and, more importantly, pressuring vendors to write better drivers.

That said, in my experience that means it's caught up with OS X. I've had maybe one kernel panic in years and that was caused by a VMware driver bug. This has been true for most people I know.

The only people I know who have problems are either the ones who install a ton of low-level extensions (Windows or Mac) or a couple of Linux laptop users faced with the option of either having really slow GL performance or using indifferently maintained binary blob drivers.

I was actually talking about LepriconSoft's Slackware Linux :)

But your argument holds, stable, well tested, non-fancy software is the way to go regarding stability.

Yes my OS might be boring and my Desktop UI looks like 1999 but I can say in good faith that my system never crashed on me.

Serious Question: I know that since Vista, Windows can handle graphics driver and sound card driver crashes by restarting the driver.[1] That often leads to the program to crash too, if its using 3d graphics for example, but it does not require a restart of the whole system. Does Mac OS have something similar too?

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/images/device/wddm_timeout.gif

I don't believe so but since neither has crashed for me in years I haven't looked into it. You definitely can restart Bluetooth, which I've needed to do a handful of times when playing audio.

I'm from the Unix world. What is a "driver crash" ?

FWIW, I have rarely if ever seen OS X crash. I'm unsure what that would even look like. Are we talking about kernel panics? A single built-in app crashing while you using it? Every app suddenly closing?

So a kernel panic. Do people seriously see those often? I could count on one hand the number of times Mavericks panicked.

Usually, when I've seen a kernel panic in the past 5-10 years it's due to poor third-party hardware or drivers. I know someone who has an external sound mixer and plugging/unplugging the USB gives a 50/50 chance of a kernel panic.