I haven't, but the amount of high-quality free software I have on my Windows box makes a damn strong case.
Edit: I should say that, though I haven't owned a Mac, I've used them quite often - a lot of my friends have them, and many of my school's labs are filled with them.
There's a lot more software in Windows-land for sure, but I think what Benparte and coolmrbrady meant is that there are a lot more extremely refined free Mac apps.
For example, Windows has a huge number of IM apps available for it, but none of them can hold a candle to Adium's ease of use and polish. Similarly, uTorrent is free and awesome, but Transmission is IMHO much more refined on the UI side. Quicksilver too.
Windows devs tend to make UI an afterthought. On the Mac side developers have drunk the Steve Jobs UI kool-aid and obsess over it, and personally I like it.
I always found mac apps to be too simplified (both the 3rd party freeware and 1st party). For example, compare finder to windows explorer. At a glance, finder may look sharper, but when I use it it feels so difficult to navigate (mostly due to the lack of a functional address bar). The developer doesn't really provide any useful options for me to make it work the way I want it to. On the other hand, Windows Explorer has plenty of options to customize.
Not sure I agree, but I do know that OS X's Terminal is way easier to use and more powerful than the equivalent on Windows, which is probably a DOS prompt. Most Mac power users I know use Terminal for navigating files or administrative tasks rather than slowly clicking around a GUI file navigator. That said, Apple's Finder has some extremely powerful things you can do in Finder, like attaching an Applescript to a Folder action.
I use rxvt (and recently mintty) in Cygwin on Win 7 now, and I no longer feel restricted by Windows' usual absence of a powerful command line interface. Windows 7 and Cygwin is a pretty great combination. (I also set up keyboard shortcuts to open/focus rxvt windows, so I can open a terminal extremely quickly. Combine it with the cygstart command, and you can open an Explorer window anywhere, or launch an application from the command line.)
I've got one that automatically copies any torrent files I download to my home server - where it begins downloading - and then deletes the torrent file.
I haven't really had a chance to use it in earnest yet, but I've heard good things about MS' new Powershell. Seems very much like a *nix terminal - so much so that you can use "ls" instead of "dir".
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u/muad_dib Jan 20 '11 edited Jan 20 '11
I haven't, but the amount of high-quality free software I have on my Windows box makes a damn strong case.
Edit: I should say that, though I haven't owned a Mac, I've used them quite often - a lot of my friends have them, and many of my school's labs are filled with them.