Are you willing to supply any metric that does back this statement?

I can't really say I have liked any Dell workstation. One workstation had the processor fan blow air on the temperature sensor. No problems for unloaded machine. Try to run at 100% CPU load, and the CPU fan would spin up to cool the processor. Then after cooling the sensor, it would spin down. Then spin up again. So the machine sounded like an autumn storm. Thank you Dell.

Another Dell workstation regularly restarts the graphics driver - especially for Youtube or similar video sources. The machine freezes for a couple of seconds, and then reactivates with a short message that the graphics card driver has been restarted. Thank you Dell.

Dell - the company that for a number of years used power supplies with the standard ATX connector, but with the wires shifted. Insert a Dell PSU in a non-Dell machine, and smell the smoke. Insert a standard PSU in a Dell machine, and smell the smoke. Thank you Dell.

Dell - the company that gives a motherboard manufacturer a fixed price, asking: can you supply motherboards for this price? Take it or leave it! So Dell workstations without sensor for temperature, fan speed or voltages. Tank you Dell.

You get decent machines for the price, but "among the best" may be a bit strong.


Not sure that this is true. It feels more like "perceived security plays the most significant role."

The M$ implementation of security is seriously lacking configurability. Lots of people turns off all security features just because they can't give a specific program the right to perform specific changes. For a firewall, it is natural to allow "accept", "deny", "accept for this time", ... for individual programs and ports or destinations. It would be logical that the same rules were true about other access limitations.


Most OS do supply frequent updates. A huge difference is that M$ have a design where you often have to reboot. And where - if you run a very big job taking maybe 24 hours - you get frequent reminders to restart the machine. You can't just click "shut up for 24 hours". So you have to drag that little nasty dialog all the way outside the right side of the monitor, where M$ may believe that the dialog is open, and hence not pop up new dialogs again, and again, and again. All the while taking the keyboard focus from a user busy typing in text.


Not always possible in the real world. There is often limitations to the virtualization.


The same could be said 10 years ago, but wouldn't be truer or falser then. Todays machines are faster. But at the same time, we are constantly changing our expectations of them. Try loading a 20Mpixel photo from a better DSLR and perform a bit of image processing on it, and you would notice that even with all eight cores busy, todays machines are not too fast. Same if you try a FEM simulation, virtual reality, or running regression testing of non-trivial source code.

The problem is that we get faster and faster computers, but at the same time the OS keeps claiming more and more resources even for standard operations. Even if fast hw-accelerated graphics cards can handle transparencies, multiple rendering passes for each presented frame etc, we pay for this in extra electric bills. How important is it, that the title bar of a Windows application is semi-transparent, and that the application hidden behind will - despite being hidden - will render, just so the semi-transparence will show fuzzy ghosting of the background?