My experience only, but it's crashed only twice on me since 2001, with
heavy daily use at work and home.
Thanks for your comments Chris. It seems many people have similar good experiences to yours. I have three macs with X (Tibook 550, Ibook G3/900, and G4/1.25 tower), and I have had crashes and freezes on all of them - albeit not as often as in 9.
> easier to maintain (it isn't),
I strongly disagree here. System 6-7 and OS 8-9 were a nightmare of
INIT conflicts, software clashes, etc.
Thats true, and there was the need to organize extension sets. But in terms of maintence, there are a number of things that can and must be done - but you need to read books or articles to even find these things.
> faster (most definitely not),
My perspective on this is that the user interface is slower (though
this isn't noticeable at all on newer hardware); but the OS itself is
significantly faster. The simplest example of this is that the whole
system doesn't grind to a stop when you open a menu.
I thought 9 had much snappier response, windows opening, etc. Although I don't like Windows, I am running an application that I wrote (non music applicaion using Real Basic) on both X and Windows and its tons faster on Windows. Its somewhat understandable that the cool graphics in X take a toll, but I wonder about that toll taking away from audio processing. On NI's plugs, if you look on the box, it says 500mhz requirement for 9 and 733 for X. So that seems to indicate that about 32% more of the processing power is devoted the GUI (graphic user interface).
I also read an article last month, although I can't find it now, but it was written by one of the original guys who developed the mac, and he was complaining about Apple's turn toward pretty but inefficient code.
But what can you do? We pretty much are at the mercy of MS & Apple.