Making the ultimate creative content OS from bits of Windows, Mac, and Linux

The recent unveiling of the Mac Pro has divided a lot of professional users who hoped Apple wouldn't fix what wasn't broken. Phil Schiller's words from the announcement—"can't innovate anymore, my ass"—made it clear that Apple used the venerable workstation as a Guinea pig to prove that it can still get its machined-aluminum groove on. Sure, the design and engineering of the Darth Pro are brilliant, but as I pointed out in my critical look, the Mac Pro needed shrinking as urgently as I need a Hermès man-purse. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, but some people who want more flexible hardware options aren't convinced. I know one video editor who's already abandoned OS X for Windows because their work depends more on GPU power with apps like DaVinci Resolve. A big box with multiple PCI Express slots is more important to them than added desk space.

To be honest, I was on the fence. While Apple was pointing its shrink ray at the Mac Pro, I've spent the past year between three OSes trying to decide whether I will move the 3D portion of my work to Linux or Windows from OS X. I reviewed the HP Z820 and Dell T5600 and when I needed some added muscle to help out with renders—and knew that the Westmere Mac Pro was a terrible deal—I built an overclocked i7 3930K. It didn't hurt that I got myself a sweet gaming machine at the same time. At 4.5GHz, it is almost as fast as my 2010 Westmere Xeon Mac Pro for renders. I'm no stranger to Windows—I learned Autodesk Maya, my main 3D application—on a Windows 2000 Athlon and frequently use Windows 7 in virtual machines for certain tasks. With a dual-boot setup, this machine was also my first foray into Linux outside of a virtual machine. I'm well versed in bash and shell scripting, but it was still a steep learning curve. I now know the sheer joy that is unloading the Nouveau driver by editing text files and killing the window server. I even tried the machine out as a Hackintosh. If you have more time and sanity to spare than money, I totally recommend that, because it was a nightmare—and I had the most compatible setup.

As it stands, I've come away with the impression that there is a lot of room for improvement in dealing with creative content in today's OSes. So in effect, this is a guide on how to create the ultimate OS for creatives by taking what OS X, Windows, and Linux do right—and wrong—for serious creative professional work. The end result should be a guide on how to make ÜberCreate OS 1.0.

OK, so what does “creative” mean?

I'm not here to debate that coders or accountants aren't creative people too. But in this context, "creative" users are professional content creators—photographers, video editors, compositors, Web designers, architects, graphic designers, art directors, 3D animators, audio engineers, etc. Like developers and accountants who want something like system-wide disk encryption, we have specific needs to work efficiently since many of us work under tight deadlines with lots of data to manage. Obviously, if the program you need to use for your creative work is not available on another platform, then this is a non-starter. At any rate, let's consider just the OS and what it offers people in these creative fields.

"Who could purport to know about all of those fields," you ask? Well, I come pretty close. Here is a quick rundown of my creative background: I'm a classically trained painter and got into computers in high-school, where I started to learn desktop publishing. I eventually worked in photo retouching and design during university before getting into magazine production, working at Vice magazine in its early days while dabbling in DJing and teaching myself 3D. Since then, I have art directed numerous magazines, done 3D illustration and rendering, made personal maps for Quake 3, did film titling for the National Film Board of Canada, authored a 5-star e-book on Autodesk's Maya 3D software, and learned to code well enough that my Maya scripts are quite popular and well reviewed. Browse through my article history to get a feel for my creative software expertise.

But I'm not just a guy who creates stuff on computers—I work efficiently at an almost pathological level, and the OS needs to help me work faster. Some people flippantly say, "I don't care about the OS, it just needs to run the applications I use." That's short-sighted. If your OS didn't have image previews and offer those APIs to application developers, you'd have a crappy OS for doing digital photography. A lot of people are wary of OS-level features because they think of failed features that tried to predict human behavior—like Clippy, everyone's go-to example of something trying-to-be-useful-but-facepalming-badly:

But there are plenty of more modern examples of failed efforts at helpful tech in our OSes. OS X Lion's icons playback for movie files is amazingly useless and just gets in your way of clicking files:


And GNOME's menu hothelp is as dumb as it gets:


Bad ideas aside, operating systems have to compete, and they are increasingly competing to save us time in dealing with media like images, music, and video. Ostensibly, these features don't just help your mother make a desktop slideshow of pics from Cancun—they should help media professionals work without the need for additional software. Obviously, filling every need isn't feasible, but the features covered here are broad enough that they touch a lot of creative pros.

Good image, PDF, and video codec support out of the box

It goes without saying that many creatives deal with images, whether simple documentation or as the end result of what they do. An OS should be able to save you a trip to a media program to just view and manage your images. All the major OSes have no problem showing a slideshow of TIFFs, even compressed 16-bit ones. But for professional image format support, OS X can't currently be beat. Since Apple builds the camera support for Aperture into the system itself, you get OS-wide support for professional camera formats like .NEF, .OLY, or .CR2 Canon Raw files:

In Windows 8, many of these files are recognized as pictures, but there is no viewer support built in:

I expect it to get better for Windows with regard to media support, but Apple is way ahead, and it even supports 32-bit floating point image formats like HDR and EXR out of the box. If you've never heard of an EXR file, this is the image format that Industrial Light and Magic developed for film and 3D rendering, and it is the JPEG of the film world—it is ubiquitous if you use Maya, Cinema4D, After Effects, or Nuke. OS X has supported it for as long as I can remember. This functionality extends even to FTP programs that use the OS' image APIs:

Transmit, the FTP app that views floating-point images thanks to its use of the OS X QuickLook API its support for images, movies and audio. A creative-oriented OS should let you view visual content like this from anywhere and QuickLook does that.

Windows 8 and earlier don't know what an EXR file is, but you can install third party software that will show these thumbnails in the Explorer desktop or open/save dialogs. While it's not the reason for a lack of 32-bit image support, Microsoft's long legacy of nervously creating its own version of something because it threatened Office or IE dominance means that only with Windows 8 did Microsoft add PDF support into Windows. That's madness, no matter what industry you work in. Even every distro of Linux has had PDF support for a while now.

So as the first of our creative features, ÜberCreate OS would have the image support of OS X but with more diligent additions of support for newer cameras.

Movie format and codec support

Because of QuickTime's close ties to the legacy Mac OS, video and audio format support was ahead of its time on the Mac. With the spread of ripped movies and the Web, it's become commonplace in all OSes to handle a variety of media formats. Windows 8 will play many .mov files without the need for QuickTime—still much reviled on Windows—and Ubuntu offers interactive installers for most codecs. Because Linux generally uses VLC or FFMPEG libraries, many distros have exceptional out-of-the-box codec support.

While there is plenty of codec support for QuickTime on OS X and Media Player on Windows, I find Ubuntu Linux is better about prompting and installing missing video formats without you having to dig around to find a webpage. Nevertheless, this is usually still just for Divx and other compressed formats that are never used for professional video editing. It would be nice to have a central repository like this that includes professional formats like the RED.

So ÜberCreate OS's movie and codec support would offer the smart codec support of the Linux distros but with pro formats included from their vendors.

As far as movie sharing support goes, OS X's QuickLook video upload is nice, but Apple's rocky relationship with Google rears its ugly head here. Only Vimeo support is offered:

Apple needs to stop limiting user choices in an effort to snub the competition. ÜberCreate OS' developers wouldn't think twice about YouTube's inclusion here.

Advanced hardware support in the OS, resolution independence, and expanded driver control

It goes without saying that you want your OS to support the hardware you need—unfortunately, some OSes fare better than others in this regard. While Apple was proactive with ColorSync support in the OS, it is a laggard on 10-bits-per-channel monitor support, which has been supported for workstation video card drivers in Windows and Linux for a while now. If you have an HP Dreamcolor or 30-bit EIZO monitor hooked up to a Mac, it's not being fully exploited.

Where Apple fares much better than the others is with 4K/HighDPI monitor support (this is still a minefield on Windows and Linux for various reasons). Luckily, recent Linux developments have seen its multi-monitor support expand beyond two displays without having to go movie hacker on config files.

Driver controls and tuning

When I'm doing 3D work on Windows, I am spoiled by the graphics options available in the drivers. Since there is so much competition between AMD and Nvidia in Windows, it is standard to get per-application or global options for anti-aliasing, quality versus speed, color balance, etc.

Linux gets some of these options, but OS X gets none.

Latest implementation and good optimization of OpenGL drivers

DirectX rules for games, but OpenGL is still the main API for 3D apps. That's unlikely to change since many 3D and CAD apps are cross-platform. But the OpenGL implementations vary, with Windows and Linux quickly getting the most recent versions from AMD and Nvidia and OS X still slowly catching up—OS X Mavericks is just getting OpenGL 4.1 in the fall, and the 4.3 spec is already supported on the other platforms. This lag has very real consequences, as 3D application developers like Autodesk can't just force people to upgrade OSes, so getting out there early with GL feature support means enough people are capable of running the next-gen features you want to implement. So if ÜberCreate OS is going to implement OpenGL and OpenCL, we're going to want it to stay current.

As far as speed goes, Linux has by far the fastest OpenGL implementation. If you've ever used the same video card in Linux and OS X, the difference is like night and day. This used to be because Linux was the last OS to support fast hardware overlays, but Linux OpenGL is still much faster in modern GPU-composited window environments.

Good compilers

As an extension of hardware support, the programs that use your CPU need a good compiler to perform well. Apple, Microsoft, and the Linux community develop their own IDEs and include and tune the compilers that client programs are built with. If you compare render speeds between OSes (and I do this often), you would be shocked to see how drastically performance can vary due to compilers. For example, Maya and blender, which use gcc on OS X and Linux, perform noticeably faster than the Windows versions, which use Microsoft Visual Studio. It's for this reason that V-Ray's developers switched to Intel's C++ compiler on Windows while sticking to gcc on the others. A creative software-focused OS should include compilers that help the software properly exploit the hardware.

Pen tablet support directly in the OS

A benefit of Windows 8's merge of the desktop and tablet was its adoption of support for pressure-sensitive pen input. With Samsung's investment in Wacom, it seems that other companies recognize that pressure-sensitive input is empowering for content creators. Include a paint program with your system—I'm looking at you, Apple—and you're golden.

So ÜberCreate OS would get hardware support right by taking something from each major OS.

OS customizability, logging, system output, and monitoring tools

Linux, OS X, and Windows will give you access to the hidden aspects of an OS, but they vary in their willingness to do so. Most Linux distros assume you're proficient enough that you want access to the guts and understand the consequences:

The Services panel in GNOME under CentOS.

Windows has a similar centralized Service panel but OS X doesn't, leaving it to third party apps like Lingon to disable startup scripts and daemons. I understand that giving you access to this type of thing can be hazardous, but I think it's important to offer.

A power-user focused OS should also give you the option to run multiple instances of applications. Since this could potentially confuse newbies, it could be something easily done from a right-click menu in the OS' launcher. As it stands, you have to resort to the command line and "open -n /App" in OS X to get something Windows and Linux users take for granted.

Similarly, Linux offers the most control over window behavior, file manager prefs, window animations, and more that, when tweaked properly, can save you lots of time. OS X's window frills can be tweaked, but only through terminal hacks or third-party tools. OS X has a lot of command keys to do things like show hidden files/folders (command-shift), but these are obviously very obscure and you have to go out of your way to learn them. I think Microsoft solved this problem nicely with Windows Powertools, a separate installer that gives control to more of these hidden features of the OS. Considering how frequently I have to dig into the hidden ~/Library folder to delete a corrupt Maya preference file or whatever, it's a bit dumb that I don't have the option to see it in OS X without resorting to chflags. At the very least, OS X needs a Windows-like Folder Options control panel to give advanced users full access to hidden files:

Where OS X does excel is with logging and diagnostic tools. On top of the data-rich standard output and command line tools of a Unix environment, Apple has added robust crash reporting and application monitoring to help you diagnose system or program issues:

I deal with a lot of developers and beta-testing programs, and this stuff makes it much easier to solve issues. So our OS is going to need lots of diagnostics tools while being heavily tweakable.

Search everywhere, clear-text content indexing, and expanded metadata handling

The search capabilities of your OS are obviously important to working efficiently—less time is spent digging through folders. Being able to search for images by their size, format, and everything is now a commonplace feature of search in all OSes:

With content indexing of ASCII files and content-indexing APIs for binary formats, you can do smart searches by remembering the filters you used inside a video timeline:

Finding ASCII Nuke files by searching for the used filter nodes inside the scene.

But content indexing has its limits. If you work with images, movies, and other content, you generally have to use metadata to sort through it, since your files don't have the advantage of being human-readable like a text file. Also, media filenames don't usually reflect their content—captured film footage is going to be called "BATCH_0014_main.mov," not "THAT_IDIOT_RUNNING_ON_THE_BEACH.mov."

So you need to embed metadata in content if you want to find something more specific. I have a massive stock texture library, and embedded metadata is the main way I find things while working. For instance, I may have 300 different folders with male faces in them:

As the badly translated line from the Chinese family drama goes: "DON'T YOU LOSE MY FACE!" You probably noticed that I have some feet in my male head search. That was my bad batch metadata tagging.

After initial tagging, metadata searches save tons of time in dealing with media. Windows and OS X are now roughly on par for metadata searches, but the Linux support for these is very poor. Linux relies on third-party tools like Recoll that aren't as effective. While applications like Lightroom or Media Pro let you embed metadata into files for this purpose, metadata tagging is so essential that it needs to be included in the OS. So ÜberCreateOS would offer the ability to batch embed metadata right within the desktop, using an interface much like Macmetamod:

You might be wondering why I haven't suggested including facial tagging in this metadata scheme. Well, professionals don't generally need to find photos of their loved ones, and it's more of a danger to embed personal info in media files rather than keep them within application-specific databases.

Put search everywhere

In any media work, you spend a significant amount of time just tracking down linked media, and OS X is the only system that makes a search pane part of your open/save dialogs. That has great advantages:

InDesign's dialog shows you the name of the missing file, so you just type it in the search field and you've just relinked your media.

Here's the same InDesign dialog in Windows 8:

Now go find it. Godspeed.

To be fair, there is a search field in the open/save dialogs of a lot of Windows applications, but for whatever reason it's not a global thing. Needless to say, you waste less time with a search engine in open/save dialogs. Let's put it everywhere.

But a robust OS for creative users should enable users to discover new media, not just manage it. Microsoft's increasing competition with Google has seen some innovative search additions in Windows that should appeal to creative content users:

Windows 8's Internet image search is one of the great ways that content can be found without having to resort to a browser. Obviously, owning your own Web search has its benefits.

Intuitive methods of dealing with visual content and flexible inter-application workflows

As the download progress overlay on the Steam taskbar icon shows, visual cues are not just for visual people. Visual content needs to be dealt with visually. There's a reason that, at my last art direction job, we used colored file folders for documents that circulated: it instantly told you what the containing documents pertained to. Graphic designers didn't need to concern themselves with red, since that was strictly editorial. Yellow was for layout, etc. Visual cues tell you important things that would otherwise have to be said with an excess of words ("_DONT_TOUCH" appended to every folder that could be labeled purple, for example).

Nowadays, much collaborative design work is done through Dropbox and Google drive, since people don't need to work on-site anymore. When you can't walk over to someone's desk, an OS' digital filing system needs to step up to help in this modern work environment. OS X Mavericks has this shared filing system sorted. Apple modified the traditional Mac OS labels to let you do multiple custom-named labels—this suddenly adds a Boolean capacity to labeling—so something can be "in progress" while still "missing final visual":

Similarly, visual content needs a visual method of sorting through active windows. Tabs may be good for multiple text, terminals, and folders, but as with search, reading "_IMG2095.CR2" in a menu bar doesn't tell you much about a piece of visual content. So an OS needs to show that content:

And Exposé in OS X:

A program isn't an island

While Metro and OS X's fullscreen modes are fine for painting a single image or isolating your writing work, much creative work is spent cross-referencing or cross-linking content (whether it's a layout, a webpage, a video timeline, etc.). Windows' Aero snap, which uses a hotkey or quick drag to one side of the screen to size a document to half of the screen, is a great example of this "an app isn't alone in this environment" thinking:

Similar windows snapping tools are built into GNOME. ÜberCreate OS would add those features to the cross-linking flexibility of Mission Control/Exposé in OS X:

And to that mix, add the capabilities of venerable Mac utility Default Folder X. DFX is basically a "favorite and recent folders" on crack—it monitors your file and folder access and makes that recently accessed environment globally accessible from your menu bar and open/save dialogs. It also renames similarly named recent items to give richer information:

Since "scenes" is a common template folder for Maya, the recent items are suffixed with the parent folder name. Notice that folders can be sub-navigated right from the menu. It's a lucid, fast-browsing monster. It even knows what folders are open on your desktop and lets you click on them when opening/saving. The end result is a workspace that is so intertwined—and efficiently bound to hotkeys—that you never find yourself slowly browsing through folders to get to something recent. Operating systems need to emulate this behavior and extend this type of mentality to documents. If I open a file in Photoshop and hit "import" a minute later in After Effects, Maya, or an e-mail app, that document should be an easily accessible option. Creative work rarely exists in a single-application bubble, so the OSes should add a layer of awareness to follow that thinking.

Multitasking

It seems almost ridiculous to have to bring up multitasking today, but yes, it is still an issue. I'm not going to go on at length about MACH versus Linux kernels because, between OS X and Linux, multitasking is pretty much the same. But Windows is an entirely different beast. I started learning Autodesk Maya on a Windows 2000 Athlon around 1998 and the same problem plagues Windows to this day—terrible multitasking under load:

Windows responsiveness grinds to a crawl while rendering. That doesn't just affect the GUI. Networking slows down. Everything slows to a crawl, and it isn't just mental ray that does this—any renderer can cause Windows, even 8, to fall to its knees.

And the same render on OS X:

The kicker is that OS X and Linux render significantly faster for mental ray, due to the compiler issues mentioned, even while multitasking better.

This is a known issue among CG artists, and I frequently see people recommending to other Windows users to leave a core free for other tasks while rendering. No task that doesn't work at the kernel level should be able to hog resources like this. I would say that Linux and OS X's multitasking is perceptibly the same, but Linux apps tend to be more conservative with idle CPU usage. Apple is trying to lower idle, non-visible application CPU usage in Mavericks, but it's still not ideal:

That percentage is per-core, not total system resources, but it still seems high to me for idle tasks.

Luckily, the authors of ÜberCreate OS are aware of our need for every available CPU resource.

OS-wide scripting support

If you are a professional, you probably use things like templates and well-honed workflows and lots of hotkeys to save time. But scripting goes beyond those things to make you an efficiently working beast. Before Photoshop had its Actions scripts, we would use a plugin that much the same thing, and on OS less-than-X, many applications supported AppleScript to get expanded functionality. It is still used widely in desktop publishing.

Let me first start by saying that I have always hated AppleScript. I hate its goofy syntax that tries to be uncomplicated and friendly but ends up, for me at least, adding needless, cutesy padding to simple logic. But AppleScript started a trend in graphics apps in the older Mac OS that was greatly improved on in OS X with Automator. Automator added a more flexible scripting layer that let you use a combination of GUI tools with almost any scripting language you'd want to use. I have a pretty basic knowledge of C and a terrible understanding of Python, yet I still managed to use Automator to make a multithreaded image converter that is way faster than any application I've ever used:

The Automator setup is amazingly simple thanks to Python 3.2's thread-pooling:

You may notice from the code that this is a poorly disguised template copied from the Web.

I can batch convert a bunch of lines of plain text to encapsulate them in Web code when doing this article in the CMS, right within Chrome. Want a calculator in your text editor? Easy. Grab all images from a portfolio website in the days before browser extensions? Done. With Automator, InDesign suddenly gets type formatting features within its dialogs:

This is the power of a ton of built-in UNIX command line tools meeting the OS' GUI scripting frameworks. There is nothing like this on any other OS, and third-party efforts to emulate Automator fall flat due to the lack of OS-wide support and frameworks. For all the work that Microsoft has done on improving Powershell, there is zero exposure of these tools to use it in a GUI context. And while I'm sure Powershell's syntax is quite modern, Microsoft isn't going to suddenly replace years worth of well-honed (and included) UNIX programs that work together with a simple pipe to create a scripter's dream. Tacking on these tools with something like Cygwin just limits their reach.

In OS X, Apple has added tons of command line equivalents for things usually done from a GUI: you can pipe a file path to sips and embed a color profile, for example. Or you can parse a system log for a Maya crash and pipe the saved crash file path to "open," OS X's double-click command line app. Send awk or grep output directly to pbcopy, the clipboard-bridge binary. If it looks like I'm fawning over Automator, that's because I am. It is the "teach a man to fish" of OS features.

While Linux obviously has many of the same command line apps as OS X, even with some clones like "gnome-open" acting as similar bridges to the GUI as in OS X, Windows is still the weakest for OS-wide scripting. People are right to point out that you can install Python in Windows but part of the point of having OS-level support for a scripting language is to build tools that can be shared easily. You can't always expect that a user will be allowed by their IT department to install X software on their machine. Microsoft needs to take its newfound love of HTML5 and open standards, apply that thinking to support things like Python, and build those frameworks into the GUI.

The only thing that ÜberCreate OS would add to an Automator clone would be to somehow miraculously add its reach to every program, regardless of the IDE used to develop them. For now, sadly, there are many programs that Automator can't reach because it relies on the use of certain Cocoa APIs.

Downtime reduction tools: Flexible ghosting and backup

While I'm not really a huge fan of Apple's auto-save versioning since it assumes you want to save a document on close (a nightmare), Time Machine—or to put it a more platform-agnostic way, a backup system that is tied to the OS—is crucial to reducing down time. Sure, Apple's interface for looking through time is novel...

Roll system back to a particular snapshot and QuickLook shows contents of files within Time Machine. A QuickLook extension provides syntax highlighting.

...but the real ingenuity of Time Machine was just putting backup front and center in the OS and making it easy. Since there are things only the host OS developer knows about the way the system works, they are best able to make backup and restore both flexible and stable. In the enterprise Linux world, the solution to this problem is to put the system and the user data in separate partitions so you can reinstall the OS without wiping the user data. Windows has both Windows 7 Backup and Restore and Windows 8 File History, but neither option does system file backups. Windows 8 has a "Refresh your PC" option that does something similar, but if you are on a deadline and have to reinstall a system, more flexible system restores are key to not losing a whole day. ÜberCreate OS would have a hard time improving on the existing backup and restore features in OS X.

Concerns for each operating system going forward

It's unlikely that ÜberCreate OS will ever become a reality—my grep skills won't get us a new kernel, unfortunately—so we're forced to look to the existing platforms in the hopes that they'll improve to bring us closer to becoming that OS for us. Let's examine the direction each is taking and how that applies to us beret-wearing types.

Mac OS X

This piece may at times read like a Mac OS X love-fest, but I'm just giving credit where it's due. Maybe it's unfair to ask that all OSes be as capable as the Mac for creative users, since this has always been Apple's market and Windows has a much broader user base. I guess now you know why I'm sticking with it for my 3D work despite the limited choices surrounding the coming Mac Pro.

But I have some serious concerns for OS X's direction for creative professionals, and most of that has to do with two things. The first: Apple is increasingly appealing to consumers, and that has contributed to a demise of powerful technologies such as X-Grid and the lagging updates to Aperture (and its OS-level camera support).

The second thing that worries me is the very marketing-driven and overnight change to iOS 7's interface. An OS for work should be a well-honed thing that isn't subject to trends, but Apple's newfound love for minimalism and the complete scrapping of iOS' previous GUI terrifies me that they'll try something like that for OS X just for the sake of consistency. I pray that Helvetica Neue, by all accounts a novice choice for the interface fonts in iOS, stays the hell away from OS X. This type of poster-design-meets-interface is amateurish, and it hurts usability. Apple has already started this trend in OS X by stripping out color icons from the sidebar—and it just made things harder to find.

This is what some have fittingly referred to as "Apple's war on color." Jony Ive's minimalist aesthetic may look great for the profile of a phone, but a wash of grey doesn't help distinguish one UI element from the other. Stop with the IKEA-ization of OS X, Jony.

Windows

While the pen tablet in the Surface Pro has great creative potential, Microsoft's unified tablet/desktop approach is moving Redmond's OS away from a manager of media to a passive consumer of media. What's worse is that Metro isolates applications completely. That may seem good for a slideshow, but it effectively nullifies drag-and-drop and inter-application work. The Desktop and Metro environments in Windows 8 are still a mishmash:

A document is shown to you as if it's media being consumed on a tablet, not as if it's a window to be worked with among other applications. The good news is that non-Metro applications still run the same in Windows 8, but the bad news is that Microsoft cares less about the future of that desktop environment because that's not where the growth is. By merging the tablet and desktop environments, it limits Microsoft's choices to offer the best desktop experience. Drag-and-drop with a finger on a tablet is an awkward experience, so it makes sense to offer less drag-and-drop. But that doesn't make Windows 8 better for a desktop computer that manages media. It's safe to assume that unless Microsoft splits Windows back into desktop and tablet variants, future workflows in Windows will assume the same limitation.

So if you think of Windows 9 as an upgrade that has to appeal equally to tablet users and makers, what are the odds that Microsoft will introduce a scripting engine or robust support for EXR images? This is what is most problematic about Windows' future as a creative power user's OS.

Linux

Linux is obviously a trickier one to tackle. There isn't one Linux—a 
RedHat user is assumed to be someone completely different from an Ubuntu user. The other problem is that many of the creative-dependent things missing from Linux are frequently missing due to licensing, take TrueType kerning for example. Apple and Microsoft license many technologies that simply can't exist in Linux without a complete change of direction from strictly open source technologies. That's not going to happen, and it shouldn't.

Aside from the other things mentioned, like a lack of good metadata searching built into the OS, Linux still needs many things that are crucial to creative work. Unified color profile handling and built-in calibration tools, things that Windows and Mac users have had for years, are still a chore to deal with in Linux. And commence the rolling of eyes for Linux die-hards—that old familiar mantra, "fragmentation," is the main threat to Linux's progression into a great creative OS. Things that are coming in Ubuntu are meaningless to me because all the programs I use that have Linux versions require RHEL-based distros. With Ubuntu throwing an entirely new window manager into the fray, you can't even assume users are going to be on X-Windows anymore. This is Linux's usability paradox: it needs bold things done, but those further split the ground under its users' feet. Nevertheless, there are inspiring examples of open source conquering longstanding usability issues, most notably with blender's recent interface overhaul. It can be done, but it's not going to be easy.