OS Battle: which is the best? (OS X, Windows, Linux ...)

[Tiberius]

I concede that I might be incorrect about the requirement of TPM hardware for Mac OS X. However, I am not entirely convinced since I don't think Wikipedia is an authoritative source (for example, it has not provided any authoritative citations for the claim that Apple has not used TPM since 2009).

Well, there is the authoritative claim from the guy who wrote a book on OS X (and incidentally, one of the modified drivers so you could use the TPM when Macs had one). Other than that, the fact that Apple don't list one on the components list seems indicative to me that there isn't one there.

Of course, you could also get hold of a Mac and run the following command on a Terminal: ioreg -x | grep TPM

It will highlight any TPMs present on the Mac. I've run this on both my machines, and neither come back with anything.

There is actually still an ongoing debate as to whether Apple machines still use the TPM, and, indeed, if the presence of such is vital to allow Mac OS X to function.

There really isn't. I work in the computer security industry; I understand what TPMs are and how they work (took a course on them back in university). If one of my computers had one, I'd know about it (and use it).

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The design... I have to admit, they are pretty, the UI is... after some getting used to... intuitive and quick and bouncy, and pretty, and cute and gay and girly, and directed at the hipster, the designer, the advertiser, the creative minds. In that respect, it works.

Also, quite a few people in the computer security industry use them, mainly because they are UNIX based and are reliable.

Traditionally, it suffers little from viruses... however, the surge in mac ownership of the past few years has made it worthwhile investing in viruses for mac... so those are on the rise, while the users are convinced they are invulnerable just because they're not running windows... disaster waiting to happen?

Well, this depends. You can't just compare viruses on Windows to viruses on OS X/Linux. The main reason being that the Windows environment is incredibly insecure, often by design. For instance, most people install and use Windows as the Administrator account, so viruses often have no problem elevating privilege and doing nasty stuff. On OS X and Linux, the administrator account is separate, and requires a password if you want to use it. Unless the virus knows the password, it has to use other ways to elevate privilege (which are much harder).

So yes, no operating system is invulnerable; but OS X and Linux are more secure than Windows in many respects.