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Comment by sfphotoarts | Hacker News Reader

In some ways the poll is hard to answer, lets say you use gmail a lot, is the OS of the client or the server the one you're really using?

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Gmail isn't exactly an OS in itself. If we were to answer the poll according to the OS that the web pages we visit use, we would see a poll dominated by FreeBSD and Linux. Somehow I don't think that is what the OP intended.

of course Gmail isn't an OS, that's not what I meant, but when we use Gmail we're really making more use of the server operating system than the clients, so my point is that it very hard to really say what operating system we're using.

It would be interesting to measure the usage of say posting this comment, how many machine instructions were used at the OSX end, and how many by the various routers (running their own operating systems), servers etc used in the full life cycle of what I am doing.

The question is what OS we're using, not what OS we're using.

From my own experience, using Gmail is a different experience in each OS. I can't stand to use it on OS X, whereas on Windows it was always open.

What's wrong with Gmail on the Mac, the experience on Windows is identical

(practically)

Gmail stays the same; the external set-up changes. I saw no advantage to using Outlook over Gmail, whereas Mail.app offers substantially more than the Gmail webapp does, even when used with Fluid.

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