Differences between operating systems ?

When you get down to the lowest levels of operating systems such as Linux, Mac, & Windows, what are some of the key differences between them ?

Surely there's got to be things like N operating system will handle every single queued instruction even if it means slowing the system to do so, while N2 will look ahead in the queue for duplicate instructions and combine them into a single instruction, and N3 will look behind and ahead to see if it even needs to handle a set of instructions.

I can only provide a few differences between two and those are a Mac and Windows.

The GNUs are different, organization and the security against malware, spyware and other sh*tware. None of the Macs I have used got anything bad (relatively speaking) and I have tried many things to intentionaly break a Mac (Make it crash and/or infected... just to test it's security, I wasn't hacking the Government )

I had up to 10 programs open (with visible screens/windows that does the user's wish ) and it hasn't slowed down (at least very little) whereas Windows (at least my computer) can barely run 5 programs at a time... but my computer sucks so I guess this doesn't matter (Invalid argument).

As for instructions I don't think I can tell those differences, I just decided to give the most obvious ones that you already know about

i'm not sure if you're going to get the answer you're looking for here :/
OSX uses a Unix kernel, so my assumption would be it handles things similarly to how Linux and Unix do now a days. however, i'm not sure how exactly they handle things >.<
there was an article written in 2004 about some guy from Microsoft giving a presentation on how the Linux kernel was moving closer to the one in Windows (here http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000 ... 290,00.htm ) but that was like 4 years ago so..

This is more of a seed thread, I'm counting on people finding it and dragging it up with a great answer out of the blue from time to time.

gotcha. nice ;]

In regards to SI's thing about the M$ guy's 2004 presentation (to lazy for cut and paste for quote tag), I remember reading a thing that Torvalds said in an interview for some magazine or something last year when M$ was threatening to sue redhat and novell\suse for copyright infringement. He said something that operating system theory in general hasn't changed a whole hell of a lot since the 60s or 70s, long before Windows ruled the world or even the baby cradle for that matter.

yae...that woudln't surprise me. M$ actually DID try to sue for copyright infringement but tmk they lost? or gave up...it might still be ongoing but that would be stupid of them imo. them trying to sue all the open source people in my opinion is extremely similar to apple trying to sue M$ in the late 80's / early 90's for producing an OS that 'looked like' theirs'. i dont think it'll go anywhere...

Is it the GUI where the way operating systems handle things really starts to see key differences ?

I kind of like to think of GUIs as just programs that run in the operating system. KDE and gnome and all the others are pretty good examples of that. In fact, when you look back at the dinosaur windows 3.1, it was just a program that ran in msdos.

yea, i would think that the UI is the main separation point.. you can boot into single user mode in OSX and get to a command line, and you can boot init 3 in linux to boot into a command line, but you can't boot to a windows command line since WinME. i'm pretty sure this feature will never be "removed" from *nix, as well as i dont see them re-adding it to windows.
but yes, as kc0tma said, GUIs for linux are just programs that run on top of the command line to give us mutli-tasking capabilities. sadly, there isn't really such a thing as a CLI in windows anymore >.<

Isn't there a command line option when you boot xp with the f8 button like you were going to safe mode? I believe it is called "Safe Mode with Command Line". But really, what is the point of doing that? Given the scenario of maybe rolling back to a restore point because your windows is broken (again) you have to go to the gui any way, so that option is stupid.

that option means that basically it boots into windows as usual, except the only thing available to you is a cmd prompt. so its not a real command line, its just your desktop -everything +prompt