Walt Mossberg had a nice article in the WSJ recommending Panther.

If You're Getting Tired Of Fighting Viruses, Consider a New Mac

By WALTER S. MOSSBERG

For consumers and small businesses, the burden of using Microsoft Windows just keeps getting heavier. After growing easier to use for several years, Windows PCs have taken a giant step backward because they are so insecure.

Windows is riddled with security flaws, and new ones turn up regularly. It is increasingly susceptible to all kinds of viruses, malicious Trojan horse programs and spyware. As a result, Windows users have been forced to spend more of their time and money supporting their computers.

Almost every week, they are supposed to install patches to the already patchy operating system to plug these security holes. And every few months, it seems, Windows users must quake in fear as some horrible new virus is created by the international criminal class that constantly targets Windows.

But for consumers and small businesses, there's a simple way out of this endless morass: Buy an Apple Macintosh computer. There are no viruses on the Macintosh's excellent two-year-old operating system, called OS X. And the Mac is a terrific computer -- as good as, or better than, Windows for the typical computing tasks important to mainstream users.

It isn't impossible to write a virus for the Mac. The system isn't impenetrable. Mac users should still use antivirus software. But any virus or security problem that does emerge on the Mac is likely to be much less serious than the Windows security crisis. "Mac OS X hasn't had any viruses since the OS was launched," says Bill Rosenkrantz, the head of Macintosh products at Symantec, the big antivirus firm. "It's more difficult to attack the Apple system than Windows." [Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal]

It's a nice article. I do like that he does say that the Mac isn't impossible to write viruses for. But a lot of its user level security comes from not letting a user change major system files without putting in a password. In some ways that is the core of the issue. The Microsoft/PC world is one where people are used to there being one user. This has changed some with things like the NT and server product lines (and I think maybe XP too?), but even then so many people I know are logged in as administrator all the time.

OS X, with its roots in unix, is designed as a multi-user system. And people know by now that you just don't do your day to day work as 'root' (the name of the primary admin user under unix). Because that's just dangerous and you can do really bad things to yourself (ask any sysadmin for their best stupid thing they did as root story, we've all got one).

Also, I liked that Mossberg mentioned that the Mac and OS X may not be for everyone. This I certainly believe. I was in the Apple store a week or two ago and some woman wanted to buy an iBook because she'd been told they were great. But she had to run a few Windows programs on it that weren't available for the mac so would have to get VirtualPC. Even though it would have meant losing a sale, I do think the sales person should have listened to what kind of software it was and seen if there was a good mac equiv and also how much she was going to use this software. If it's what she's going to be running 90% of the time, then she should really go the PC route. On the other hand, the Mac is a lot more compatible with the Windows world than most people think. You can connect to networked drives on a Windows box, join a Windows Domain, you can use Word. And there is a ton of software out there produced by smaller developers that just plain rocks.

Anyways, be prepared for a bit more Apple geeking from me in the next few days. I'm sure there will be lots of interesting news as more people start using Panther.