Aha! That's it! See, when I say "the operating system," I generally mean the kernel, and occasionally, by extension, the server components; certainly not the clients. If, by "the operating system," you generally mean the user interface, and by extension the clients, then that would explain why this is a conversation often fraught with difficulty. If I translate "Sti: Windows is a better O/S than Linux" to "sps: Windows has better user interface engineering than Linux," and "sps: Linux is a better O/S than Windows" to "Sti: Linux provides better resource management and client isolation than Windows," maybe it all makes more sense.
Of course, the reason Windows UI is superior is probably because the serverisation is weaker: the DirectX model seems to provide for lower overhead (at the cost of lower safety) compared to OpenGL; and the weaker componentisation in the Windows GUI seems to have resulted in less variety of opinion as to how things ought to work, and in consequence more coherence in the user view and a more pointed development path.
Linux is too democratic at the UI level for consistency to arise (you notice that it is far, far less democratic in the kernel, and it still suffers from a very damaging proliferation of interfacing styles).
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Of course, the reason Windows UI is superior is probably because the serverisation is weaker: the DirectX model seems to provide for lower overhead (at the cost of lower safety) compared to OpenGL; and the weaker componentisation in the Windows GUI seems to have resulted in less variety of opinion as to how things ought to work, and in consequence more coherence in the user view and a more pointed development path.
Linux is too democratic at the UI level for consistency to arise (you notice that it is far, far less democratic in the kernel, and it still suffers from a very damaging proliferation of interfacing styles).