A reason why BSD is better?

[Sideonecincy]

I've always read and heard that OSX is generally more stable than Windows, due to it being built around BSD (a flavour of UNIX). How is this any more stable than the XP kernel?

 

[Fukui]

The general idea is that the BSD kernel (part of the XNU kernel that apple uses) is more or less "pure." That is, unlike windows kernel, there isn't a mixing of user-space programs running in the kernel. For example, in windows, the GUI and explorer/internet-explorer run in the kernel space and are treated special, whereas in OS X, those respective programs would be user-space only; they couldn't touch the kernel. In vista, at least IE should be gone from the kernel at least... that and the general consensus is (its hard to tell without the complete windows kernel source) that BSD, being an open source and heavily used kernel, should be more secure than the windows one... but time will tell how vista compares.