I'm so happy that OS X doesn't do notifications. Dock badges are already distracting enough...

I always like it when someone gives a talk, attaches his windows laptop to the beamer, and is then constantly distracted by the yellow notifications in the bottom right corner "You are now connected to the internet", "Your virus definitions are out of date", "New hardware detected"...

Microsoft Windows did it right, all notifications are standardized and put into the icon tray. If I want to disable notifications I open the tray settings and disable them there. MacOS never standardized anything, and so every MacOS app creates a new non-standard tray icon, with its own notification system, and some of them now use Growl and some of them don't. It's a mess that even Microsoft managed to standardize 10 years ago.

Microsoft did it exactly right if you assume popup notifications are necessary. I firmly believe that popup notifications are unnecessary and distracting, and that's why I prefer the "notification system" of OS X (red badges in the dock). These are a standard. Growl and menu bar status icons etc are just useless cruft introduced by developers who don't want to adhere to the standard. I could care less if my OS notifies me that it discovered a new input device, or that someone sent me an email labelled "urgent", or whatever.

Of course, OS X is not as clean and notification-free as I'd like it to be: It annoys me every other week or so with some useless software update, and every 10 days it complains that I didn't plug in the backup drive for some time.

Now, it might be possible to configure and disable all these notifications, but I just don't want to bother. I want my computer to act on my command, and in my eyes there is almost no excuse for putting up an unexpected notification or alert or dialog for anything.

You're confusing OS with the kernel. The graphical environment is part of the OS.

EDIT: is -> is (often)

I find the term Operating System mostly outdated these days when all common OSes ship with wide array of applications, some which are essential for the system to function, and others less so.

You are confusing OS with the userland. Graphical environment is not necessarily a part of the OS. If you run Linux you can load a number of different graphical environments.

If I use Linux I can load a number of different filesystems. Are these not part of the OS?

While the OS doesn't necessarily have to distribute a graphical environment, it can and it is often a feature of the OS, unlike what rbanffy said.

I've edited my post above.

Never said they were the same thing. My original post was "is part of the OS".

OS space

Again, that's kernel space. OS is something bigger. Debian is an OS. GNU/Linux is an OS. Linux by itself isn't.

I'd just like to point out that this sort of pedantry is kind of pathetic.

Yes if you need that sort of clarification I was referring to the MacOSX "graphical environment".