Linux drove me to get a Mac

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 02:33:56PM -0500, Kamran Khan wrote:
> After 7 years of Linux being my primary desktop operating system at  
> home(I tinkered with Linux since the Walnut Creek days) I jumped to a  
> MacBook with Leopard.  OS X is basically BSD UNIX with nice candy on  
> top so you all the command tools that I came to love in UNIX and Linux  
> are pretty much available.  OS X has better support for hardware,  
> especially gadgets like cell phones and cameras.  Not as much as  
> Windows but more then Linux and major vendors like Nokia release their  
> software natively for OS X.  OS X has better support for games, some  
> of the big games are native on OS X and of course there is Wine and  
> Cedega.  OS X has much better integration between its applications  
> like iCal and mail.app.  Lastly, overall OS X is more "polished" then  
> Linux.  Linux as server operating system is excellent but when you  
> move closer and closer to end user applications you see a lack of  
> refinement, lack of polish, sometimes a lot of instability and very  
> poor integration.  The fasciation of getting things to work with Linux  
> has long since passed and when I buy a printer I pretty much just want  
> to plug it in.  You pay a big premium for what is essentially PC  
> hardware but so far it has proven to be the best desktop os I can  
> find.  So long Linux, see you on embedded devices everywhere.

Well I know of a few people that bought mac's and ran Mac OS X, and then
they were dual booting OS X and debian, and eventually their macbook was
running just debian because they found in the end OS X just wasn't
flexible enough to really do work, and installing software was a lot
simpler with debian as well.

As for hardware support, well I do pretty well by having the policy of
buying hardware that works with linux rather than trying to make linux
work with hardware I have bought.  Works amazingly well.  Has the
benefit of supporting companies that support linux.  If you want a
printer to work, buy a postscript printer, or at least one that supports
a well known standard printer language and you won't have any issues.

Mac OS X is a very nice OS, but it isn't debian.  Even fink doesn't
quite fix OS X's software installation issues.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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