i just recently got a 15" G4 Powerbook because i played with a friend's and i thought it was pretty neat and was in the market for a notebook computer. Since i was an avid Linux user MacOSX's unix foundation appealed to me. So anyways, i have had the PowerBook for over a month now and after a lot of using and using my linux box very little i have come to realize many things.

First I would like to talk aboout Microsoft Windows and such so people understand more where I am coming from when I speak about Linux and Mac.
I was a very avid gamer, dedicating most of my time on the computer to games and such and for this, however much I would like it to be the other way around -- but this is a different issue. I also had a little linux box running RH7.3 running a webserver and pretty much just sitting there collecting dust. One day my PC got fried by something and was totally screwed over and I was forced to use my Linux box for my other every day needs -- email, instant messanger, programming (i'm a computer science student), surfing and other such things. I didn't really miss gaming because I wasnt playing that much at that time anyways. So by the time my computer came back from the manufacturer repaired i was hooked on using Linux as my regular basestation and the two roles of my computers switched: I used my Linux machine for everything and my Windows machine for what little gaming I did.

So thats what started me using Linux regularly. I really got into and tried several different distros and played around with it quite a bit. So I have been using Linux for a while now and I love it. There are so many reasons I like Linux so much more than Windows. When I go on a PC I just feel trapped... I LOVE being able to go into config file and do something manually. Things on Linux are just so much easier to configure and fix and gives a user more power. I don't think I need to explain much because I am sure people on this forum share my thoughts =).

Then all of a sudden came my Apple Powerbook and much like the situation that made me switch from PC to Linux, I could not use my Linux machine for an extended period of time. My family has something like 5 cats (sometimes I lose count) and my computer room and living room became heavily infested with fleas. After a week or so of fumigating, carpet spray and wearing knee high socks to get an ethernet cable to avoid fleas I finally got rid of them. But when I set up my beloved Linux machine up and had my Mac sitting right there, I chose to use my Mac for all my needs and my poor Linux box is sitting there and I am feeling exteremely guilty. I sat down and thought to myself about this and I came to a conclusion: "I can do everything I want to do in Linux on OSX and do a few things more on OSX".

Let me explain, and the reason I am posting this is because I want to know what OTHER people thing about this issue because I have just started thinking about it. First of all, on my Mac I do not feel trapped much like I do in Windows. One of the first things I did was add the terminal to my doc and as far as I can tell after slight inspection is that the config files are there and if I wanted to do I could change what I please. To tell you the truth though, I havn't had to do that yet, the GUI is very good and I am able to configure everything that I want... unlike how Linux (Fedora Core/Red Hat)'s GUIs SOMETIMES works. I remember trying to set up dual mons wasnt as easy as going into the settings and setting it to dual head. I also remember having to remove ethernet devices from hwconf manually because the GUI network configger didnt do it. It never really bothered me at all, but it is nice having things work easily without much effort in OSX.

OK, so at this point I still think I would choose Linux over Mac but Mac does a lot more and adds so many bells and whistles that its just so much easier and enjoyable to use. Expose is great for handling lots of windows and the way applications are ran in OSX is ingenious I think... how you can have an app running then open a new window and as many windows as you want without running multiple instances. It really makes apps that take a long time to load easier to use. Built in apps are pretty good... I think iTunes is great, iPhoto is just so much better than anything I know available for Linux. And the other great thing, is I get to play games now that run a lot better and are a lot easier to run than using Wine.

So I think the bottom line is for my personal needs and uses is: OSX is everything Linux is... but more.

I want to point out a few things before I stop. I am talking about using Linux as a desktop workstation for personal needs and such. I love open source and I dont want to make this a fundemental philosophy arugment on open source -- I tried to stick to usability and other issues.

I hope this is an controversial topic and gets a lot of posts -- this is why I posted it. I want to know what other users think. Thanks for reading so much =)

Linux>Windows>Mac

there is nothing that can be done on osx that cant be done wither in linux or in windows. in fact, both these os's have advantages over osx.

linux-its free, can be used on anyhting from a server to roadkill, better maintenance and package managment, FREEDOM.

windows-gaming, ease of use, compatiblity, it just works. really, it does. with mac, you always have to worry about compatibily with pcs and windows, when youre using windows, youre sure htat everything will work the way its intended to.

macs just suck, the whole idea of apple is just wrong. linux is about freedom and doing what you want when you want it without worrying about restarts and defrags and security holes. with apple, its one os, one WM, no choice at all. you cant even install it on 95 percent of the pc's in the world. linux should install on every computer out there.

expose-Kompose for KDE, same functionality, no 130dollar pricetag.

the iapps are a joke. they all suck and are very limited. there is nothing better than xmms, infintite customixabilty yet it remains intuitive and easy to use. there are programs like iphoto for both linux and windows, so thats not a problem. the thing is, in linux, you just open up gimp and you can do anything you want to your photo. in iphoto you are limited to redeye and crop. i have no use for imovie or idvd and garageband is a useless piece of crap. why they would include somthing like that with an OS is beyond me. youd think people were demanding it from them.

how exactly can you run games in osx natively and not in linux. there are more linux games than osx games, and in linux you can still run most windows games in WINEx. you cant do that in osx, and dont tell me youre gonna be running halflife 2 in virtual pc.

anyway, i hope that covers it. while i tried to stay away from it in my post, the BIG thing that irritates me about apple is their cockiness and the way they treat their customers. its really sad to see people with so much brand loyalty and then still fully support a company after it takes a shit on them. i couldnt believe how happy people were when apple took away itools(cause heaven forbid they give you sonthing for free) and charged 100 bucks for .mac. and having the nerve to say "redmond start your photocopiers" and then a few minutes later demoing a winfs ripoff.

this is somehting i posted on another forum a few weeks back

First of a little history on my computer use. I work for a newspaper where I work on both mac (OSX) and PC's (Win XP) at home I use mainly Linux (SuSE 9.1). In my experience Mac is really great looking and does have some nice applications. That said I still prefer Linux over Mac because Linux is much better at networking, most of the applications I run work both in Mac and in Linux (Open Office .org, Konqueror/Safari, IM). I also like Linux because I don't have to pay every time I want to update my system and when I do pay for a new release it is cheaper than OSX. When it comes to gaming I feel that Linux is one of the best platforms I'v ever used, if the computer is setup correctly, this mostly pertains to the videocard you use. A lot of game developers are making games/game engines that run natively in Linux now and just about any game make to run natively in OSX is also made to run Natively under Linux (UT2003/2004, DOOM 3, Enemy Territory, Americas Army, Neverwinter Nights).

Another big reason I prefer Linux to mac and MS Windows is that Apple and MS both make a lot of claims that their OS's are perfect, you'll never need anything else, when they most certainly are not perfect. Now I know there are a lot of Linux zealots that would have you think Linux is perfect, but if you ask the big players in the world of Linux and Open Source Software (Linus Torvalds, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Etc.) you'll find that they probably won't say that Linux or OSS are perfect but thats what the GPL is for, so that when something isn't working right or doesn't work how you want it to you don't have to wait for some corporation to decide that it can assign a programmer or two to fix the problem and when it's done than you the consumer get to have it. Under the GPL any problem you find YOU have the power to fix it. The GPL is there because the designers of OSS know that humans make mistakes and since programs are written by humans they are virtually guaranteed to have mistakes.

Good reply

I tend to agree with this. I wish apple opened up a bit. But this doesn't bother me that much, however. I havn't dealt with package management in OSX and wished I was back in Linux yet. I don't think either of these issues would have tipped me either way... open source is great and I think if Apple's and Linux's roles were switched -- free cost + open source vs. close source + price of OS I would still choose OSX... however much I love the ideology of open source.




is this not also a problem with Linux? I think I have had more compatability problems using Linux than I did with Mac. But I do agree that using windows you know it will work -- which is sad I think, and bringing in a new subject... consider the hypothetical situation: if 95% of the market used Linux and the majority of software and other things was built to work on linux, and Microsft was the one having to comply to compatability standards -- would anyone use Windows? If Linux was the mainstream OS games would be made for Linux then ported to PC, Linux would "just work" if it got as much attention as windows from developers. I think the reasoning of using windows for compatability is reasonable at times, but this mentality of using Windows because it is compatable is what keeps a crappy OS popular. Honestly would anyone use Windows if it was in the same position Linux was as an "underdog" so to speak?? So if Mac was the majority of the market share, would it not have this problem? if linux is going to advance, people need to start challenging compatability. So anyways, I do not take this in as a valid argument for windows or against minority OS's.




I played around with Macs before i decided to buy one, and I made the choice to get it. I wasnt forced to get it. As personal prefference, I think OSX is more intuitive than kde and gnome.




i do agree with this, I wish apple opened up more.





personally i didn't particularly care for xmms... it fit my basic needs but not much more. I wasn't really interested in searching for several packages to customize it. iTunes comes in, it has tons of online radio stations, it easily imported all my music and sorted it and has several features i like, without much work at all. I can imagine everything that iTunes can do you can find somewhere on the internet. I don't want to diss xmms because it did a nice job for what i wanted at the time, but iTunes is great out of the box with no work.

there are more linux games than osx games? the only mainstream games i can think of that are on linux are unreal tournament(s), civ2, quake3 and a couple others. many more popular titles are ported to mac. however winex is great -- but sometimes things just didnt work for me and by the time i got it working i didnt feel like playing it anymore. however this isnt a really big issue with me since i probably only game a couple hours a week and the selection of games available to me usually easily fills in that time.




thanks for the post, it made me think a lot =) and you have a lot of valid points

HenchmenResourc:

Good post, I think a lot like you. And I agree with what you say and the reason I didn't want to bring Open Source into this is there is a big difference between idealogy of open source and what it actually isat the moment. None of the OS's are perfect but for what I am doing right now I like OSX and it fits my needs better than Linux and definitely better than windows. =)

there are ports of OS programs to osx, but OOB, the aerage linux distro is much more compatible with windows than OSX. take knoppix for example, it has support for ntfs read and write(osx cant do either) it can run windows programs using wine, it can partition windows harddrives in qtparted, it can connect to windows networks using smb4k, it can read and create all office files in openoffice and Koffice. it can do many more and its all on just one cd.

i think that windows has its good point that make it worth using. as it is now, its not much hassle to get something working in windows. obviously youre going to have one of those problems in xp, but theyre bound to happen in any OS.

as for osx having 95 percent of the market, thats wishful thinking at best and stupidity at worst. not everyone has 800 dollars plus to spend on a wordprocessing machine, and most people certainly dont want to spend 2000 plus on a gaming machine. while it may be possible that osx could have 95 percent of the computer market, the computer marked would be pretty damn small.

linux on the other hand is free and freely accessible to anyone and any computer(theres the freedom thing again). theoretically, every person in the world with a dsl connection could switch to linux in 24 hours. linux taking over the market is very probable.

with the backordered imacs, it will take until septembet for them to come back(id bet my bottom dollar that theyre going to be jacked up in price too). without a mainstreem computer offering, do they really expect to get any market share at all?

its your choice to get a mac. but once you have it, you have no choice of what to do with it(unless you format and install linux)

i like xmms cause it works with karamba and it plays music. in windows (i dont know about mac) itunes uses 50ish mb of ram. thats just insane.

were not going to get anywhere counting games for osx and linux. gaming as a whole on osx on an imac(the average mac) is absolutely terrible. a few month old pc that costs 800ish dollars can play doom3 at medium settings with no problems at 800x 600. now, hardocp.com say that to play at medium and 800x600, you need a radeon 9600 pro. that is leaps and bounds ahead of the geforce 4 POS in an imac. now, these settings are low enough as it is, but to add insult to injury, the imac uses an lcd screen. this means that either the game will run in a microscopic 640x480 (if not 320x240) square in the middle of the screen or that square will stretch and look completly aweful on an lcd(cause anything other than native resolution is bad). you might say "well this is a problem for pc users too". well, tis not, not really. on a pc, you can go to ebay and pick up a radeon 9800pro for a hundred somehting bucks and play d3 at whatever resolution your little heart desires. this is completly impossible on an imac. again, freedom and choice.

I was raised around the mac, sadly I can't afford brand new mac equipment, I have a older OS 9.1 mac here, but I do most of the stuff on this Windows XP Laptop (soon I will have Linux going again)

When I get Linux going again, the Mac will not get very much use AT ALL, and the laptop will be here for alittle music (I have all my music on here, and it would be a waste to make a copy onto another computer.

When I get the money one of these days, and I am running a top of the line mac, I think I will use it for pretty much everything, but Linux will have its spot still, and so will windows..

I guess you can say, tho I am not a fan of windows.. I believe in having alittle bit of everything, I like the idea of having mac, linux, and windows all on the same desk.

Has far as hardware is concered, the PC comes first for choices... my operatings systems, Mac OS is first on my list..

Maybe, if Microsoft could be arsed to release that stuff, one could speak of a ripoff. Now, Microsoft is simply late. Microsoft is, and has always been, late. See www.windows-longhorn.org for details.

^youre missing hte point. apple hasnt released teh stuff either. however, can you really tell me that if longhorn was "just another windows release" then apple would have thought of these things all by itself?

I really don't think it matters... everyone borrows ideas from other people, its inevitable. Why do you think pretty much all the webbrowsers have a forward/back button, a refresh button and a address bar at the top? why do you think gnome and kde have a taskbar with a button much like the start button? gnome and kde also have something very similar to the windows system tray.

It would have been nice if apple thought of the idea themselves but who cares, longhorn wont be released for another 2 years.

I like to think that all the OS's borrow a little something from eachother and that's what makes them progress. Who cares if Linux and Mac take a few ideas from windows now and then, if it is a good idea, whats stopping you from replicating it? Maybe if Windows took some hints from MacOS and Linux it would make their OS better.

i disagree. i think it is immoral (and illigle in a sense too) to charge money for the work of other people. linux is free so its a different story.

also, its not so much the fact that they copied microsoft, its the whole "redmond start your photocopiers" thing. ill bet you that all the mac fanboys will start crying "longhorn copied osx's spotlight!!!!!!1111oenoenoenoe" once its released. again, its the whole apple community elitism crap.

in ms's explanation of winfs, they say that they built upon the idea already in beos and they are putting a more advanced version of it in their OS. also, AFAIK, beos is out of bussiness anyway so there is no reason for anyone to get mad.

apple's explanation of spotlight is "we came up with it on our own, and ebil microshaft is copying us. "


two very differrent aproaches.

also, on the konfobulator thing, why dont you ask hte developer what the problem with him being put out of bussiness by apple copying his ideas is?

at least microsoft has the decency to buy out small companies and use their products in their OS like with that AV company they bought. apple just cuts and pastes and says that the konfobulator guy actually copied them.

im really glad that the people at apple dont use linux. cause on a mac you have to do the cut, paste procedure by moving the one button mouse around and looking for the copy button and then teh paste button. if they were using linux all theyd have to do to rip off other companies work is just select the text and push the middle mouse button.

speaking of one button mice, its the stupidest most idiotic most retarded thing ever. i have a five button mouse and i want more buttons.

oh, heres something about your precious powerbook(i assume its a 15 right?) my mom has a dell d800 laptop that has a 15.4 inch widescreen lcd. in short, its beautiful. the res on this thing is 1920x1200. the 15 inch pb screen is a pathetic 1280x854. if thats not bad enough, its not a standard resolution so any nonnative wallpaper would look screwed up. 1280x1024 and 1280x960 are the reses that are industry standards. you might say that 1920x1200 isnt standard either, actaully that aspect ratio is the standard widescreen ratio. sure, you might have trouble with finding walls, but the selection is much much bigger than that of the 15" pb.

now, this is where it gets nasty. apples prized "inovative first of its kind best of the best 17" pb" this POS pales in comparison to the 17" notebooks from toshiba. they have tivo capabilites and much much more. but lets get back to the dell d800. the reason apple made the 17 inch in the first place was so that you can have more screenspace to do your work in. well, the resolution on it is1440x900. how pathetic. no wonder dell dosent make a 17" laptop, their 15 inch ones have more screen area than apples 17". the 17 " pb is the worst laptop money could buy, and thats 2800 moneys. its big, expensive, nonstandards compliant and it sucks compared to cheaper offerings from competitors like dell. btw, the d800 my mom has costs 2500ish dollars, as much as a 15 inch. hte only feature it lacks a dvd rw drive. (yes, thats all a superdrive is, just a dvd writer. its not like its anything better than that. it just has a different name). on the topic of optical drives, unlike the pb, the dell has removable drives. so if you want to (although i cant see why yo would) you can put a dvdrw in it, or a second battery, or a floppy drive. there it is again, choice.

i just went to dell.com and customized an xps. it comes with xp home, but you can put linux on it, obviously.

just look at htese numbers. amazing. the only number lower on the dell than on a pb is the price, and thats before a 250 dollare rebate.

dell xps - pb 15" superdrive
price 2750 - 250 -75=2425 - 2500
intel pentium 4 3.4 ghz with HT technology - 1.5ghz g4 (megahurtz myth or not, it just got pwnd)
512mb ddr 400 ram - 512mb ddr 333 ram
256mb mobility radeon 9800(no, thats not a typo) - 64mb radeon 9700(its not really a 9700, its actually a 9600 on steriods. it dosent have 256bit memory like the desktop 9700 pro)
60 gig hdd - 80 gig hdd, meh
4x dvd rw removable - 4x dvdrw stationary
1920x1200 resolution - 1280x854 res
external USB audigy 2nx surround sound - headphone jack
dell 720 color printer - who needs a printer?

as you can see, first rate pwnage, no matter how you look at it.

True, but they will soon, most certainly sooner than MS. And yes, that was a bit of a trolling post on my part.

I do agree with DonMiner, borrowing ideas in inevitable. In fact, I think it's the basis of innovation. There is no need to perpetually reinvent the wheel just because you can't borrow ideas from one another.

Somewhat true, money is made with Linux, though, despite it being free. Just look at companies like RedHat and Novell. They are, in a way, most certainly making money of other people's work. There's nothing immoral about it.

Looks like this is turning into an M$ vs Apple thing, instead Apple vs. Linux

wtf, i replied but my post is gone. or at least i think i replied....