I don’t really want to start an OS war, but in reading through Claire Wolfe’sreply to an essay by Brad over on wendymacelroy.com on Linux vs. Windows, I’m tempted to offer up Mac OS X as an alternative. I guess if you have an Intel machine your only choice is Win or Lin, though OS X now runs on Intel. The second fall-back argument is that Macs are too expensive, and while somewhat true, you do get quite a few items standard on the Mac that are add-ons in the Win/Lin world. Of course, the most powerful argument is that OS X is proprietary, while Linux is free and open-source. True again, but OS X includes Unix and exists in a healthy 3rd party developer environment so you don’t need to rely on Apple software. And it’s a gorgeous OS, far smoother to master than either Win/Lin environment. But that’s just my opinion as a Mac user since 1984.
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I have to say as someone who switched over to Mac OS X a few years ago, it has not been the joy I expected it to be. It’s fine. I can do some fun things with it. It’s getting better as I learn more.
But I got a Mac because I wanted the computer that you could just turn on and things would be intuitive and work easily. It has not been like that at all for me. It’s just as much a pain in the ass as when I was using Windows with the sole exception that it’s not forever crashing. That is definitely better.
I can’t think of anything else that is remarkably different for me, and it has been about the same amount of trouble to figure out how to do things as it was when I was learning Linux.
I wonder which programs you’re using that are causing problems, or is it just navigating the OS? I’ve usually had no problems with Mac applications, or finding things. I’ve had few issues trying out the Apache server that comes with OS X, even installing PHP, Moveable Type, SMF forums, and mysql (all on the localhost, not internet server). Sure, using those open source apps on the Mac require some experimentation and use of Google to find how other people succeeded, but in terms of web, photos, movies, music, other basic apps work fine. I do rely on one shareware app all the time, and that’s LaunchBar. Speeds up the time to launch and find apps – I do rely a lot on keyboard shortcuts.
Moving from Win to Mac no doubt feels strange – no Start menu, what’s that hard drive icon for, where are the applications? But I find that three months after having to begin using Win XP at work, I still curse it many times a day for it’s strange quirks and confusing behavior.