OS X Vs. Linux On The Desktop

saintlupus writes: "There's an interesting article about the recent web browsing stats of Linux by Charles Moore, a fairly well-known web journalist in the Mac community. He asks whether OS X is the deathblow to Linux in the desktop and scientific computing markets. He also touches on the perennial "I'll run it on my Athlon or not at all" mindset of current Lintel hardware owners. Definitely worth a read." The article that Charles uses as his jumping point is the recent stats on Linux on the desktop. That article cites .24%, but Charles article has some pieces on why that number could be wrong.

Comments

Re:let's not forget something important

[90XDoubleSide]

your typical Linux user and choose from KDE, Gnome, blackbox (my personal favorite), icewm, vanilla, Enlightenment, etc.. etc..

This offers a great advantage in that you can pick a WM that fits your style, unfortunately X11 is a very weak and, as the author put it, "clunky" base that they all must run on, and none of the choices offer the desktop ease of use and incorporation of graphics desktop users demand. It is childish to call OS X a "KDEish environment" when KDE cannot hope to offer an interface at the level of Aqua.

the only other "cool" thing i noticed with it is that you can switch back to Mac OS 9 (which takes about a good 2-3 minutes to do that)

43 seconds on my G4/466 MHz, which should be fairly middle-of-the-road Mac hardware (it's mostly disk operations anyway); I don't know any Mac that would take more than a minute.

unix shell in Mac OS X is nothing special... it's really limited to what you can and can't do in the shell

There are very few limits to what you can do in the CLI; it is essentially a full BSDish system. You can complain about what comes preinstalled, but I think it's fine considering most users will never touch the terminal; power users will most likely want their own favorite tools so it's just as well to let them download it themselves. Apple doesn't bundle make because almost all developers are going to do all of their compiling in Project Builder (why would you want to do it at the CLI when you they bundle such excellent DevTools?)