Penguin2Apple

Dark Paladin writes: "What happens when a Linux lover takes the plunge into a Mac for the first time in his life? Turns out he falls in love, to the point of abandoning Linux and taking up OS X full time. Read about the conversion in Penguin2Apple. And pray for mercy on his soul."

Comments

Big deal.

[Psiren]

And pray for mercy on his soul.

I know this was meant as a joke, but really, whats the big deal here? He tried something else and prefers it to Linux. Good for him. Whatever floats your boat. Live and let live, etc etc.

Just as we accept the fact that we have people moving from other OSes to Linux, we'll also have to accept the fact that there may well be return traffic.

Here's the article

[W2k]

Slashdot effect hit the site, here's the article:

After 2.5 years of Linux, I've finally found joy in a Unix operating system. And I found it when I purchased a Macintosh - the first one I have ever owned. What could turn an Open Source junkie into a Mac-head? Click Read More and find out.

The Garden

How the Best Site on the Internet looks from OS X. Back in the '80's, I spent a lot of time doing many things that kids do. I played a little Dungeons and Dragons with my friends (until my parents, certain I would become a Satan worshiping pervert, brought an end to that one. Ha! Jokes on them - I became a Satan worshipper anyway.) I played ball with my friends, rode my bike around the neighborhood, caught a glimpse of Stacy Baker's 6th grade breasts when she showed them to me (I was in the 6th grade myself, and trust me, that fueled almost a year of fantasies) -

And I played some computer games. On an Apple II computer system.

That was really my first experience with computers. Playing games like Ultima III and Ultima IV (both bootleg copies, before I knew what "warez" was and that I should be avoiding it). I played text based games (most of them were never finished as I couldn't get the game to accept commands like "put egg in lake" or "drop egg in lake" or "slam egg into the damn lake you stupid computer!"

I went straight from the world of Apple II right into DOS. My father got a IBM computer, and I learned how to use Wordperfect 5.1 (which was the best word processor ever. I wrote the worst 12 year old 120 page book in the history of 12 year old books with that program.)

And then, one day, my father got Windows. I didn't get what the big deal was. Evidently you were suppose to be able to run multiple programs at once. I could never figure that out. Whenever I clicked on Wordperfect, the same DOS program filled the entire screen. (This was before I discovered the magic of the alt-tab command.) Right click, or click and hold down, and you can see the contents of folders you've put in the Dock.

When I left home, my father game me two gifts. Luggage, and a broken computer. From the broken computer I learned what is now my trade, moving into the world of Windows 95 and Wing Commander III.

But there was a problem. All the magic promised by Windows 95 never came. Maybe because every six months, I had to reformat the system and rebuild it. Oh, sure, Windows NT 4.0 was better - more stable, but you just couldn't run as many games on it. (I'm personally convinced that Microsoft never ported DirectX 5.0 to NT 4.0 just to get people to upgrade to Windows 2000. That, and because the company is composed of pricks.)

Even today with Windows 2000 and my development work, usually my day proceeds along "Work, work, crash. Reboot. Wait. Computer won't reboot. Shut down power. Work. Hang. Reboot. Boot into Linux for a few hours. Get some work done. Forced to reboot into Windows for some program. Crash." Dealing with Microsoft operating systems is like having the school president as your best friend. Yeah, he's pretty popular. But when you realize that you're just in high school, you realize he doesn't have the ability to do shit.

So I've suffered with Windows through the years, dealing with it because, well, that's all I had.

And then, I discovered Linux.

Want to run Xwindows programs in OS X? Get XDarwin.

A whole new world was opened to me. GNU/Linux, the Open Source operating system wonder. It seemed that this was the computing answer that I was looking for. People raged about how well it played Quake.

After trial and error, and learning my way through the system, I had a computer with Linux on it. And...it was good. I could do so many things. I learned how to use Fetchmail to get all of the mail from all of my mail accounts, and download it to the local box. I learned how to use IMAP so I could get my mail from anywhere in the world.

The mysteries of Perl became known to me, and I started to learn how I could edit files in gigantic sweeps, or how to tie it into Image Magick so I could edit the files on The Gamers Press at once instead of laboriously opening them all with The Gimp (which would take, literally, hours, as I resized, pasted logos, made thumbnails, and saved it all).

I learned the magic of the FTP server and SSH, or how I could plug my Linux box into the Internet and telnet into it from work so I could run programs and scripts. It was like magic. It didn't crash - even the day that the hard drive died, and the operating system kept running so that when I came home, I could repair the damage. I once made the mistake of accidently trying to open 500 1MB JPEG images at once in The Gimp - and the system didn't crash.

But...I still wasn't happy. Part of it was because I just couldn't get my Linux box do everything that I wanted. For one thing, no matter what I tried, I just couldn't get many games to run on it. I bought different video cards, purchased the Linux version of Quake, and Quake II, and other games. Who needs $400 for Photoshop when you can get the Gimp for, um, nothing?

For all of the instructions, I couldn't get my ATI TV-Wonder card, which I use to capture screen shots and movies from video games I'm reviewing, to work under Linux. People wrote about how I had to install patches into the Linux kernel, and recompile it.

You have to understand, the idea of recompiling a kernel is a terrifying idea to me. I've done it a few times, and each times my insides twist around like I'm 12 years old and about to see a girl's breasts for the first time. And even after all of that, obeying strange, cryptic comments like I was an alchemist trying to follow the instructions for turning lead into gold, still I couldn't get the ATI card to run under Linux.

And there were the other little things. As much as I love the Mozilla, the Open Source browser that Netscape is built on, I love it's stability, it's tabs (once you try tabs, you can't go back), there were still things that just didn't work right. Like the Java plug in. I tried to install that so many times, and it just wouldn't work. Or the ability to watch Quicktime videos from Linux. Or when people would send me Microsoft Word documents that StarOffice couldn't quite translate.

But the worst, the truly worst part, was cut 'n paste. Using Linux, I would tend to use Emacs, a wonderful text editor that takes me back to the Wordperfect days. Emacs is powerful, quick, does just about whatever I want. It also doesn't let me simply cut and paste text from itself into a Mozilla browser, which is how I post articles on The Gamers Press. I tried using different text programs in Linux. Staroffice wouldn't work, because it stubbornly tried to WYSIWYG all HTML encoded files, even if those files were labeled text. And for something like myself who likes to edit HTML directly, it was annoying to have anything between myself and the actual code. The KDE clipboard didn't always hold text from one program to the next. At one point, I got annoyed that it kept trying to open Konqueror every time I cut text with a web link inside, so I tried to edit the clipboard program to make it stop. Afterwards, I couldn't cut and paste links at all.

But there was so much to like, like GCC, a C/C++ compiler so I could build my own programs. Or my beloved Perl.

Linux was a lot like a girl named Allison that I used to date. She was a hot redhead with large, firm breasts in most of my honors classes. She was smart, she was cute - and she was totally crazy. I could only deal with her strange behavior for so long, no matter how much I loved the rest of her.

But what else could I do? My Windows machine was now only for games and my ATI-TV card, and the few times I needed a Windows only program. My Linux box did everything else, it did it with brutal effectiveness, but it just wasn't cuddly. It was a bulldog with hairs made of needles. It never let me down, but I could never get close to it. I was resigned to simply living with this.

Enter the Serpent

And then...I started hearing about OS X. It took about an hour to rip all 17 disks from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire to 128 bit MP3 format. It took about 3 minutes to transfer them to my iPod. My iPod is the second sexiest thing that fits in my palm.

I first caught word of OS X through Slashdot. I had never used a Macintosh, well, unless you count a few days in high school. But it just wasn't for me.

But there was something that called to me. A Unix core...with the Apple GUI? What would happen with the power of Unix was combined with Apple's legendary GUI interface?

I started looking up all of the information I could. I read through the Ars Techana review from the point of view of a Macintosh lover, who both praised and criticized the operating system. Or the writings of Tales of a BeOS Refugee, which was from the point of view of a BeOS user going to Apple's new operating system. I even devoured The Register's comments about how much they didn't like OS X.

But there was something in common with so many of these articles. They were written from the point of view of people who had been using the Macintosh operating system for years, who had become use to its quirks and oddities, of its inability to handle virtual memory (though how you can have a decent operating system without virtual memory, I just don't know). These had good things to say about OS X, then mentioned all of their problems with the operating systems interface compared to the old OS 9 system.

But at the same time, I wasn't like any of them. I hadn't used a Macintosh before. (In fact, before today, I hadn't met anyone who had used a Mac for a long period of time. But more on that later.) I was coming from a perspective of an almost pure Unix user moving to Mac, not from a Mac user moving to a more Unix based system.

It was time for me to upgrade my Linux machine anyway. My two computers - the Pentium III 800 machine which ran Windows, and thus my games, and the Pentium II 450 which housed my Linux machine - were getting a little behind. The original plan was to purchase a new computer, keep Windows on it, and make the Pentium 800 into my new Linux box.

But still, the call of OS X kept coming to me. Since there's no Apple stores in Utah, I could stop by CompUSA and try out the Macintosh machines there. And it...just felt right.

There was something about OS X that just felt right to my fingers. I liked The Dock, the Start Menu/Program Launching system. I learned how to move folders and program icons in and out of the Dock, or how to navigate the file system. Use the iPod as an MP3 player, or as a disk drive. I nearly installed OS X on it just to boot from it - but then realized I didn't have a reason to do that.

And the terminal. Oh, the terminal. The command prompt that all Unix heads are used to. It's the mother's tit, the place where everything starts. Why cut and paste files, when a simple "mv" command words wonders? Or tab completion. Instead of typing "ren thefileiwanttochange.txt", a true Unix head knows they can type "ren thefile[TAB]" and the operating system would type in the rest fo the file name. Or typing "cd ~" to go back to your "home" directory.

And in OS X, it was all right there, and even smarter than what I was used to in the Linux command line. When I typed "cd dir[tab]", the computer didn't try to fill in the file "directly", but know that since I was using the "cd" command, I wanted to go to the directory called "directory". Or if I mistyped a command, typing in "emcs", the system would ask "emacs?", and I could just type Y and go on, comfortable that my finger fumbling would be caught.

I finally caved in, deciding that, if worse came to worse, I could always install a PowerPC version of Linux on the box. I wouldn't be any worse off, and I planned to spend the money anyway, so what would it matter if I turned out not to like OS X, since I would just have Linux back on it.

I ordered my machine, a PowerPC 933 system with 512 MB RAM and an 80 Gig hard drive. I agonized over that decision until I had the system perfect, then ordered it.

And then my real experiences began.

The Conversion During the time that I waited for my Power mac, pieces of it came in the mail. First was the software (BBedit and Office X), then the iPod. I played with the iPod for a few days, showing it to my friends even though I didn't have any music on it.

It was hard not to. It's just cool. It's small, and so user friendly, I didn't have to crack open the manual to figure out how to use it. I must have spent a few hours just rolling through the different options, hearing the little "clicking" noise it made just because I could. I even went so far as to rebuild an old Sony laptop computer that used to have Linux on it back to Windows 98 to try out a software program that's suppose to make the iPod work with Windows. (But since the laptop's rescue CD didn't only had Windows 98, not Windows 98 SE, that cut that endeavor short). iDisk - Apple's free, online storage/email/web page system. I haven't had a reason to use it. Yet.

When my Power mac finally arrived in the mail, I took it into work and set it up there. Right upon taking it out of the box, it just seemed so...pretty. I guess that's the only way to put it. The grey/silver looking package has rounded curves and a handle that makes it easy to carry around. I opened up the side just because I could - one flick of the lever, and I was peering at the guts of my new system.

I decided to use my old trusty optical Intellimouse instead of the standard mouse Apple sends with it, and plugged the system into my monitor, plugged in the clear Apple speakers I had ordered (and discovered with some chagrin that they only work with a new Apple computer), and turned it on.

The first thing I noticed was the sound through the speakers, then the little smily face Mac computer in the middle of my monitor. A few seconds later, and I was at a registration page. No entering in serial numbers or cryptic commands - it simply wanted to know who I was to register the computer, and then proceeded to launch into OS X.

The next thing I noticed is just how sharp everything looked. Using the same monitor for my Windows 2000/Linux machine at work, and my Linux/Windows 98 setup at home, the OS X just looks sharper. The images look a little cleaner and brighter, and the text - I've never understood the big deal about "anti-aliasing" until I read web pages under the Mac. The text, which was readable before, was nearly perfect here. Under Linux, I usually had to enlarge the font to 150% to read pages at CNN. Under OS X, I could leave the pages just as they were, and they were even more readable. Maybe it's because the system uses Adobe PDF rendering at the core to delivery almost page-like displays. Or all the Aqua pieces that Apple talks about to give the cool transparency. Whatever it is, OS X just makes things look good. Disk images. Like zip files - only better.

OS X is probably the easiest system I've ever had to use. There's so Start Menu, but something called the Dock, which holds all of your currently running programs (well, not all, but more on that in a moment), as well as holding your minimized windows.

Sounds like just the one you'd see in Windows 95/95/2000/XP, right? Well, yes and no. The biggest difference is that the Dock is a dynamic system. You see, it is possible to drag programs directly into the Dock, so you can launch them later with one click of a button. Running programs have a small black triangle underneath them, so it's easy to tell what's running and what's not.

But it holds more than just programs. It can also hold folders or files, which go on the right side. In my case, I have three folders - a link to my Home directory, one to a folder with shortcuts to programs I usually run, and one more to the main Applications folder. A single click brings up the folder, holding down the mouse button brings up a menu of all that the folder holds.

It's something that just makes sense. And OS X really gets the idea. It has to, the way that it's programs are installed.

When I first went to install Microsoft Office X, there was something that surprised me about the installation procedure. Basically, it was "copy this folder into your Applications directory". Or Omniweb, a competing web browser. It's just one file.

Well, not really. It's called a "package", where that one file, like a zip file, contains other files. Instead of an executable surrounded by dll's, it simply has all the dependancies it needs right inside itself. Again, simple. Elegant.

Coming from a place where to install a program on Red Hat can involve using a RPM (and I'm sorry, I've never figured out how to uninstall a RPM file), having the entire program contents in one file is just a wonder. Want to get rid of the file? I don't have to go wandering through directories to find all the files I have to delete, or worry about an uninstall program that can't seem to get all of the necessary parts out of the directories and registries. If I want to uninstall, I just drag one file to the Trash.

And thanks to the Unix bits of OS X, program stability is a snap. For those who are used to Linux, the command "ps" is a standard - it shows the "processes", or running programs. Have a program that's out of line? Just start up the old "Process Listing" program, and give it a little "kill" command. Program stops running. No messages about "I can't shut down the program" like you'd see in Windows. It dies. The end. It's something I've grown used to in Linux, and having it in OS X is just natural.

All of the other weird bits

You can't just close the windows to end a program - you actually have to tell it "Quit". There is a lot to like about OS X, including the parts that are both convenient and a little weird. If you want to eject a CD-ROM, you can either press the eject button the keyboard (no, the computer doesn't have an eject button), or you can drag the CD-ROM icon on your desktop to the trash.

Copying programs is much like Windows - select a file, and either drag it to another directory, or select Edit->Copy. But oddly, there's no "Cut" command. A weirdness that's taken some getting used to.

Or that Finder windows, each of which have the name of the title of the directory, if you click and hold the title, you can use that to move the folder somewhere else. Rather nice, even if its different.

You can minimize a window, and it's image will show up in the Dock. The first time I did this with a terminal window, I almost had a heart attack as I noticed that the little window kept updating as the program ran, so I didn't have to check it all the time.

Or you can just "hide" a program. Since OS X does a great job with memory management, it's often best to start a program (like Mail or iTunes, the MP3 player), then just "Hide" it. The program icon still stays in the Dock, but the window itself just...vanishes. Click on the program icon, and it comes right back.

In fact, the whole "hiding" a program versus "closing" it is another weirdness. You can close all of the windows for a program, but that doesn't actually "exit" the program - you still need to press Apple-Q, or right click on the program in the Dock and select Quit. It would be nice to have a setting like "if all windows are closed, end the program".

Then there's the whole Metadata thing. Most of us who have used Windows or Linux are used to have file extensions tied to a program. We all know that if a file ends in MP3, and we double click on it, XMMS or WinAmp will launch.

Under OS X...it depends. I've only seen a little bit of it, and for the most part it's been fine, and a little annoying at other times. Take a .jpg image. If the image was downloaded from the Internet, odds are, the standard "Preview" program will work. But if that program was made with Image Converter, then the next time you click on that particular .jpg file, Image Converter will launch, since that was the program the file "Created With". I've only had one program running an old Groupwise program (which runs in Classic, which is really an OS 9 emulator), and it thinks it owns a Word document someone emailed me.

I've been using Internet Explorer since I moved onto the Mac, and I haven't decided if I'm going to reinstall Mozilla. I'm planning on playing with it soon, since IE has some weird quirks of its own. Sometimes when I click on a bookmark, it wants me to rename it instead of jumping to the site. I haven't figured out if it's the way I click it , or something else.

Update: Since this writing, I've dumped Internet Explorer after it wouldn't let me paste this entire article into the text window. Seems it has a space limit on how large an amount of text you can paste into a window. Mozilla doesn't have that problem. And it has tabs. I missed my tabs.

And cut and pasting. It just works flawlessly. I can cut from terminal and paste into a browser window. I can copy from BBEdit, the text-based HTML editor, and paste it into an email. And it's even easier than cutting and pasting in Windows. (Every tried to cut and paste text from the Windows 2000 telnet program? Somebody decided to change all the cut and paste keys to piss of the users, I'm sure.)

The Games of the X

To get rid of a disk image, just eject it. Oh, and Cardcaptors is so cute. Ah, yes. The games. This was something that I was worried about. I do have a few games that run on both Windows and Mac, like Diablo, the Myth games, or the Myst games. And I've ordered some other games, like the Bungie Mac Action Sack which holds the old Marathon series of games. And Baldur's Gate, that RPG modern classic.

All of these games were made for OS 9 and below, which really means it's going to run in Classic, the OS 9 emulator that runs in OS X. It's like running a DOS program in Windows XP. Only...it actually works. Most gamers know that under the newer Windows operating systems, often old games just refuse to run (like Ultima VII, for example, unless you're using the Exult, which doesn't count since it's a rewrite anyway).

I haven't had an old Mac program fail to run. I've had some odd quirks, like Baldur's Gate running a little quick, or times I need to shut down the Classic environment and restart it, but otherwise, the programs run just fine. I've noticed that 3D acceleration doesn't quite work for Classic programs running under OS X, but since the only game I've tried it Myth: The Fallen Lords, I can't answer whether other older Mac games will work. (Like Alice, or Red Faction. I'll have to try those later and see what happens.) In order to get 3d acceleration to work, I've had to actually reboot into OS 9 - an experience I usually avoid when I can. No Unix there.

Enter our friend Unix

Of all of the reasons why I went to OS X, this was the biggest one. If I couldn't run my mail server, Fetchmail, Perl scripts, and all the rest, I might just as well format the system and install Yellow Dog Linux. Switchpic - allowing people to manage huge collections of desktop backgrounds everywhere. (The new Version 2.0 lets you handle them in iTunes like collections. Very snazzy.)

Not only did all of my Unix programs install just fine under OS X and run like they've always done, but the OS X developers crowd have even ported many of them over just for OS X. Installing Samba was a breeze - I just downloaded the OS X specific binaries and installed. Getting The Gimp was simple after installing XDarwin, a rootless XWindows system. Even Image Magick came up perfectly. And I didn't even have to change any of my Perl scripts. I just copies them from my Linux box, and off they ran.

In fact, my old Linux hard drive is now a backup drive in my OS X box. I just shut it off. Why keep it on? OS X does everything it did - only prettier, easier, and with more little tricks. I don't have to worry "can I get hardware X to work?" I never have to hear "oh, just recompile your kernel, or edit the configure script before you compile".

And that's what I wanted. I'm not begrudging the folks who use Linux or FreeBSD or the other systems. I still use Linux as the web servers at my work, and have no plans on changing that. Open Source is driving the true innovation, bringing greater stability and power to computer systems.

But I'm a lazy son of a bitch, and I just want to use the programs, not fiddle with it for hours to get it to run. And that's what OS X gives me. Power, and simplicity.

And with the power of Unix comes the ability to tweak OS X just the way I like. I've already discovered how to make my Dock fully transparent (which looks pretty damn cool), or how to use Switchpic to give the same "rotate desktop backgrounds" ability I had under KDE and Linux.

Bitch like an old lady

VNC - lets me take control of my OS X box from work over the Internet. No, I'm not telling you the IP address. Or the password. Or where I keep my, er, my daughter's copy of Beach Playmates Romp. If there is one gripe about OS X itself, it's about the way to open files. Apple-O opens a file/runs a program. Pressing Enter on a file renames it. If there isn't a more counterintuitive method of doing it, I don't know what is. When I look at a directory and type "Tales of the" to jump to "Tales of the Sword Coast", then hit Enter, I mean "Launch Tales of the Sword Coast". If there was a way to edit this key combination (or if someone could tell me how to change those keys), I'd be a little happier.

That said, I do still have some gripes about OS X. But the gripes aren't about the operating system itself, but the support, or lack of it, from other vendors.

Novell, let's start with you. I took my Power mac into my day job because I was tired of booting between Linux and Windows 2000 all day long. Novell, I realize that over the last few years, your primary goal has been to lose market share as fast as possible. This is why there's no novell administrator, unless you run Windows (what moron thought up that idea?), why you haven't come out with an OS X client for Groupwise, or even a Novell client for OS X. What do I fucking have to kill to get someone to make an OS X program that will let me mount some Novell volumes on my machine here?

ATI - personally, I think your cards are the bomb. I love my ATI TV-Wonder, and I've been eyeing those 8500 All-in-Wonder DV cards. So why aren't you spreading the OS X love? You have a TV USB device for Mac, but there's no OS X drivers. And where are the All-in-Wonder cards? You'd think that was a no-brainer on the Mac. I want that screen-capturing, straight to Quicktime movie ability that I know you can give me.

I like OS X a lot, and I'm now a fully converted Mac user. It has all the power I remember in Linux, but it's easier to use, and far prettier. It has all of the editing abilities of my Windows machine, without all of the crashes. (I haven't had OS X crash once since I've run it.) And if the other vendors can just get off their asses and realize that OS X is the future of Apple, and maybe they should be writing their drivers and apps to that system, then I wouldn't have anything to gripe about.

For now, I'm just a guy who started loving a penguin, then discovered true love with an Apple.

As always, I'm John "Dark Paladin" Hummel. And that's my opinion.

Re:Here's the article

[bay43270]

My work machine crashes at least once a day Why don't all you people look into geting your computers fixed? Everyone here seems perfectly content to edit 4 tab delimted files to get their sound cards working in Linux, but they won't spend five minutes to look under the hood when windows crashes. If windows crashes more than once in the same month, chances are you have a problem that you should be able to fix. Rather than pointing the finger at the evil empire, you should fix it.

Re:Broken computer

[Dark Paladin]

Actually, I'm pretty sure it's not (I wrote the article).

I've noticed with some regularity that when I tell Windows 2000 to reboot, it takes *forever* (well, not literally, but you know what I mean.)

Usually I wind up just killing the power to my Windows 2000 box rather than waiting for it to finish shutting down.

But that's just my opinion on it. I've had that problem on 2 different Compaq computers so far, so I'm pretty sure it's not a broken machine.

Not that your point isn't a valid one - I just don't think that's it.

Re:I went the other way

[diverman]

A lot of things have been fixed since the 10.0 days. There were some things I wasn't as happy with them.

As for not including the Dev Tools... that's messed up. I would have called Apple and asked, where is my Dev Tools CD!?!? Without the dev tools, you lose access to a large amount of the OSS stuff.

I feel yer pain, but I think your situation was less than common.

The directories are definitely a little different. It's like a combination of standard UNIX, NeXT (similar to many BSD's), and Apple's existing structure. I'd been a UNIX/Linux guy for a good number of years, and was thrown off a little, but quickly adjusted. In all honesty, I kind of like some of the differences... especially the way some of the local user directories are setup. But there are still a few things that are annoying, such as the lack of use of the /etc directory in many situations.

It was the strangest thing to not see my user account in the password file... then I discovered the NetInfo tools (similar to NDIS).

I am not waiting for my second Mac to show up (next week)... a low end Titanium Powerbook. Can't wait!

Cheers,
-Alex

Re:I went the other way

[Knobby]

You can download the DevTools for free, or call Apple and tell them that you never received the DevTools with you TiBook!

Re:Free2TwoGrand (try $1488 to $1499)

[petard]

Suppose he buys a comparably equipped PC from a reputable manufacturer. Let's say Dell, for the sake of argument.

• 
  Dell Dimension 2100:
  
• 1100 MHz Celeron Processor
• 256MB RAM
• 40GB HD
• 15" LCD Display
• Integrated Intel 3D Graphics
• NO IEEE 1394 (firewire) port
• Harmon-Kardon HK195 Speakers
• DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive
• 1 year warranty

Total cost: $1488

• 
  Apple iMac:
  
  
• 700 MHz PowerPC G4 Processor
• 256MB RAM
• 40GB HD
• 15" LCD Display
• nVidia GeForce 2 MX 32MB DDR
• Apple Pro (also Harmon-Kardon) speakers
• Firewire interface
• DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive
• 1 year warranty

Total Cost: $1499

So if he didn't want firewire, it'd be more like $1488 to $1499 (Or Free2ElevenDollars, as you put it). If he wanted firewire, add $70 for an Adaptec firewire board. If he wanted a better video card, add $60 for the one included in the iMac. In this case, it'd be $1608 for the PC setup to match the iMac, and the package still isn't as nice :-)

So maybe an even better subject would be "Free2OneHundredNineDollarRebate"

Re:No, GNU/Linux and MacOS are not UNIX

[Dahan]

Well, according to this, the Open Group considers Apple to be one of the "platform vendors supporting the Single UNIX Specification."

Not that it matters to the majority of Linux or MacOS X users.

Re:They'll never get me

[jcr]

For example, what if I need to add a user?

Open NetInfo Manager app, select the domain where you want the new user, and create it.

-jcr

Re:What is GIMP missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

CMYK support is a huge deal for Photoshop's market.

Oh boy..

[flegged]

oh boy oh boy oh boy.

Newsflash : self proclaimed "Open Source junkie" too stupid to uninstall an rpm[1] loves Mac OS.

Lets try to deconstruct this article in order.

I played text based games (most of them were never finished as I couldn't get the game to accept commands like "put egg in lake" or "drop egg in lake" or "slam egg into the damn lake you stupid computer!"

Try removing the preposition - drop egg should work if it's possible to do so.
And close your brackets.

Whenever I clicked on Wordperfect, the same DOS program filled the entire screen
In 386 enhanced mode, you can run DOS in a window.

I'm personally convinced that Microsoft never ported DirectX 5.0 to NT 4.0 just to get people to upgrade to Windows 2000
It requires a new kernel and drivers for all hardware. That's why.

the idea of recompiling a kernel is a terrifying idea to me
What's so terrifying about make menuconfig && make bzImage && cp arch/i386/bzImage /boot? The power of linux lies in the fact that you can whether or not you have to.

there were still things that just didn't work right. Like the Java plug in. I tried to install that so many times, and it just wouldn't work
And yet so many people can. Is this not a case of not RTFMing? I even have the java plugin on my ppc mozilla[3] even though Sun only produce an i386 version.

But the worst, the truly worst part, was cut 'n paste
Left click to select, middle button to paste. What's bad about that? It even works on a tty or a virtual console. And it's consistent throughout the entire system.

Linux was a lot like a girl named Allison that I used to date. She was a hot redhead with large, firm breasts in most of my honors classes. She was smart, she was cute - and she was totally crazy. I could only deal with her strange behavior for so long, no matter how much I loved the rest of her.
I'm really not qualified to say anything about this...

of its inability to handle virtual memory
Mac OS does handle virtual memory. It just makes it possible to disable it. (Now that is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard).

even smarter than what I was used to in the Linux command line
The default shell in Mac OSX is tcsh, which has a different command completion behavior than bash by default. The behaviour you see in tcsh can easily be set in bash, and zsh does so by default too. It is not, however, smarter.
Example : you have both a directory and a file in your current working directory, named so that the file comes before the directory (eg after unpacking somefile.tar.gz you have a directory called somefile). To change to the directory you try cd some* to go into the directory. tcsh will find the file first, then complain, whereas bash will do the right thing.
Both bash and tcsh are available for linux, so the comparison is irrelevant anyway.

Right upon taking it out of the box, it just seemed so...pretty
This is why most people buy Macs. Mostly people (like my boss) who think that case is actually relevant to the design of the system.

I've never understood the big deal about "anti-aliasing"
And yet you seem qualified to write an objective comparison of it? Sure some of default linux fonts have terrible hinting, but get a copy of gdkpixbuf and the windows truetype fonts and you're laughing. Have you seen what cleartype looks like? Sub-pixel rendering is sweet. By comparison OSX just looks... blurry.

Running programs have a small black triangle underneath them, so it's easy to tell what's running and what's not
The key word here is "small". It's not easy to tell what's running and what's not. Both long time Mac users and new converts have a lot of pet hates about the Dock. I won't reiterate them here.

When I first went to install Microsoft Office X, there was something that surprised me about the installation procedure. Basically, it was "copy this folder into your Applications directory". Or Omniweb, a competing web browser. It's just one file
ls -l shows it as a directory called somefile.app. So which is it? That's the problem - the gui and prompt are inconsistent; changing any files name to somefile.app will make it always appear as application (with the file extension hidden) and it can't be fixed from the finder[2]. So installation is easy. For some programs. Others have their own installers, which variously put random files anywhere (eg Lightware) to nuking other partitions (iTunes 2) to crashing simply because you've moved an older version of the app.
And there's no uninstallation routine. No way to cleanly get rid of all files, system resources and preferences.
Compare this to linux. cast appname will install appname and all required dependencies from source, while dispel appname will remove it and all applications which depend on it.[3]
Compare also to Windows. msiexec appname.msi will install appname, repeated invocations will give options to modify repair or remove appname. Or you can get the same effect by clicking on appname.msi.

I've never figured out how to uninstall a RPM file
See again note [1]. Please now tell me how to uninstall apache from Mac OSX, because I don't need a web server. What do you mean I can't?

No messages about "I can't shut down the program" like you'd see in Windows
You mean "Unable to terminate process. Access denied"? This is no different from trying to kill another users process in any unix. You can't kill other peoples processes. This is natural. This is right.

Copying programs is much like Windows - select a file, and either drag it to another directory, or select Edit->Copy
Copying files by Edit/Copy didn't exist until Mac OSX. Maybe because they realised how useless the finder[2] was.

Since OS X does a great job with memory management
I sincerely doubt you have evidence to back this up. Better than Mac OS, certainly, but better than any other unix? No. Considering how the ui allocates stupid chunks of memory for any window which makes it take days to resize a window (due to its dynamic de- and re- allocation of roughly a gig per window).

It would be nice to have a setting like "if all windows are closed, end the program".
Don't even hope. This is Jobs' idea of usability, and it will not change.

Then there's the whole Metadata thing
Yes, that sucks. We're in agreement on something.

Every tried to cut and paste text from the Windows 2000 telnet program? Somebody decided to change all the cut and paste keys to piss of the users, I'm sure
So you've skipped back to something you mentioned earlier. Yes I have tried to cut and paste from Windows 2000 telnet. Left button to select, enter to copy, right button to paste. Almost identical to linux. This is needed since console programs have a habit of interrupting when they are sent a Ctrl-C :o)

It's like running a DOS program in Windows XP. Only...it actually works.
Oh, you mean that Apple have done a better job at retaining backwards compatibility than Microsoft? Is that why, when they decided to use a new processor, all programs had to be shipped in two versions ("fat binaries", and they're still in use today)? Is that also why, in their new all-powerful operating system most programs won't run unless you have the older operating system installed alongside? Don't even mention how Classic allows "almost full speed" or "running natively" until you explain why Apple ditched a well used and well understood API in order to deliberately break compatibility. If Carbon can run OS9 programs properly under OSX, why not keep the entire API consistent. This is what Microsoft has done. The DOS API still exists. The Win16 API still exists. The OS2 and posix APIs still exist. The Win32 API has been continuously updated for the last seven years without breaking backwards compatibility. Why didn't Apple do the same?

I've noticed that 3D acceleration doesn't quite work for Classic programs running under OS X
If they had kept the API, this would not have been a problem.

Not only did all of my Unix programs install just fine under OS X and run like they've always done, but the OS X developers crowd have even ported many of them over just for OS X
Which begs the question, why build a gui on top of Unix if it is completely incompatible with X Windows? XDarwin is a stopgap solution. Any BSD program or one which uses configure correcly should work on Mac OSX, if it weren't for deliberately introduced incompatibilities.

I don't have to worry "can I get hardware X to work?" I never have to hear "oh, just recompile your kernel, or edit the configure script before you compile".
And why didn't you actually ever follow that advice?

If there was a way to edit this key combination (or if someone could tell me how to change those keys), I'd be a little happier
Sorry again. Jobs' idea of usability.

What do I fucking have to kill to get someone to make an OS X program that will let me mount some Novell volumes on my machine here?
Steve Jobs, I think...

ATI - personally, I think your cards are the bomb. I love my ATI TV-Wonder, and I've been eyeing those 8500 All-in-Wonder DV cards. So why aren't you spreading the OS X love? You have a TV USB device for Mac, but there's no OS X drivers. And where are the All-in-Wonder cards? You'd think that was a no-brainer on the Mac. I want that screen-capturing, straight to Quicktime movie ability that I know you can give me.
Now this bitching is directed at the wrong entity. ATIs hands are tied. Apple decided there would be a minimum level of hardware support, and all machines which are supported will work the same. Which means that features of more expensive cards such as the ATIs TV-out, will not be available because it is not available in lower-end machines. This is also the (stupid, stupid, stupid) reason why the nVidia cards don't do hardware T&L, of which they are more than capable (and indeed is their selling point).

I like OS X a lot, and I'm now a fully converted Mac user. It has all the power I remember in Linux, but it's easier to use, and far prettier
I got so sick of the OSX gui I installed Yellow Dog so I could go back to Gnome - and yes, I can apply themes!

It has all of the editing abilities of my Windows machine, without all of the crashes.
My Windows 2000 machine doesn't crash. The Windows 2000 machine I installed at work the day after starting (almost a year ago now) doesn't crash. In an office full of Macs, that (aside from my Yellow Dog box) is the only machine which doesn't crash. I guess your milage may vary, but the only reason for a Windows 2000 machine to crash is a hardware problem.

And if the other vendors can just get off their asses and realize that OS X is the future of Apple, and maybe they should be writing their drivers and apps to that system, then I wouldn't have anything to gripe about.
That's what they said about copeland and pink and taligent. Adobe didn't buy into it, and so those systems never took off. It's only because Photoshop now looks crap in their deliberately crippled "Classic" mode that they are producing a Carbon version.

Where the hell am I going with this? I don't know. I just hate it when people evangelise Apple, when they should know better, or in this case, clearly don't. But who am I to argue? A clueless user who can't RTFM on RPM using an Apple? They were made for each other.

[1]clue rpm -e. Try also rpm --help or man rpm. Or even rpmdrake.
[2] ever notice how the "finder" can't find anything? For that you need a completely separate app called "sherlock". Now, I ask you, is that intuitive?
[3]I am in the process of porting Sorcerer (mentioned on Slashdot a couple of times) to powerpc, because quite frankly, rpm sucks.

Re:They'll never get me

[Anonymous Coward]

> Open NetInfo Manager app, select the domain where you want the new user, and create it.

Sorry, he wanted to be able to do it via the command line, as in "over a slow network connection". NetInfo isn't usable in that scenario.

Re:another Linux user's experiences with OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

For technical books/articles on MacOS X, see

DevDepot
MacTech
O'Reilly
Stepwise

Re:Mac nuts Vs Linux nuts

[Johnny Mnemonic]

For the record, I'm a Mac Nut. So I hope you will admire my restraint, and in fact my sacrifice of mod points, in my response.

Although I really do feel that criticism of OS X, the Mac, and Apple in general is good and healthy, when things are simply "ain't so" I have to speak up. When you say that the opensource presence in OS X is "zip ... nada ... nothing", you are ignoring the fact that the core of OS X is Darwin, and Darwin is, in fact, Open Source.

Sure, I realize that that excludes a lot of what makes OS X attractive vis a vis Linux, including Aqua and other layers, but the sum total of Darwin is a lot more than "zip." You do have the source for the network implementation, the I/O interfaces, memory usage, etc etc, and it is fairly well documented. Further, Apple accepts submissions back to the source just like any open-license software. If the omission of open code from OS X was one of the primary things keeping you away, you might want to take another look.

Re:They'll never get me

[SmittyTheBold]

Know what? This is absolute FUD on both parts. At least you're both ill-informed. These complaints apply to OS X, yes - but that's the client OS. Buy the Server and get the server tools. It's very easy to do pretty much everything remotely, through a Apple-provided GUI tool.

If I wanted to add a user to one of our OS X servers right now, I could. Remotely. Through a GUI. Without VNC. If people would look into using a "Server" as a server, people would be much happier.

Re:Well

[mjpaci]

When you're at the logon prompt, type ">console" and whammo, no gui. CLI all the way.

--Mike

Re:They'll never get me

[Goonie]

Basically, the idea is that you use a markup language to describe the structure of a document, and then (for any custom elements), you specify how to render that structure.

The idea is somewhat similar to DocBook, but it's more pragmatic in that it will give you tight control of elements where a human can make visual formatting better than the machine can.

Word can sort of do structural formatting with styles and templates, but it's very much a half-assed structural formatting system pasted over the top over the basic visual paradigm. LaTeX has it built in.

There a lot of "packages" - standard sets of formatting tools to lay out most things you'd ever want to do without the bother of having to design the format yourself. If you're doing anything vaguely mathematical, LaTeX's math-typesetting capabilities are unparalleled. Equation editor doesn't come within cooee. LaTeX's citation, cross-referencing, and sectioning abilities are extremely good.

LaTeX does have its downsides. Customizing the look of your document can be quite hard work, and it's not particularly well-suited to highly graphical documents it can include figures perfectly well, but its placement algorithms aren't great and highly graphical documents require a great deal of visual formatting that a visual tool is better at.

LaTeX (and TeX, which it is built on top of) is highly stable. You can be guaranteed that your documents will be editable and rewritable for generations into the future. Word's file format keeps changing, and more importantly embedded objects seem to not cope very well with version changes.

The other thing that can be important in some cases is that LaTeX is a batch system, and it's not hard to write computer programs to generate output in LaTeX format which can then be processed into high-quality layout. The Docbook tools do just this, IIRC.

LaTeX isn't for all applications. If your documents are long, structured, contain mathematics, require consistent formatting, and are for long-term use, LaTeX is the choice, no question. If you're sending out one-page marketing memos with colour and lots of pretty drawings, Word is far superior.

If you do decide to give LaTeX a try, you might need LaTeX : A Documentation Preparation System by Leslie Lamport (the designer of LaTeX), and possibly The LaTeX Companion, by Goossens, Mittelbach, and Samarin. They're a little expensive, though.