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Mac OS X Switcher Stories
spid writes "Tim O'Reilly posted an interesting article about people switching from other OSes (Mac OS, Windows, Linux) to Mac OS X. The resounding consensus is that most folks appreciate how, compared to these other OSes, Mac OS X 'just works.' O'Reilly also makes an interesting point that UNIX/Linux users, rather than Windows users, would be the best target niche for Apple's 'switch' campaign."
Switch to OSX from Linux? OSX is an incredible OS, but as long as I have to buy proprietary Apple hardware, and pay full price for minor upgrades, Apple can forget getting any of my money. Don't get me wrong.....technically, Apple got it right with OSX. But I still like the freedom of building my own machines as I need them. Apples are great for people that need convienience most of all, and have lots of cash to burn. The rest of us will continue to roll our own.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Yes, I see how Linux users may be the more likely candidate to pick up a Mac. Familiar *nix feel, sweet desktop and windows manager, kick ass hardware. What is there not to like?
On the other side, what's not to like? THE PRICE! Most Linux users have a Linux box that isn't the biggest and best machine, just a box with spare parts that you put together (cause, hell, it works GREAT on subpar hardware). Not many get stuff like GeForce4 cards, because the 3D gaming market hasn't really hit Linux hard. Now, to switch, you have to buy a fairly expensive machine. Personally, I'd rather spend the money on a PC, because I'm a gamer, and that's where my cash usually goes.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Here I sit, writing on MacOSX IE 6, waiting Software Update to install new version of OpenSSL on the background. I use apt-get (fink), KDE and Emacs, develop software on this iBook and run it on *nix machines over network, be it command-line or X11, thru openssh.
I have not switched. This was, with it's 6 hour uptime, the best *nix-laptop I could afford.
I have not "switched", nor have I to "switch" back when someone puts out a better laptop. I just use whatever *nix is applicable to me. Yellow Dog, yeah, I would try, but I don't need to fix what is not broken.
Apple simply did not break BSD when they created Darwin.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Apple took a risk switching their entire OS core over and not having 'native combatibility' with older apps (yes I know it can run them but it has to load the whole classic mode which takes a long time). Apple went through a similar change when they went from motorola cpu's to the powerpc ones, and having the older code 'emulated' (although it ran just great anyway).
Apple seems to be much more willing than pc makers and microsoft to switch to new things and I think this is very good as it encourages others to follow. I am mostly a windows user and I must say that OS X is deffinately on par with winXP when it comes to usability and surpasses it when it comes to stability.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Let me build my own box.
Then it wouldn't "just work". Say what you like about Microsoft, they support a vast range of hardware, and that's one of the reasons they software is sometimes unreliable. The only way Apple products can "just work" is if Apple maintains absolute control over the hardware their software runs on.
Just from the whining posts of "OS X is cool but Apple is a big, mean, evil proprietary hardware manufacturer", you can see that O'Reilly is completely wrong in suggesting Linux users are a perfect niche target. Apple should focus their ads 100% towards Windows users--people that expect to pay for what they use. There is no point going after the Linux folks. The attitude of "if its not free its evil" is not one you are going to change with white backgrounded commercials. Plus why would you focus on 1% of desktop users instead of 95%?
Unless Steve Jobs wants to lay prostrate in front of Linus and RMS and wail, "I am not worthy, I am not worthy!", there isn't an ad that is going to convert a hard core (masochistic) Linux desktop users.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I work at a university, and I can see clearly who is switching.
Those who say they wont switch here are probably system administrators. Since I do sysadmin as part of my job, I can say that that part of me is a control freak, and loves the power of linux. That is also the reason why Linux has it hard on the desktop: only macosx, lycoris, lindows are even thinking of deprecating root in their OS'es.
The part of me which programs is split. Doing scientific programming today is easier on linux because of the number of high quality numerics/graphics libs available for X11. This will change. However, have you seen the simplicity of macosx? Every app is a directory. No gtk compatability problems(for those who remember). Copy the app anywhere. click, go. For command line people, change defaults using the default command, since all apps use plists. Open any file by saying open bla.pdf. It will use the default app. use open -with if you want a specific app.
The linking model is simple. The loading model is simple. applescript scripts most apps and is way easier to use than COM or bonobo. Still linux is a familiar model to lots of people. So I know people now, grad students and post-docs and engineers, whose desaktop is a macosx box and who program on linux..the professors dont program much so macosx works well for them. This student/scientist/engineer/programmer is the only remaining market.
But at the end of the day its the apps. Excel is available. And itunes and iphoto just rock.
There was a time when i liked struggling with linux to get all this working. At some point, one just wants to code. One dosent want to deal with dependencies, etc. You will say apt-get and I'll say hallelujah, its a great thing, but why cant i just install the freaking app where I want it too, and delete it by trashing it. rpm --erase??? Who would think of that?
The sad part is, most of what macosx has done could and still can be done on linux. Make a restricted distribution. Share earnings with app developers. Choose 10-15 best-of-breed apps, thats all. Thing of the next evolutionary step in these apps, rather than remaining behind the curve. root should only be a single user mode thing. Like gentoo, make init scripts dependent on whats running and whats not. Simplify the runlevels to single-user, and multi-user. Reduce hardware complexity by certifying systems based on linux friendly manufacturers. run daemons not as root. Get rid of the start, or hat, or whatever menu. Get rid of the XP like icons(see redhat8 beta). Give gtk a default look which dosent look like grey shit. Use a tasteful muted color scheme. Make sure pcmcia and usb and firewire just work on plug in. Use hotplug and devfs like mandrake do. Get rid of one million etc config files and use gconf and alchemist like redhat do. Simplify the gnome2.0 desktop. Check out the innovations in oe-one's desktop. Use autofs pervasively. Implement per process namespaces. Implement a simple event layer on top of bonobo, pipes, mimetypes, clipboard, etc to make scripting the desktop trivial. See plan9's plumbing. Unify zsh(bash) and nautilus to use same mime system. Allow apps to be manipulated as directories. When such directories are opened in either, allow hooks to be called which can start or install apps into a dependency database. Create a pasteboard server like in macosx. Implement gnustep over gtk2.0...
You get my point. There is so much thats already there but just missing a bit. It needs people with that extra bit of innovation, and that extra bit of compansation a app-royalty scheme would generate to push it across the edge. It needs that part of me that is a system administrator to let go. But it may be too late.
The Inscrutable Gargoyle
Sounds like Astrid the Priestess needs to pray to God she gets some freaking brains. She's still using Floppies for God's sake! I can't even fit one MP3 on a floppy these days. She reports that she uses "Disk Utility" often -- something smells real fishy--is Gates religious?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
how many times does this idea need to be brought up, and then quickly shot down because it will never happen?
1. apple makes their money selling hardware. they will lose all that revenue if people can just use a walmart $400 pc.
2. apple is a systems company, using the fact that they develop both the hardware and the software as an advantage to them. how many times do you hear the words *it just works* when it comes to apple computers? that's a big selling point for the bulk of the population who don't like to tinker with hardware.
3. yet another architecture change? i think not. moving from 68K to ppc went well, it took some time but it was a success. os9 to os10 is going well, most apps are there and the open source/hobby coder population is booming. so to go from ppc to x86 after moving to a new OS, the big software companies are just going to say no. that's suicide.
4. ibm's new power4 desktop chip is further evidence that apple is going to stay ppc. this chip has 160 vector ops (altivec has 162), that's another big indicator.
i can't see apple going x86 in the future.
Your story sounds similar to mine, except that I switched back yet again. I've been running Linux since spring '94 and FreeBSD since '97 and decided to go the Mac route about a year and a half ago. I bought a PowerMac G4, took it home, used it for two weeks and took it back. I spent a few months after that looking for the perfect computer without much success. One day, I was walking by the Apple Store in Tyson's Corner, VA and decided to give the Mac another try. This time, I shelled out a bit more money for their "Fastest" model. Instead of the puny 15" LCD that I had with my first Mac, I bought a 21" Sony top-of-the-line CRT. I purchased a the optional GeForce 3 to make Quake 3 perform at par. This time around, things worked a lot better. 10.1 was released the week after I bought the Mac and OS X became much more usable.
As for reasons to switch from a free *nix to Mac OS X, here are mine:
1) Asthetics - from the look of the desktop, the beautiful anti-aliased fonts, the built-in PDF capabilty, and (of course) the beautiful hardware, it's hard to compete with a Mac when it comes to a slick user experience.
2) Support - Like *BSD and Linux, you have a great community that will provide informal support, but you also have AppleCare to rely upon.
3) Hardware - the hardware, as I'm sure you know, is top-notch. You pay an arm and a leg for it, no doubt, but compare a top-of-the-line Dell case to any Apple case and you'll see what I mean.
4) Microsoft Office - I know this sounds a little odd but Microsoft Office on OS X is just fantastic. I've never seen a better office suite, commercial or open source. If you use your computer for business and your job title is something other than "programmer", chances are that you will need MS Excel. MS may be the devil incarnate but they sure do make a good spreadsheet package.
So anyway, my advice to you is to give it another shot, preferably once Jaguar is released. Two weeks really isn't enough time to get familiar with the little niceties of OS X.
Good luck.
Chris
...because other (former) Linux users are doing the job for them. Between Tim O'Reilly, plenty of folks here on / and various others, it would be difficult for geeks not to know that OS X is "Unix Inside (tm)".
I switched only because I needed a new video editing PC. After several years of building my own boxes with Windows NT and 2000 and 3rd party hardware, Adobe Premiere is still not easy to learn, nor is it very stable, nor is it very fast. And the 3rd party hardware makes me shudder with revulsion: buggy drivers and a lot of vendor denial.
The cost for the PC hardware I wanted was about 2700.00 USD. Then I looked at my other PCs: one is very stable, one does not work with any version of Windows but runs for 100 days with Linux, another one was sort of flaky until I installed OpenBSD (this is why it's good to have many OS choices; if it's a hardware problem, it should die under ANY OS, like my Thinkpad with a bad motherboard used to do).
When I looked at the Power Mac dual G4 1GHz, I saw the tradeoffs: slower bus, less MHz in the CPUs, and so on. But, I get 2 firewire ports digital video out and OSX all included. I also saw several movies in the past 2 years with a credit to FCP. The price was $200 over what I would pay for a tricked out PC.
I went to the Apple store where they showed me how to download and edit footage right in the store. I have never seen a PC store with a setup like this.
I was surprised at how fast the Mac replaced my Windows PC for everything I do: Office, e-mail, software development. The hardware is not the latest or sexiest, but it works better. The computer _feels_ faster, because I never have to stop working to appease some sudden need the OS has.
I think that the world of cheap commodity hardware and all-compatible software is still a dream; believe it or not, Intel, Motorola, Sparc, they're ALL using proprietary technology that locks you into a vendor's plans, whims, and mistakes. Get used to it. When buying the Apple, I chose a different route: pay a premium for "commodity" hardware with a lot of added value. Dell and Gateway have gotten so big that they cannot afford to lose any money; maybe being the biggest company is not always the best thing to do.
About me and technology: I work in a Windows NT/2000/Solaris 7-8-9 shop. By day I am a systems architect building Solaris, Windows, and OpenBSD systems for security and business automation. I program in python, perl, java, and C++.
As a Linux user of 4 years now, I bought a new iMac a few months ago and have to say I have been nothing but impressed. I have a beautifully configured Linux box at work, but the thought of going home to the same thing after a 9 to 10 hour day didn't fill me with joy, plus I was concerned that I would be forever recompiling KDE betas when my wife wanted to check her email, which wouldn't lead to a happy family life. Yet I refuse to have a dull Microsoft box in the house.
The iMac has proved a superb compromise. Both my children are addicted to the various DK educational software the shop on Tottenham Court Road threw in. iPhoto is superb and the integration of Digital Cameras and Camcorders with the rest of the OS is seamless, my four year old can now take the camera and edit photos on the box without much help. And underneath it all is UNIX, it connects easily to my broadband connection, and all my IMAP, LDAP and SSH sessions to my corporate network work fine, making it the perfect machine to use for working from home (and it looks good too).
So I wouldn't described myself as someone who has switched from Windows or Linux, rather Apple achieved a sale where nothing would have been bought in it's place. I am confident I am not alone in this market segment, one of my friends with children the same age has bought an iMac for exactly the same reasons, and I know of others considering it.
My conclusion was different. She wasn't suckered . . . being suckered implies being deceived. She wasn't deceived at all. Her negative experiences have to do with unreasonable and unrealistic expectations about the switching experience. She can't print, she can't talk to her boyfriend, she misses her floppy disks, she doesn't understand CD-RW, she misses her left-clicking Windows mouse, her favorite font is gone, she can't figure out what keys perform what task.
In other words, she expected her new Apple Macintosh iBook laptop to behave _exactly_ like her old Microsoft Windows desktop PC. And when it didn't, she blames someone else for "seducing" her. Suckered, or typical modern consumer? I think the conclusion is obvious.
I didn't so much "switch" as fall into OS X's loving embrace.
;-) (It's not like they're much, I think the most I've for shareware far has been US$20).
... man, that program *rocks*. I'd "switch" to OS X from Linux just for that. The inbuilt PDF stuff is also very cool, and the fact that I can run Photoshop and the (surprisingly excellent) MS Office brings OS X a suite of much more stable apps than are available under Linux.
;-) I didn't think it would ever come to that, but I've taken the sweet delicious Apple bait, hook, line, and sinker.
Having seen the Titanium PowerBook G4s on display in the Apple shops, that drool-worthy stop outside the display window became a regular pausing point on my way home from Uni. The student discount price made it even more attractive, so after a while of saving up the sweet silvery sexiness that is a TiBook was mine.
A Linux user of 4 years, I used to boot into Windows to play games like Baldur's Gate II, knowing that I would be able to combine the excellence and stability that I'd come to take for granted with Linux with the ease of use and hardware integration that Windows offered, but with a much sexier look and feel, and no hideous Start bar, I was hooked instantly.
I tried for a while running rootless X in order to have my favourite Linux apps (XChat for one - available through the rather excellent 'fink'), but soon gave that up because even with the "Aqua-esque" themes, GTK and the WMs I was using just didn't quite make the aesthetic grade. I've since found an XChat-alike (Snak) and either ports of or apps that are similar to the ones I used to use under Linux. Sure, you have to pay for some of them, but I found that I didn't have a problem with this (I'm not really in the FS philosophy camp, preferring the BSD license anyway) and figured that if the programs I used regularly under Linux were shareware I'd probably pay for them too
There are, of course, plenty of excellent free (and Free, for those who care) apps available for OS X.
However, the best point of OS X is all the excellent bundled software that comes with it. iTunes is simply divine, iPhoto is
Don't get me started on the *hardware*. The networking is as simple as a very simple thing, wander between WLAN and traditional cables and OS X doesn't miss a beat. Not to mention that the Airport cards are seriously kickarse. Great range (due to the aerial being lined up the screen), and fantastic integration with the OS. Under Linux I'd be fiddling around with ifconfig and routing tables and such - not so under OS X.
Turn on Apache with a checkbox, ready to go. FTP? No problem, another checkbox. SSH? Certainly! Check that box too! I hear 10.2 has a seriously nice firewall configuration tool coming with it, I'm looking forward to *that*.
The display is something that has to be seen to be believed. Never have I seen such luscious crisp images on a laptop LCD. And the machine is *quiet*. Unless you're doing something graphics-intensive or spinning up the seriously kickarse combo drive (CDRW/CDROM/DVD), it's virtually silent. A fan kicks in when there's some excitement happening, but in my experience it's only when I've been playing games/watching DVDs or using the combo drive a lot.
And yes, you *can* use a 3-button mouse.
So where does that leave my trusty desktop Linux box? Acting as a local mail server and backup machine
I hate comments like this, because "computer gurus" is a loaded term. The implication is that someone who knows what they're doing would never use a Mac; it's only a system for people who do art and make web pages and want to edit their photos. And even if someone using a Mac writes Perl and Python scripts and so on, then you are still superior to them.
Enough of that please. That's the kind of elitist attitude that perpetuates the horrible reputation that Linux users have garnered. I do hardcore software development. I love languages like Lisp. I write Perl scripts to automate tasks, but then I get pegged as a compute newbiew because:
I use a GUI.
I don't have serious objections to Windows of the Mac.
I still find an 800MHz processor more than fast enough for commercial software development.
I don't have an obsession with buying every new $400 video card that comes along.
Maybe it's the faux "power users" that need a condescending term for them? They're certainly a loud segment of the computer using population.
The fallacy of equipment-based expertise permeates virtually every hobby and profession. It's based on the assumption that if one just uses the appropriate tools, excellent results will be a simple matter of fact. While the true masters of a given domain may indeed use a given toolset, it is most emphatically not the tools that guarantee the results, but the skills of the master.
The tools-obsessed photographer worries and frets about spot meters, chemistry selection and razor sharp lenses while the master quietly makes images that impact the soul with little more than a box and some film
The tools-obsessed cook buys copper-bottomed cookware with non-stick surfaces and an endless stream of gadgets and tools while the master chef makes mouths water with little more than fire and meat.
The tools-obsessed musician spends all their money on optimized amplifiers and acoustically engineered instruments while the master musician wrings emotion from the cheapest pawnshop instruments.
The tools-obsessed artist concentrates all their energy on choosing the right paints and canvas while the master creates great works of art on fast-food napkins.
The tools-obsessed carpenter buys specialized tools for every type of joinery and finish while the master carpenter builds furniture and homes that last for generations with little more than a handsaw and a plane.
The tools-obsessed programmer spends his time arguing about language choice, editors and platforms while the master programmer produces elegant code in any language and any platform that suits the job.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things