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Confessions of a Mac OS X User

Posted by pudge on from the guilt-is-for-the-weak dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting commentary on OSDir.com about one Mac OS X user's guilt over using it instead of Linux on his laptop, and how he's been burned by the dreaded iBook logic board problems so much that it underlines the tyranny of hardware vendor lock-in: it's not that Mac OS X isn't F/OSS, but that it only runs on Apple hardware. It also raises the obvious question: have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?"

5 of 989 comments (clear)

  1. This article doesn't make sense..... by Dr+Reducto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know what is up with this guy. His logic board gets fried, so he says that he can't stand hardware lock-in. It seems like just a rant, and doesn't really make sense. if he didn't like the hardware, he should have just sold the iBook on Ebay, instead of just keeping it. Running Linux won't fix the logic board, and he will be back to having the same problems that he had with his Dell(No Linux Compatibility with Linksys Wireless card.)

    1. Re:This article doesn't make sense..... by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't know what is up with this guy. His logic board gets fried, so he says that he can't stand hardware lock-in. It seems like just a rant, and doesn't really make sense.

      Agreed... The "guilty" question is the really puzzling thing:

      It also raises the obvious question: have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?

      Why would you feel guilty for not using a F/OSS operating system? This is just ideology run amuck. Programmers and engineers need to eat too. We can't all work for free.

      I'm not even an Apple user, because of the cost. But Apple makes a good product and charges what it's worth. You get a well designed package, with hardware and software components designed by the same manufacturer to work together as a system. I can't go to Fry's, buy a cart full of cheap commodity PC hardware, and expect to (easily) run Mac OS X on it. So what? Avoiding vendor lock-in is one thing, but why would you feel "guilty" for using it?

    2. Re:This article doesn't make sense..... by Renegade+Lisp · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Programmers and engineers need to eat too. We can't all work for free.

      The all-too-common misconception again. I'm an engineer and a programmer, working only on free software projects, and I make a decent living off of it. (Before you ask, "only free software projects" means that for software that is released to the general public, I request that it is under a free license, otherwise I won't work on it. For internal software used only at a customer site, the question naturally doesn't apply. I do recommend using free software as infrastructure in these cases though. So all my work centers around free software, literally.)

      It all depends on where you set your priorities, and whether you are willing to question the established way of dealing with software, and try something new.

      A lot of big businesses are jumping onto the same bandwaggon right now. And when someone like IBM does it, believe me, there's a lot of money involved.

  2. Nope by pixelgeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >> have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?

    Hell no. I only ever use Linux for servers.

    Using any of the window managers that ship with Linux makes me love my OS X box even more.

    And hardware lockin is a double-edged sword. If the hardware is of poor quality is is indeed a problem but I have never had an issue with any of the Apple hardware I have owned that I couldn't get fixed by an Apple tech in a few days.

    Can't say that for some of the x86 beige box machines I've owned that I've had Linux on.

  3. Re:Vender lock in by nettdata · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is vender lock in for Apple ok when it's considered bad for anyone else?

    I don't see this as being "Vendor Lock-in" because at the end of the day, I'm writing software that I can use anywhere.

    The Apple component (in this case a TiBook) is nothing more than a tool. All the output of my efforts (Java, Perl, etc.), can be moved to Linux, Solaris, BSD, Win32, etc., and it's not a big deal.

    I still have a choice, in the long run and where it really matters, and if Apple pulls some crap that I don't like, I can still bail without really losing anything but a bit of my time and some cash for new development apps/gear. Even then, most of my apps that I use for development are platform agnostic, and won't need re-licensing.

    My end product will still have COMPLETE choice of where it wants to reside.

    Now, if I want to do MS development (.NET, etc.), guess what, I'm seriously locked in. I have NO CHOICE on where to run my apps. If I don't like it, tough. For that matter, I'd be locked into the Dev environment for the most part as well.

    Which brings up another issue... trust. I have way more faith in the business practices of Apple than MS. I don't believe that Apple will do anything that will piss me off, whereas I'm quite confident that with MS it will only be a matter of time.

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