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Confessions of a Mac OS X User
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?"
have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?
You'll have to ask my ex-wife; she took the Mac.
Trolling is a art,
iDidn't do it.
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.)
It's pretty far down on the things I feel guilty about. I'm a middle-class white American male, you insensitive clod!
What, are you crazy?
I would so much rather run this than just about any Linux distro out there. Mainly because I can guarantee my vendor is available on the phone when I need them to troubleshoot any of the funky ass things servers tend to do.
And no, you can't come to my site or have a look at my logs because it's secure, just tell me what error code -16246 means in your software, ok, thanks, bye.
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Sometimes I feel guilty about doing some work, while I am trying to read Slashdot.
>> 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.
Now this is personal opinion, and I am sure I am inviting plenty of flames, so... here goes.
I don't think anyone should feel ashamed for not using linux as their desktop. Fact of the matter is, any OS claiming to be linux is just a mess of free software utilities and applications, on a unixy type setup.
While there have been a few noble attempts at actually building an OS from the linux kernel, it ends up being no more then repackaging the same crap in a more "shiny" way.
The linux kernel is a good base for an OS. Until something other then a Unix clone is made from it, I will stand tall to the fact that I wont use it for my desktop.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Apple as a company is not an angel. But its not a monoply and is leverging open source an contributing back to the open source community. As a rule Apple shuns DRM (digital rights management).
But OS-X has at its core DARWIN which is an open source version of BSD which apple puts out. The parts of the OS that isn't opensource is the graphics layer above OS and a few other bits (hfs+ the file system is not open either I think.).
They've given back web browser code, updates to GCC etc. etc.. So all told they're not bad guys.
How is something so blatantly WRONG modded up as interesting? Since when was utter ignorance at all interesting?
Need I go on with how Apple differs from Microsoft and SCO?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
First of all Apple actually contributes to OSS projects even though they generally stay away from GPLed code and don't have to contribute their changes.
They've made many documented improvements to KHTML, gcc, the *BSDs, and others. They've also made the entire underlying operating system available as OSS.
Can you even come close to saying anything like that about Microsoft and SCO? Those two companies are the ones who testify in from of congress that OSS is unconstitutional and will destroy the US economy.
Apple also doesn't lock down their hardware, and it's totally possible to run other OSes on Macs. Their is one proprietary part that is required to run Mac OS, but if you don't want to run Mac OS it's not a problem.
Ever heard of OpenFirmware? It's an open standard that Apple, Sun and others use instead of the antiquated BIOSes found in PCs. What do MS and Intel want to replace the BIOS with? A locked down firmware that will implement DRM for media and software and possibly even OSes at the most basic hardware level. That's open?
Apple uses standard components and has opened up many of their hardware innovations like FireWire.
In other words: you're nuts.
It's like being taken hostage initially against your will, then realizing your captors are the Swedish Bikini Team.
You sure can... I have no idea what the parent was bumbling on about.
Take a drive out of a PC and put it into another PC - Check.
Take a drive out of a Mac and put it into another Mac - Check.
Both work equaly well. In fact, its even easier on the Mac. You don't even have to take out the drive!! Just hook the two Macs up via Firewire, hold Cmd-T while booting up the Mac with the problem, and have the functional Mac boot from that Firewire drive. If its a drive problem, you've just found it.
The parent has no idea what he's talking about.
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.
$0.02 (CDN)
Let's take this one step further:
Take a drive out of a PC and put it into a Mac - Check.
Sure you can't boot off of the drive without installing a Macintosh operating system but all of the data on the drive will be accessible to the Mac if the drive was formatted with FAT or NTFS. I've done this a number of times to help my PC friends recover data from their crashed PCs and it works without a hitch.
Sure Mac OS is proprietary, but it hardly locks you in to a specific operating system. In fact Mac OS does a damn good job of trying to cooperate with as many other operating systems and file types as possible.
Sapere aude!
i spent an entire year preaching Linux to all my friends but i have to admit that all the way i've been having tons of problems with it... USB devices were not working, attempts to switch keyboard layouts gave me XFree86 errors, trying to do accounting with Gnucash was a lunacy, and could XMMS be ANY UGLIER? Then i tried installing XD2 from Ximian (which I still consider the best "graphical shell" for Linux) and that just broke *everything* on my laptop... On that day i just got so mad i walked down the street and got a powerbook G4...
so, back to the guilt thing.... yes, i do feel guilty - probably because i kind of showed myself as a hypocrite - preaching linux to others then getting an Apple machine. i think the key with Linux happiness is to recognize whether it's APPROPRIATE for what you do. if you need email, web browsers and a shell then Linux IS perfeect... but if you try to use it the way i did (USB, Music, several business applications, multimedia), then you better know how to recompile things yourself (i don't).
The big advantage in my view is that I feel better and work better when my screen's an aesthetic delight than otherwise.
So I'm delighted with all my Macs - I switched almost totally away from Linux and Irix, my previous systems, and in terms of computing environment, I couldn't be happier. The Mac isn't perfect, but it's as close to a hassle-free computing environment as I can get.
And that's worth its weight in gold, at least for me.
Just out of curiosity, could you give a few examples of things you can't do from the command line? I'll bet there actually are ways around it that you haven't heard.
D
Apple provides a neat little tool named security for this purpose. It allows full access to, and manipulation of, the keychain.
To retrieve my Slashdot password from the keychain, I would do the following:
Note that the first time you use security to access a keychain item, you will receive the standard Confirm Access to Keychain dialog. It would be unwise and unhelpful for this to happen when you are trying to access the keychain remotely via SSH, therefore it would pay to first access the keychain in this manner when you have access to the UI to Always Allow security to access that keychain item.