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Nerds Switching from Apple to Ubuntu?
Mindpicnic writes "The recent switch of two lifelong Mac nerds to Ubuntu hasn't escaped Tim O'Reilly's radar. He cites Jason Kottke: 'If I were Apple, I'd be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow. Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.'"
Their reasons for switching are proprietary file formats and DRM. The main issue with proprietary file formats is the iTunes library file, which has an XML file that mirrors it. Apple uses some proprietary formats, but is that any worse than an open format no one has heard of that has no support or documentation. Apple supports most of the important file formats. No one has to deal with the DRM. In Linux, you can't use anything with it.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I installed ubuntu on a PC a couple of months ago. It took me about a day to get the graphics system to work on the machine (X11 - text was fine). And by work, I mean "display at all." I never got the res out of it that I wanted. And once I had some graphics up, I tried to do anything else, and was misserable.
.8 and .9 days; I stuck with NeXTSTEP. I revisited back in the late 90's; I stuck with OpenStep. I revisited it around 2000, when MacOS was very much in transition; I stuck with OpenStep and/on Windows. (though my servers were FreeBSD during the 90's and early oughts') And now I've taken a look in '06; I'm still going to stick with OSX (which is now my server).
I cut my teeth on linux back in the
It's not there yet. Everything I do on *nix other than OSX feels like pulling teeth. I'll continue to use this expensive OS ($600 machines and $100 OS upgrades every 2 years) for some time, I guess. And while I do, I'll continue to submit bugs and toss a line or 2 of code at various Open Source code/systems I use.
I have stuff to do, and I don't care to muss with the kernel and video drivers. If you don't have stuff to do, or you DO want to muss with kernels/vid drivers - go for some flavor if linux.
Yeah, and I have to say, I don't really get that. I like and use OS X, but don't really care for iPhoto or iCal, and don't use them. I'm not sure why I would be inclined to switch from OS X just because of how iPhoto or iCal operate. Frankly, even if something happened with iTunes (an app I do use) that bugged me, I'd probably just find an alternative mp3 player/library manager, rather than switch platforms.
how about instead of discussing gaming on Ubuntu, we just bust the owner or employee of linux certified trying to lie to us about his identity to get some traffic?
"whois wineverygame.com" and grep for chander kant. now google for "chander kant" and linuxcertified.
gamer and developer my ass. probably never even used a mac, ubuntu, or even linux before
I beg to differ! See http://torch.cs.dal.ca/~hannon/windowlayers.jpg. Finder on top of Quicktime on top of Finder.
As for support, I highly disagree. Whenever I have a problem, instead of calling, I can just drive over to an Apple Store and get free tech support in person regardless of the computer's warranty (as long as no hardware is problematic, then it depends on the warranty of course). You can't say that about any other machine on the market. I think that makes it much better than the Ubuntu setup because with message boards, you just have people guessing at your issues since they have no access to your machine, whereas in the case of a Mac, you can have someone actually look at it (and I'll add that almost all the "geniuses" actually do know what they are talking about, which I find impressive).
Probably your best bet is to subscribe to Transgaming's Cedega service, which, while not perfect, is the only solution out there for playing Windows games on Linux with any kind of decent performance that I've heard of.
Read my blog.
Dell will sell you a similar notebook (an Inspiron, for example) for $600. Or you can give Dell your $1200 and happily own a Dell XPS, with dual core CPU and everything else. If you don't want Windows, you can always blow it away and install your Linux of choice, not that it costs any.
It is very hard now, impossible probably, for small notebook vendors to compete on price with the big companies. Dell just gives them away, and Compaq is right there too, with $450 price tag on Presario V2000 and V5000 series, and Lenovo trails them all at $600.
his reasons for changing have everything to do with his stance on DRM/Copyrights and little to do with Mac os x vs 'nix so using him as a figurehead for the Geek who said No! is a bit misleading.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
...QuarkXPress, Adobe Creative Suite 2 and BBEdit.
Sometimes the OS alone, no matter how refined or the "better-than-brand-X" factor, is not enough of an argument to make people switch.
Ubuntu doesn't include decoders for proprietary media formats on principle, including MP3 and AAC. Playback's possible, sure, but not included out-of-the-box.
(so pbbbt).
Triv
I'm sorry that Ubuntu borked you MBR. I don't believe that there is a graphical GRUB menu editor that allows you to easily change the line 'root (hdx,y)' to 'rootnoverify (hdx,y)' -- which I figure you must have been recommended to try already -- to make sure that GRUB lets Windows do its thing.
/mbr" command at its DOS prompt, and the boot disk image can be used to start up the computer from a CD if you've no floppy. If you're keen on keeping your Windows partition after that, you could usse GParted from the Ubuntu Desktop CD (boot it to Ubuntu, select GParted from System -> Administration -> Gnome Partition Editor) to delete your Ubuntu partitions and resize the NTFS or FAT32 partition that Windows uses.
Your graphics situation may require the installation of nVidia's own graphics driver to loosen up the available resolutions. The alternative would involved using "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" to enable higher resolution modes via the configure-at-installation part of Xorg.
But if you're going to forego Ubuntu, don't forget that Windows can be resuscitated with a Win98 boot disk and the "fdisk
I switched back because of the horrid quality of Apple hardware the last few years.
And with the build quality of the MacBook family, I won't be surprised if there will be more who jump ship because they cannot find a suitable replacement for their PowerPC machines.
Right now is the worst possible time to move to a Mac. First of all the MacBooks and MacBook Pros are plagued with many issues as nicely documented here. More importantly, Microsoft and Adobe still have not ported their software over along with numerous smaller third party vendors. How do you suppose customers will feel when they realize they bought software titles that aren't even native for their machines quite yet? Unless you use Apple's own consumer-oriented products, you are screwed for the time being.
Then of course are the issues with OS X itself. Too many to mention, but nicely summed up over at Rixstep.
I was actually hoping that the move to Intel was going to mean lower hardware prices now that under the hood there is no discernible difference in parts from bargain basement PCs. Instead, Apple continues to charge a premium for their hardware and even ask for an extra $150 for a color (e.g. MacBlack). I have owned and used Macs since 1997, but once my PowerBook breathes its last I will be migrating to a cheap PC running Ubuntu.
I'm currently dual booting OS X and Ubuntu and now find myself booted into the latter a lot more often.
As an earlier anonymous coward mentioned, if you do a whois on wineverygame.com you find that Chandler Kant is the administrative contact. At the same time LinuxCertified has a major employee named Chandler Kant (see http://linux.about.com/b/a/062983.htm for one reference). It is quite unfortunate when a dealer of linux systems will lie on a forum like slashdot about his identity in order to sell systems.
My explanation was a bit off, but the logic holds true. The original complainer has it backwards: it's consistent with Mac behavior for all the windows to come forward. The weirdness is that the OS will let you layer windows between applications. I think it's a wise compromise: it makes drag-n-drop actions far easier by making it possible to visually arrange windows as you need them, but keeps the consistency of having a foreground application.
Regardless, I think it's an absurd example of how an OS is going downhill. Sometimes you have to just say "it works this way" in the name of functionality over absolute consistency.
If you click an app's dock icon, all windows come forward. If you click a window, only that window comes forward (most of the time).
First... this is an nForce2 machine with built-in video, and the default config refused to let me select a screen-res larger than 1024x768. I know, the nerds out there are saying "just edit your x config file", right?/p>
Ubuntu tries to autoconfig everything. Sometimes this doesn't work out, but you don't have to go hacking your configs just yet. If you want to specify your own configuration, just run sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. This will go through and give you easy configuration options.
Also, since you've got an nVidia chipset, you might want the nvidia packages for accelerated X. Ubuntu has them, but if you don't want to mess around, easyubuntu makes this process entirely automated.
Second... I discovered that the oh-so-lovely disk partitioner has the added feature that on some systems (including mine) it borks the MBR of the resized Windows partition in such a way that Windows will refuse to boot. Even after uninstalling Ubuntu.
To be frank, you asked for it. Resizing Windows partitions is a black art, and there are a lot of things that can go wrong with this endeavor, especially since the file system does not officially support this feature. Even if you did partition everything from scratch, Windows doesn't alawys play nice. Also, individual partitions do not have their own MBR; there is one MBR on the disk, which is where Ubuntu will install grub. You will need to configure grub to boot windows if you have a dual boot configuration, or you can optionally reinstall grub on the first sector of your boot partition and have Windows overwite the MBR. If you have NT/2000/XP, you can then set up the NT loader to boot other systems, but this is a major pain.
Hi,
How come the guy who registered your website (www.wineverygame.com - Chander Kant, according to whois) has the same name as the founder of the company that you're saying has such great deals?
Maybe you should clarify this before LinuxCertified loses any credibility.
He speaks truth. It's kind of a shame that Ubuntu ships with the less-than functional GStreamer and Totem. Mplayer works a hell of a lot better and plays all the 'proprietary' codecs like wma, too. If they wanted, they could distribute Ubuntu with Real's Helix player, flash, and java. Instead, they cram it in multiverse and then make sure that multiverse isn't enabled by default.
I haven't had any luck at all getting Ubuntu (or Knoppix) to work with my wireless network. What, am I supposed to just turn off security (i.e. switch to WEP) to get online with Linux?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
"I switched back because of the horrid quality of Apple hardware the last few years."
Indeed. I have a G3 iBook that died 3 months out of warranty, but this is not surprising given all the problems I had while it was still in warranty. I haven't had any problems with Ubuntu, but even if I had, the combined downtime from all the hardware problems with my iBook was over 2 months. The hoops I had to jump through as a result of that outweigh the issues I've had with hard distros like Slackware, let alone Ubuntu.
Even though OS X has its merits, it's pretty clear the hardware quality hasn't picked up much. Other vendors offer better quality, particularly in the business class machines, but even if that turned out not to be the case the superior support services from other vendors would still tip the scales by providing faster repairs.
I also find Apple's lineup lacking. For example, I've been shopping around for a new workstation. For less than the base PowerMac, I can get gigs of ECC memory, RAID, and better support services from another vendor. Even if I had a strong preference for OS X, I doubt I'd be willing to spend a couple grand to keep up like that.
There have also been issues with OS X itself. Some of these are specific to my line of work, like the consistent delay in getting updated Java versions. Others aren't, like poor quality control in software updates. Ubuntu's updates are well tested, but Apple has been known to cause major problems by forgetting to include important files, and you don't see forums filled with people reporting their experiences with a particular update because problems are rare.
Using a Mac for a few years has been enough to convince me that there's very little on the platform that I find beneficial. All in all, I consider myself thoroughly de-switched.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Once you have that situation, closing the finder window on top brings forward the finder window on the bottom.
Actually, jackass, if you want to know the specifics:
iBook had its memory on the logic board go back with a month left of the warranty. The Apple store "repaired" it, which turned out to be "took the 128 meg SODIMM out and put a 256 meg in" -- not replacing the bad logic board. It was several months before I noticed that. A month or two later, out of warranty, the system finally died entirely.
Apple will NOT repair it out of warranty for $280. They specifically quoted me $680 (or something right around that) for the repair. You're not the first person to mention that, but like everyone else, clearly you've never actually tried to get them to do that.
And yes, out of six or seven laptops, I've had one hardware failure other than the iBook's logic board -- a floppy drive on a Sager-Midern laptop ten years ago. That laptop was still running fine before I finally recycled it last year, I just had to pull the harddrive if I needed to install a new OS on it. That one died four or five years out of warranty. In fact, I've never had any serious hardware failure in any of my personal systems -- that includes MFM and RLL drives going back 20 years. I take extremely good care of all of it.
My most recent dead iPod actually had almost never been used. The first 40 gig one I bought had its hard drive die at 11 months -- and it was only used sporadically, mostly on plane trips. So while I appreciate your sarcasm, your assumptions are quite incorrect. Apple replaced that one with a new one with a defective dock connector. I, unfortunately, didn't get a chance to use it more than once or twice in the following few months, and discovered with less than five or ten hours of use, that one was dead. It works, if I can get it charged, but with a bad dock connector, thats not too useful. I could buy a new iPod for the flat rate repare cost they quoted for that...
The 1st generation (or maybe it was 2nd generation, I don't recall) one before that had the harddrive die just out of warranty, again only ever used on plane trips. That one probably had less than 100 hours of total use on it.
My first Mighty Mouse stopped tracking movement to the left. Weird, considering its optical. The guy in the store happily exchanged it under warranty after seeing it (he was surprised, too) Its replacement died three months later when the scroll-wheel stopped working. Unfortunately that was out of the 60 or 90 days a warranty replacement is covered for.
Yes, Apple had an extended logic board program for the G3 -- and insists to this day that the problem did not exist with the G4 ibooks. Do some google searching, you'll see how common it was on the G4. In fact, the going theory is that its a flaw in the case design allowing too much flex in the logic board that caused both the G3 and G4 failures.
I'm not here to get modded up for anything. Believe me, my karma is quite high enough I don't need to shill for some imaginary anti-Apple contingent on here.
Go put your arrogent fan-boi head back in the sand about Apple's very real quality problems, or at a minimum find some other thread to cast accusations around in.
This isn't 1995 anymore. Mac OS X has changed Apple's demographics quite substantially. Most computer geeks wouldn't touch the classic Mac OS with a 10 foot pole. Now half of the CS professors and students that I know own a Mac, solely because of OS X.
I'd be willing to switch now (I find Parallels to be an interesting solution and I like the dual-core Mac laptops) except for 2 things:
1) I don't care for the keyboard on the MacBook. I was setting up a 13" MacBook on Friday and the keyboard just isn't quite right for extended use. My Tecra 9100 and the ThinkPad keyboards are much nicer. (I don't use external keyboards or mice, so keyboard feel is very important.)
2) No mouse pointer in the middle of the keyboard like is found on the Thinkpads or the Toshiba Tecra line. For a keyboard-centric user that little pointer is just enough mouse to do the job 99% of the time without having to take my fingers off of the home row. It lets me click on wayward dialog buttons or for drag-n-drop of the occasional item.
Since I still need to use a laptop as my day-to-day machine those two desires are a deal breaker for me to switch to a Mac. I'm not interested in replacing my dedicated game PC for a Mac and am leery about switching my video editing / development box over to a Mac.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I've been a Mac user since 1997. I still don't understand the significance of this. I have never heard of these two people, and I subscribe to several "Mac Nerd" list serves like macenterprise.org and afp548.com. It's not like Josh Wisenbaker, Schoun Regan, or some other significant user has left the platform. I know people that have switched from Linux to Mac, Windows to Mac, Mac to Windows, Mac to Linux. I think it's great. Learn other operating systems so you can make a informed decision. The only way to truly learn a OS is to immerse yourself in it and make it your primary OS for a period of time. I've done the same thing with Windows and Suse. I've always come back to the Mac, some may not. Windows is thee ultimate gamers OS, Linux is the ultimate server OS, but I feel OS X is currently the best productivity client OS. My two cents.
Second... I discovered that the oh-so-lovely disk partitioner has the added feature that on some systems (including mine) it borks the MBR of the resized Windows partition in such a way that Windows will refuse to boot. Even after uninstalling Ubuntu. And even after applying various fixes via UBCD and friends. (Right now this system is sitting disconnected under my desk because I refuse to reinstall Ubuntu, but reinstalling Windows is a horrible half-day affair on its own...)
:(
w indows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx? mfr=true
:) Unfortunately, the video card manufacturers (nVidia / ATI) are pretty adament about not providing specs on their cards so people can write drivers for Linux (or any other OS). So we have to resort to downloading drivers from nVidia. It pretty much sucks, but not much can be done at the moment. Perhaps when Linux becomes more popular, Linux will have more clout and perhaps be able to get some traction on this issue (ok, I can dream :).
That sucks about your MBR.
No need to reinstall windows or go through anything involving boot disks to fix the MBR. So just boot from your XP cd, go into repair mode / recovery console, use the command prompt console (that's close to what it is called, but perhaps not exactly the right name). Then just use the fixmbr command and presto, your MBR is fixed and windows will boot (although it will likely wipe out your Linux boot loader GRUB).
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/
First... this is an nForce2 machine with built-in video, and the default config refused to let me select a screen-res larger than 1024x768.
As someone else mentioned, you have to download and install a driver from nVidia to get nice video and 3d acceleration. At least while you're downloading and installing your divers you have serviceable video, which is a bit better than Windows I guess.
I would advise you to use a LiveCD when checking out new Linux distros. Sure, it is a bit slower, but you can kick the tires first, before reconfiguring your box.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
(Free/Open/DietBSD etc. seem to be immune to this, not sure why.)
Obviously you haven't been in #openbsd.
It's a joke, laugh! Note: I haven't been there in some 8 or so years. Wow. That's scary that it's been that long.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The average lifecycle of a PC is 4 years, 5 x 4 = 20 years. You've still got a long way to go.
You clearly don't have a monitor larger than 19". I *hate* Windows for having a maximize button instead of a zoom button. I don't want firefox taking up the entirety of my 20" widescreen monitor when the content is designed to fit in a width of 768 pixels. Maximizing most windows to 1680 or more pixels wide is an INCREDIBLE waste of screen realestate. The zoom button is used to combat this and to have a button that will automatically resize a window to be the most efficient size for you. Also it is not determined at compile time. Load up many different sites in Safari and use the zoom button on them. You will find that the zoomed size will differ between different sites.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dude, if you want a "girl" to see that rig of yours, you need to get her into your house first!!! (Oh, and dont think about flashing the iBook either!).
Seriously, anyone who thinks a computer can pick up girls, are seriously mistaken. In my experience, the most important things have also been (in descreasing order)
1. Smile
2. Humour
3. Personality
4. Looks
5. Money (Though can be a negative too)
6. Car (though can be a double edged sword.. I have a jag, some love it, some hate it)
7. Job
8. Family
9. Home.
.
.
.
.
103. Flash computer.
Have a nice day!
The best way to get games to run on Ubuntu is to either buy a TV card and plug a console into it, lower your expectations a bit, or do a bit of digging.
You're probably going to hear a lot of people wax on about Cedega here, but I'm not one of them. I've tried Cedega several times (and transgaming still spams me with their "news" every so often) but every time I have it's been money down the drain. The games I'd want to play are either so old or sold so few copies that it is impossible for them to ever garner enough votes to get any critical bugs fixed, and even if there aren't critical bugs, the annoyances are generally legion.
The best solution I've found to gaming is to just use my consoles for 90% of it. I admit, I'm a bit of a gamer, so I have all the current gen consoles, a Dreamcast, and an assorted pile of other stuff including a SNES with no power adapter (if someone has one they're willing to get rid of let me know!) There's a lot more quality just letting the computer alone and turning to the conveniently placed TV. One of these days I'll invest in a decent TV card and just move the whole operation to the computer and clean up a bit, but for right now, I don't need Windows, or Ubuntu, or MacOS for 90% of the gaming I do.
Other than that, if you go looking, there are a fair number of ports for Windows games done by the developers (or people working closely with the developers). Neverwinter Nights is the most popular one, I would imagine, followed by id Software's entire game library (as long as you have the resource files from the original discs). I believe Quake 4 has had its Linux version released by now. icculus.org is a source for some other ports, and also a way to explore a bit more in that area. Also Tux Games is a good place to find games packaged for Linux. I've never bought there, so I don't know if you get a normal installer or a seperate disc with the binaries, etc, but there are some interesting old games in there now that I'm actually interested in getting again. You're going to pay more, but it all goes to support more games being released for Linux.
Lowering your gaming expectations can also be helpful too. I've gotten an awful lot out of Angband, NetHack, etc, over the years, and all those run quite well under Ubuntu, as well as just about anything other OS with a display.
For the most part,
There are some exceptions - the site_perl stuff you mention, for example. I would say those aren't a quirk of the filesystem layout, but rather a quirk of the way Apple has configured their bundled apache dictated by the default configuration of OS X such that
Granted, if you configure your Mac so that you can see all the directories, then it seems weird, but there is some logic behind it.
More importantly, there is nothing that requires the use of
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I don't use Linux regularly, although I've played with it extensively in the past. I've been having some network problems in XP, so I decided to install Linux over the weekend as a bit of a troubleshooting aid, and I'd heard a lot of good things about the distro with the Worst Name Ever, so I gave Ubuntu a shot.
My XP installation is on a RAID-0 array (I like to live dangerously), and I decided I wouldn't worry about getting a boot loader menu; I'd just change the boot priority in BIOS. I've had bad experiences mixing OSes in the past, and I prefer to keep them as seperate as possible within one machine. So I downloaded the "Desktop" CD (as opposed to the "Server" CD), which turned out to be a Live CD with a very basic installer on it. I decided to view that as a feature, and sat back and relaxed while the installation made most of the decisions for me. Surprisingly, Ubuntu saw the individual drives on the RAID controller, but I was careful not to do anything with them as I pointed it to the "new" 40GB drive and let it partition it as it saw fit. The installation went off without a hitch, and I was soon rebooting. Little did I know that would be the last time I'd see a functional Ubuntu desktop. After POSTing, the computer hung without any sort of protest. After resetting a couple of times with the same results, I finally raised the boot priority of the RAID array so I could get back into Windows. That's when I discovered that the installer had installed GRUB onto the MBR of the RAID array without asking, God knows why, which of course didn't work.
Despite this setback, I was undeterred, and after repairing the MBR I headed to the Ubuntu forums. After posting my problem, someone suggested I should use the "alternative" installation CD, because it would let me decide where/how to install GRUB. Right then. So I downloaded the alternative installation CD, chose the proper drive for GRUB, and I was on my way. Once again, installation appeared to proceed smoothly, however after rebooting, the system hung at "Mounting root filesystem..." and eventually dropped to a shell, telling me it couldn't find the drive it had just booted from. After searching for "Mounting root filesystem," I found a slew of similar problems on the Ubuntu forums, although the causes and solutions appeared to be many. After making my own request for help, I was greeted with some helpful, but less-than-knowledgable replies.
After a couple of days of waiting for more replies and trying to troubleshoot on my own, I decided I had done enough work to try to get a simple installation to work. I downloaded Debian and it installed and booted perfectly the first time -- something I'd expect of any modern distro.
Anyway, your milage may certainly vary, and it could just be the luck of the draw that I picked a bad version to try; nonetheless, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Personally, I've had an easier time installing OSX on non-Apple hardware.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere