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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.