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HardOCP Spends 30 Days With MacOSX
boyko.at.netqos writes "Hardocp.com has published "30 days with MacOSX" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" and "30 days with Vista" doing the evaluation. Ultimately he likes the stability and security but other concerns keep him from recommending it. From the article: 'The hardware lock-in and lack of quality freeware makes owning and maintaining a Macintosh an expensive endeavor ... Mac OS X has some amazing capabilities, but you spend a lot of money. Indeed, it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. Want to convert a file? Buy a utility. Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program. Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.'"
does anyone else find it surprising that they're still trying to push the most expensive computing platform into schools? No wonder some are switching to Windows. OMG I just called a Microsoft product cheaper! Is the problem really this bad?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Sure, the Mac fanboi attitude is to buy stuff, but remember, OSX is a BSD, and a lot of the same stuff Linux has can easily be ported to OSX and probably has been.
... though that's not for the faint of heart even if it is as simple as ./configure && make && sudo make install
If not - you can always try to do things the "source" way
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one.
Which other operating system can I use that doesn't require me to buy a new computer when this one feels too slow? If it's a lack of RAM that's slowing things down, then I'm just as likely to be able to chuck more memory into a Mac or a PC. If it's the hard drive, then again, I can put a whizzier one in regardless of whether it's a Mac or a PC.
On one hand it limits the available options and raises prices because of a lack of competition, but on the other hand it makes the product more stable in a sense of no mystery products/drivers that could break something else on the system. The review seemed fair in what I got out of it.
Well Duh. I'd much rather buy my way out of the situations he names than spend my time scrounging around for semi-adequate "free" solutions a la linux, or borked spyware crap a la windows. Maybe his time is free, but mine isn't.
There is not a single bit of actual information in that article. It's pure, unsubstantiated opinion, and in many cases it's simply wrong. Why do you post crap like that?
I'm not a mac fan and I think that people who buy Macintoshes are fools. But with that said, the Mac OS comes with a richer suite of applications than Windows does, that's for damned sure.
Of course you get more with Linux. Shock, amazement. But Apple actually gives you several easy to use applications which still don't have reasonable analogues on Linux. Not as in "they don't come with" but as in "they don't exist". As annoying as iDVD is, for example, it beats the living shit out of both dvdstyler and qdvdauthor for ease of use.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I love my new iMac, but I have a one year old Canon laser printer/scanner/copier that won't work with it. One year old, not 10-20.
I have never had a problem with a lack of freeware for the Mac. There are a couple pieces of shareware I have paid for because I like the software and want to support the developer, but that was never a matter of functionality. The only other piece of software I have paid for is Apple Remote Desktop, and that could be replaced by VNC, ssh, and shell scripting if necessary. He mentions that he can't find any DVD shrinking software. He must have not looked very hard, as I know Mac the Ripper is just one of many free programs that do just that.
Yes, you do have to pay for MS Office and Photoshop, but no shit. You have to pay for these on Windows as well. He states that the free options like Abiword lack all the features necessary, but that's going to be true of any Office or PS knockoff. So not only do you have the option to buy Office and PS (just like on Windows, and unavailable for Linux), but you have a number of free alternatives, most of which aren't any harder to install on OS X than on Linux.
All told, the author is either ignorant of or biased against Macs. He complains about the Mac Mini lacking a more powerful graphics card and more RAM, but he fails to point out that it's a $600 entry level machine. He also complains about OS X not running on non-Apple hardware. That's a business argument for another day (and one that he would have a hard time winning), but it shouldn't be relevant to a technical review.
Wow. The description is not at all like my experence with OS X. However is frighteningly describing my usual Windows experence.
Saying OS-X has no freeware is both wrong directly (there is plenty of good freeware for OS X) and indirectly (Alot of open source unix apps compile directly, have premade binaries, or have ports going)
Using fink one even has the full apt functionality from debian and debian based systems.
Although things have been changing slightly in the past couple years, freeware for windows is harder to find, and before then almost impossible. Everyone was on the bandwagon of crappy worthless shareware apps, and worse, apps labeled as freeware but require a serial to unlock, by definition shareware.
I'd say only recently has windows even come close to a freeware pool like the OSS crowd has enjoyed, and continue to enjoy under OS X.
No freeware, maybe. But one of the things I really like about OSX is the amount of high quality, reasonably priced useful mini apps there are for it. Things like TextMate (or TextWrangler, which is free!) and Transmit are worth the money. There is a lot of "freeware" for the PC, but a lot of it would be better termed "crapware".
Come now, we all know that if Windows came bundled with what Apple machines come with, there would be more antitrust lawsuits. Whatever your opinion of their respective companies, the comparison isn't fair when Windows is legally restricted from bundline more.
I am now Windows free for 3 years, loving OSX.
I am sadly disappointed in the support that apple has given the open source community. there are a LOT of free applications that do work well on mac osx, but apple does not seem to care. there is almost no official support for integrating open source applications. dports, fink, etc. - none of them really work well. you walk into an apple store and they say "if you are typing into a shell, we don't want to (read:can't) talk to you," literally. selecting and promoting open source software would be a way for apple to take a commanding lead in the os market, but they don't.
apple should have a marketing campaign like: "set yourself free" or something like that and let people choose them as a real windows alternative.
As a musician who uses Macs almost exclusively (disclaimer: I use other platforms for other stuff, not a rabid Macboy), I've constantly over the years been both rewarded and punished by the platform. He gets it right when he complains about the hardware upgrade schedule. It's only been recently that I've found a nice balance between my OS, hardware, and all the intensive stuff that my software needs to do, without having to upgrade one of those three things in a six month period.
Where he gets it wrong though is about the freeware. I've found a wealth of freeware and tinkering advice for getting more into/out of your Mac--I'm always amazed at how much is actually out there, considering the relatively small user base. And that doesn't even count projects like Fink, if you want to do real tinkering. So he's right and he's wrong, but it seems he entered the argument with his mind made up, and that's the real mistake.
u-bend
So you're telling me that an author from HardOCP, an overclocking website, considered the task of adding memory to a computer to be too daunting to bother with? Come on. It tells you how to add memory to the computer in the manual.
Wtf? If my external drive ceased to work, and it did so on anything I plugged it into across multiple other OSs, I would blame the drive, not the OS. This guy is grasping for reasons to blame OS X for stuff and for ways to give it a bad review. Typical FUD: my drive died, while using OS X, so Im cautious about using any drives with it cause it obviously kills drives!! heh. His other complaints are just as laughable, blaming OS X for making people buy hardware? Name the last Windows version that did not require a Major upgrade in hardware over the previous just to run? Name an OS that wont go faster without buying more ram or faster processors? It like saying "my car wont accelerate any faster unless I replace the engine with a bigger one, so I must be a crappy driver." And the comment on lack of quality free software, how many quality free aps can you get for windows? Almost anything from the Linux/Open Source/*nix world will compile on OS X, there's even this project called Mac Ports that makes bringing normal FOSS stuff into the native OS X environment easier. Gimp is a prime example. If you look around, there is plenty. This guy is just spewing FUD, looking to complain about everything, riding the thought that to get better viewer ship for his articles he has to be negative, just like the major TV news is these days.
Blah
Tm
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The main 'faults with OS X' the reviewer finds are:
The MacMini only has 512Mb ram (because I configured it wrong)
The MacMini has Wifi and bluetooth with I don't need instead of more ram (because I configured it wrong)
The MacMini isn't expandable (I bought the wrong machine)
Which product was he supposed to be reviewing?
Why does the MacMini suddenly turn into a MacBook when he tries to return it?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Macs are just like any high end car like a BMW or Mercedes, they look nice, have a few fetures that kick ass, and is a status symbol, but are the company that makes it is pretty much bending you over on the price. Windows is like a Ford or a Cheavy, not the best looking or most powerfull cars, but they get the job done for 90% of people that use them, of course everyone bitches that they breakdown way to much. Linux is like a street racing car, a million diffrent flavors, and yea you may have pimped it out with twin turbos, and converted ever bolt to metric, but that still isn't right for everyone. So fanboys quit argueing about it already because your just spinning your tires and just enjoy what you use instead.
In TFA he said he tried to install a lot of *nix software/X11 stuff, and had a lot of trouble.
Though, honestly, when he called NeoOffice an X11 app, I had to take away his credibility card...
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As I mention elsewhere:
* NeoOffice is the Mac port of OpenOffice, it does not require X11 to run. It works well, IMHO.
That is a typo, and it is being corrected. The line: "While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11," should be "While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available, and OpenOffice is available through X11,"
* There are plenty of free open source apps, just like in Linux and Windows: Handbrake and MacTheRipper for DVD ripping, etc.
The issue is not that there is no freeware, in fact, I used Handbrake and Transmission and Colloquy in the article. However, DVD Ripping, BitTorrenting, and IRC chatting are all secondary compared to WordProcessing and Graphics Editing - and NeoOffice/AbiWord/OpenOffice(X11)/GIMP all had significant problems with either stability or ease of use. BitTorrent is nice to have, but word processing is mission critical. That's the lack of quality freeware I was talking about.
* The model between the Mini and MacPro is the iMac
I don't know what you're referring to here. I say that there is no consumer-priced model from Apple that has easily accessed components, like the former PowerMac stand-alone tower line. To get to upgradability of that nature, you need to go all the way to the MacPro - is that what you mean?
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
One won't get far using a Macintosh from day-to-day without a word processor, for example, and the effective choices are limited to the iWork and Microsoft Office suites. Only the latter has features that professionals find themselves using with regularity (like edit tracking).
So we all need edit tracking?! How many of us really need the feature-creep of Office 2007? There are some, and there are some who really are doing DTP with a word processor, but the vast majority of people do not. Most of us would be well suited with TextEdit.
While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all.
AbiWord works like a charm and does not use X11, nor, IIRC, does NeoOffice. What functionality does this author 'need' that exists in Word for Mac but not AbiWord or NeoOffice? The Microsoft logo?
From time to time, there are small, niche apps that cost you - like the DVD shrinking software or the WMV converter - which have a freeware equivalent on both Windows XP and Linux.
How about HandBrake? While I've always been annoyed at the 30 dollar QuickTime fee, the same libraries for conversion, etc, are freely available on Mac so many free alternatives exist. Which WMV convertor for Linux are we talking about? If VLC, it also exists on Mac.
Not everyone needs BlueTooth and WiFi - and I would have rather had a computer I could use.
What is this doing in the article?
Dual-booting on a Mac brings the Mac platform an ability to play the games that were once the sole province of Windows. This should have been a net bonus for Mac but the limited and underpowered graphics solutions coupled with the inability to upgrade them negate that advantage.
So he tested on a Mac Mini and found that it couldn't play games well since they didn't cram an 8800 into the fat sandwich case. Great. Now, try the brand new MacBook Pro's video card or the iMac or the Mac Pro and see how that goes. And, the Mac Pro is upgradeable.
Furthermore, though people complain about DRM in Vista, the DRM of an Apple computer puts it to shame. There is no technical reason why Mac OS X can't run on other hardware, and even where technical compatibility is a problem, no one is asking that Apple have any sort of support for third-party hardware. Third-party drivers can take care of that, but we want to be able to have a user-friendly, stable OS to use on any hardware that we want without Apple actively preventing it.
Vista and OSX DRM issues are quite different. Apple has an understandable rationale for not wanting OS X to run on any hardware. If you don't agree with it, it is not at all impossible to subvert as a quick peek at Pirate Bay will show.
It is also expensive. The OS is sadly chained to the anchor that is Apple hardware, and I am less enthusiastic about that. It means that to use Mac OS X, you need to spend at least $600 on a new computer, and more for a computer that actually runs well. It also means that unless you go for the absolutely top-of-the-line Mac Pro line, you will need to replace your entire system when it starts to become outdated, rather than gradually solving bottlenecks by upgrading components.
600 dollars. Tragic, isn't it? If that is a problem, buy a used Mac. One of the effects of Macs being excellent, consistent 'package' computers is that they are very loved in the resale market, both for buyers and sellers. If only they would let me but this 600 dollar graphics card in the Mac Mini though...
Furthermore, the lack of freeware requires either resorting to illegal activity or resorting to paying out the nose for commercial software. Don't get me wrong, comme
Hax-fu?
And how, exactly, is this different from the situation in the PC world?
"Many ill-fated customers who upgraded have yet to get their PCs back to perfect working order" it says here and in many other places. Vista broke quite a few hardware drivers. And if your device is more than a few years old, the MBAs who decide these things are likely to decide against spending development money just to please loyal customers, so in most cases the simplest option is... to buy your way out of it.
Conversely, there are many things Mac OS X can do that Windows can't do unless you locate commercial products or shareware. I just found out yesterday, for example, that, unlike Mac OS X, Windows XP has no built-in way to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of a hard drive. And, of course, as far as I know there's no way to create a PDF file on a Windows machine without installing extra software.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I just bought a Mac to replace my dead XP box. This is my second trip to the land of mac, having lived there from the 512 to System 7.6. Now that most of the outside world compatablity issues are moot, I can't see buying another XP, or Vista, while in it's first incarnation. I've been too beat up by Microsoft to buy anything new. The best MS system I ever saw was Win 98 on an "educational system", after XP came out... Yes, the Mac is more expensive. So is BMW. So is Rolex. The construction quality of the iMac is better than most of the boxes I saw in stores. It was up and running in my application in a whopping 20 minutes, 10 of which were due to a disconnected DSL line. No, the Mac is not perfect. I was defacto sysadmin on the old Mac systems, so I don't suffer from total fanboy-itis. I'm not a programmer, but can normally figure things out. Going from System 7 to Win 3.1 was a major buzzkill, but now, the look and feel are close....but OSX is what XP wants to be when it grows up. If you have heavy use by non computer savvy folks (read:family for which you are tech support), the OSX means less tech support, fewer things to be picked up while looking for IM icons, and less time fighting with a computer while said family member stares at you to "make it work". I respect unix folks, but don't have the time to take it on. I am, like the 99% of the world, depending on store bought, so I have two choices. OSX is better, overall (not perfect) for someone who really does not care to resolve driver conflicts, port issues, malware, worms, and such.
Also, just b/c something is /mentioned/ does NOT mean that it was given a chance, nor was it properly researched, nor..
Why don't you just admit that you didn't read the article? He specifically discusses Macports, and goes into excruciating detail about his attempts to use Fink, which he concluded was just too hard to use (matching my own experience exactly). He also goes into great detail about the shortcomings of X11 applications run on OS X.
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Why are they shit? They do work, and that's what I expect them to do. I don't care if the drivers are complete crap. As long as they work! I mean, that's what really matters right? When things "just work". I could say the same about Linux and OS X. I mean, those OS suck. If I have a windows computer, I just plug whatever I bought, and have it working (I rarely need to use the drivers). IF Linux OR OS X don't support them, that means they're just pieces of crap. The world would be a better place if they just went away.
(It is a joke. Laugh).
Seriously, why do people complain and blame Windows when those things don't work, but they blame the device/manufacturer/whatever when it doesn't work on OS X or Linux? I'd say it's not fair.
The DRM module in OSX does one thing and one thing only - it keeps you from running OS X on non-Apple computers. It's no different from the CD-Key you need to install Windows, and FAR less of an imposition than activation, "Windows Genuine Advantage", Secure Audio/Video Path, DRI, signed drivers, and everything else that Windows imposes on you.
Having to buy Apple hardware to run OS X seems to be about 90% of the author's complaints, and it's a valid one, but the fact that on *some* Macs (and not all) this uses a DRM chip to enforce the lock-in doesn't mean that this is DRM, any more than using a Power PC rather than an intel chip was DRM in the previous generation. The only actual DRM in OS X as shipped is the barely-honor-system-quality encryption that iTunes uses... and that is hopefully on the way out...
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I wonder if the "lock-in" crowd will ever get it? Don't want to be locked in to a good product? Ok, your choice...buy a Dell and enjoy your MS Experience. Why come to a Mac OS party and complain about Apple Hardware lock-in?
I'm definitely not a Mac 'fanboy' but the review seems undoubtedly slanted against Mac. He also claims:
"Virtually unusable" with 512MB RAM? I have one of the first Mac Minis with only a meagre 256MB RAM, and I use it all the time for many kinds of tasks and actually pretty seldom run into any performance problems. Yet with horrendously over-dramatized hyperbole he states Apple has "blood on its hands" for releasing a machine with "only" 512MB RAM?
Either he is a serious power-user with intensive day-to-day tasks (in which case his criticism has no relevance for the man on the street), or he is outright lying.
He also criticizes that its X support is not great. But Windows comes with all of absolutely no X support!? He also points out that if you want to do serious photo-editing you need to pay for Photoshop - gee, I didn't know the Windows version of Photoshop was free. And there is GIMP for Mac so he can't complain that its because Photoshop is the only option or something.
Either the reviewer is trolling for ad-views for his website, or he is a corporate shill for MS, or he is biased and using different sets of standards to evaluate the Mac vs. (one can only presume) Windows.
It is true though that when your mac is old and slow you have to buy a new one. Not like a PC. if your PC is slow you either wave your magic wand over it to make it faster or better yet you install the new Windows OS and its like your hardware is brand new.
I guess his complaint is about upgrading your computer. Of course I use a laptop most of the time so I hardly notice the lack of upgrading. But I thought the new Intel macs had upgradeable CPUs (didn't someone upgrade one to an 8 core before apple released one?) and you can upgrade the ram and the hard drive. I admit I know nothing about upgrading video cards on the mac these days (laptop again) so that might be an issue.
I don't get it. Sure maybe the mac is a little less upgradeable than the PC, but very few people replace their motherboards these days, its easier to just buy a new machine. This sounds like hyperbole to me.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The guy is an idiot. Why would you need to buy special software to open linux files? Come on, you can run almost any linux or unix application or utility that exists on OSX - so how can he say you have to buy commercial software for nearly everything and there's almost no freeware stuff for OSX? There's all the linux and solaris stuff plus all the OSX stuff. Certainly more than on Windows.
Not only that, but it has all the functionality of a linux or unix box. That's why you'll find that the laptop of choice for a lot of non-windows/non-mac developers is OSX. People who think that it's some locked-down fisher-price toy don't have any idea what the hell they're talking about. It's like saying that because you don't know how to how to perform surgery, a scalpel is a stupid, useless tool.
Oh, and of that 'free' software for windows, what percentage comes pre-packaged with spyware? 80%?
As far as upgrading hardware goes, yeah it's crappy that you can't swap out a motherboard on your iMac or laptop very easily. So sell the iMac. Did he price used macs on ebay? Doesn't he realize that even crappy old G4 iBooks are still worth real money? That does a lot to help keep upgrade costs semi-reasonable.
100% agreement here... I have to get sly looks from one of my system administrator friends because I actually use a GUI to begin with.
Sorry, command line is great for a lot of things, but so is the GUI, so it might as well be nice. And when I want the command line... there it is! In that terminal window! And when I maximize it, I get more info on the screen than you do without a GUI! Hey, look at that!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I spend a fair amount of time at the HardOCP forums when I'm looking for PC info. It is one of the most virulently anti mac websites I've encountered in the last ten years. It is rare for any post concerning the mac to receive anything other than a tidal wave of antimac troll posts.
There are plenty of intelligent people over there, but when it comes to the Mac they behave like a bunch of fucking baboons, and this "review" should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
actually I think that you totally missed the point of the article. The point was to see what somebody who had absolutely NO exposure to a mac would think after 30 days of using it. If he didn't use spotlight, thats probably because he couldn't find it, or had no freaking clue what the hell "spotlight" meant. Same thing with dashboard. What does that app's functionality have to do with a dashboard? (at least in the sense that the vast majority of people think of it). Sure, you might know what these things are, or that you can find openoffice for mac by searching for "neo-office", but how is this guy supposed to know that "textpad" is just like wordpad on steroids. The point is that a user should not have to search all over the place to find these things. They should be able to just sit down in front of the keyboard, and get their work done.
And don't even start about fink, or macports, or whatever else is out there. The casual user should NOT have to install some goofy third party port-of-a-port of a BSD application.
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Well, this is because all-in-one devices are almost universally shit.
I concur. This is why I advocate, at a bare minimum, one wife for cooking & cleaning, one for intellectual discourse, one for sex, and one for bearing children. Those all in one models just don't cut it.
Slow news day? More like OLD news day. My first thought was--what the fuck is this, early 2001? OS X has been out for SIX FUCKING YEARS--who cares that some douchebag just now spent 30 days with it?
The use of, benefits of, and shortcomings of Mac OS X have been thoroughly documented on a thousand* different sites. It's not like it's even a new version--10.4 has been out for TWO EFFING YEARS!!! Where has this retard been? (Reminds me of the NewsRadio episode when Bill discovered rap.)
Up next: 30 days spent breathing air and drinking water--a Hard OCP exclusive!
* the funny thing is, "thousand"--usually an exaggeration--is in this case a drastic understatement. Googling for 'os x review' yields 67,400,000 matches. Just in case anyone has been under a rock and wants to read some good reviews by smart people, here are a couple:
Review of 10.3 by Bruce Tognazzini, Apple employee #66
Detailed technical review of 10.4 from ars.tecnica with links to reviews of every version of OS X, ever
Typical review from a Mac site
Review of 10.4 from PC World
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You say this:
Finally gave up and sold the printer to a windows-only relative.
But earlier you said:
I love my new iMac, but I have a one year old Canon laser printer/scanner/copier that won't work with it. One year old, not 10-20.
So which is it? Is the fact the Canon printer works only with Windows a problem with the printer or a problem with the Mac?
Maybe so, but if he is getting facts incorrect like that, he sucks at his "profession". Even if other journalists do the same, that's more of a critcism of journalism itself than anything else.
I'm not saying he didn't have some good points, I found some of the things he said true to my own experiences with MacOS (His "The Bad" section I thought was fairly well accurate, "The Good" had some things that were just too subjective for my liking, but had it's pros and cons). But if he can't do his research, and puts in fairly obvious falacities, then how can I trust his writings on topics I'm not familiar with? More importantly, does he have a right to be potentially misleading the public?
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No, I didn't miss the point. I am simply pointing out how flawed the article is. If you really want to stand up for the same person who wrote such crazy things as insinuating that the average Linux user writes his own software to replace commercial applications only found in Windows, then be my guest. Every article reads like that of a 13 year old who's excited about gaming and little else.
.app files and the occasional folder for a productivity suite or other big program that doesn't stick to this simple convention.
If you want to take that line of thinking further, then review the Vista comparison. That should have been done by a person who never used Windows before, since about 90% of the interface is the exact same thing with a more osx-looking title bar at the top. Alternatively, as this same thinking should have been applied to switching to Linux. In order to take on that task, there were three outlets of support mentioned as last resorts before giving up on any issue.
The things you have issue with are the things any OSX user will find within 10 minutes if they are a former windows or linux user. Spotlight is on the desktop at all times, it even looks like a search function to someone who has had SOME form of computer exposure in the past, as it has the icon of a magnifying glass.
Expose/Dashboard/Spotlight are all covered in way too much detail on the apple's switch site, the tiny little quick start manual that comes with the system, and all over the internet. This isn't just a case of a new user not being able to figure out how to progress with their new system, this looks more like someone sat around getting frustrated and calling something stupid before they even bothered to approach the problem with some logic. Other things, like the applications he couldn't find that were at his fingertips. Not to mention, how Apple sort of made these features key points in all their switch advertising text. These are of the few things that differentiates the brands anymore, and our hardware expert wasn't aware of any of them.
In 30 days, if you have not found your applications folder or spotlight in osx, you probably just want to go back to playing Q4 on Windows and calling yourself a "power user". The fact he missed the Applications folder's beauty is another bit of evidence of the personality we are dealing with. For those who aren't mac-inclined, it's like the Program Files folder in Windows, only without all the settings and clutter. Typically, there's just a list of
I'm certainly going to put a Windows XP partition on Whakataruna for the near future - but I've decided to keep the bulk of my hard drive - and most of my day-to-day operations, in Linux. XP is going to be my OS for gaming, audio loop editing, and Photoshop, but for everything else, Linux has transformed into an attractive, utility-driven, customizable, and generally easy-to-use interface that takes all of the virtues and none of the faults from the other major OSes and gives it to the consumer for free.
Here's some more chatter from your friend. If he had actually been using ubuntu since that text was written, he would have probably had something to say about how nice it is to be able to run his xapps off his Linux box on the laptop. He probably would have known what apt is by now, thus not crying about the lack of software. There probably would have been mention of how nice it is having a terminal icon on the desktop, so he could do things the way he did them in Linux. Can't have none of that, mainly because I don't believe much of what happened in the article reflects upon any reality outside of his teenage tech fantasy land.
I suppose the thing I find most annoying is the fact that I picked up osx and started using it right away, with no problems, using only google. My new boss came in one day and sat down new little macbook and said "Here's your laptop!". Within half an hour of first boot, I made it further and had used more features than this sap found in 30 DAYS. I'm not some
I used to do the same thing, but then the cycle just got too fast. Upgrading the video card meant either picking a lower end card to support older technology, or buying a new mother board to support the new graphics card. Buying new RAM didn't see any boost until you bought a new motherboard, and recently, the purcahse of a new processor has dictated the purchase of a new motherboard as when you're going to spend a hundred or so anyway, you might as well be upgrading. Modular is nice if you want to stay where you are (and even then, only for so long) but if you want to upgrade, everything is relying on everything else, so it doesn't matter. The hard drives are the only things in my years of upgrading that I can say I've kept around long enough to be worth the frustration of the upgrade path, but even then, if I had to get new ones as part of a whole machine purchase, I could put together a nice big array of all the old disks.
Here's what happend to me. My home built athlon machine died. Processor or motherboard, I'm not quite sure which, but it was one of them. I could buy a new processor to test it out, but then I'm out the cost of the processor if it doesn't work. So I went to buy a new motherboard, figuring I would grab one with some expansion room so that if I needed a new processor, I could up it just a little. Turns out, there aren't many boards like mine anymore, at least not at the shops. Sure I could buy it online, but I need this today. Of the options, none appeal to me, not for the money and because the few ones that are worth the money are unuseable for me because they only have PCI E and not AGP. In the end, I settled for an upgrade to both the CPU and the motherboard, but as I didn't want to upgrade my RAM at this time, I was limited a bit even in that selection and I still need a PCI E graphics card. When I'm all said and done with this, I'll have put about $400-$500 into this computer, and even then, I won't have a great machine, just one that I can say is better than what I had before.
By contrast, my father just had his old mac tower die (processors). He found used tower that was a generation after his, swapped out the various expansion cards and harddrive. Same general idea as my repair about $500 for a computer that's better than what he had before, but no where near top of the line. In the end, in my experience, it's about the same, PC or Mac. If you want top of the line, you'll pay thousands, no matter if you upgrade or buy outright. If you want to move up a little, you'll pay a couple hundred, no matter if you upgrade or buy it outright. If you want to stay with the exact machine you have, that's the only place I've seen upgrading do any reall good.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Obviously you haven't spent any time with the better quality free/open source PC apps out there. Also, just because you pay for something that doesn't automatically make it better.
It isn't a matter of thickness of skin. It's a matter of the author, pretending to be a journalist, coming off as performing an honest and unbiased reviewer of the strengths and weaknesses of the platform. He is misrepresenting himself.
RTFA and learn some English.
... "the other choice was NeoOffice, an OpenOffice.org fork for Macintosh, and running OpenOffice.org through an X11 environment."
... running NeoOffice OR running OpenOffice.org through an X11 server.
He said, and I quote
He basically highlights 2 choices
I actually found TFA to be spot on.
He's right about the culture being more one that buys software rather than getting it for free -- but the quality of those tools is then also significantly higher than a lot of open-source software (with exceptions, of course). For example, CSSEdit or Fission are both easily worth the $20 or $25 you spend on and pay themselves back within days. On the other hand, he's wrong about the paucity of Freeware in general; it's just that the favorite tool tends to be commercial rather than freeware, as is often the case on Windows. On top of that, I've found the general quality of Freeware to be outstanding (Adium, Tunnelblick, TextWrangler, etc.), which is more than I can say for the download orgy that one often embarks on when searching for a tool on Windows.