I've tried several Linux/PPC distros (Gentoo, Debian, YDL and LPPC-Q4) on several Mac types (blue, grey, various Powerbooks). As for today Gentoo is the best distro and it's getting better even faster than other distros. All hardware works as under Macos9 and Macosx. And the packaging system (Portage) is just a dream.
Agree about DRM, but better try it with Gentoo - it will optimize EVERYTHING for your specific hardware, which I cannot tell about Debian, Mandrake or YDL.
There are several good Linux distros for the PPC, but why would you really want to use them?
Perhaps b/c Linux is open source, not proprietary, easy to fix, many to learn, cross-platform, vendor-independent OS with widely used cross-patform remotely working window system (X11).
The best "functional-relational" language I've ever read about was Datalog (1993). But there is still the same question - why hasn't it become popular?
The only answer I can see myself is that most of limitations in "pure" ANSI SQL are compensated (somehow) by integration (embedding) SQL with conventional (mostly procedural) programming languages. I agree that the result of such integration is "dirty". However does anyone else (besides me and you) in the world understand it?
Actually, there other such people, but their ideas about post-SQL
are considered as crazy and no one commercial company wants to adopt it.
Perhaps open source can? How about functional programming extention to PostgreSQL? It's already got PL/* extension to integrate SQL with procedural languages. How about FL/*? It would be exciting to have FL/Haskell, FL/Lisp, FL/Scheme and FL/ML in PostgreSQL! Just remember, when I mean FL/Schema I don't mean pgsql *client* library linked to the guile or gauche interpreter. I mean that the scheme interpreter library will be added (embedded) to PostgreSQL *server* as a server-side FL/Scheme programming extension in a way similar how Python interpreter library is added (embedded) to PostgreSQL *server* as a PL/Python server-side language extension.
And why stop on FL? How about Logical and Function-Logical programming language extensions in PostgreSQL? LL/Prolog, FLL/Curry - you name it!:)
Now the question is who will do it and on what budget?
the hassles of WinModems and XFree86 for laptop screens under Linux
No hassles with any modems on all Powerbook models I've tried with various Linux/PPC distros (YDL, Gentoo, Debian) so far. Same for X11, sound, powerbook specific buttons and LCD backlight.
that OS 10.2 will run MS Office natively
What's wrong with OpenOffice? or what would be wrong to run MS Office (mac-os edition) on Mac-on-Linux? Well, if you really need "native" MS Office, than the laptop with MS windows will be the best choice anyway.
that it's still really a UNIX under the covers
Are you talking about Mac OS X? Do you know that Mac OS X is not the only Unix-like OS perfectly fine working on Mac platforms, including various powerbooks? Did you consider any of Linux/PPC distros, like Gentoo, YDL or Debian?
and that it's cool looking and not too heavy
It won't be any heavier with Linux/PPC - just a hundred bucks lighter:)
First book is the only good book about SQL standard I found. You can learn lots yourself and you can teach (if you are a teacher or a project leader) other developers.
The second one very well explains when and why "pure" SQL doesn't work [well] anymore.
By the way, Date is not less bizarre character than Celko, neither he is less productive author. Especially together with Darwen.
834 pages? it's just a beginning
on
SQL Fundamentals
·
· Score: 2
For most IT people it takes a couple of hours to get to grips with basics of select, update etc Joins, sub queries come next.
Year, right. Next after 5000 hours. Even professional SQL programmers keep doing serious mistakes in sub-queries. Not only in performance optimization area (waiting for results forever), but also in consistency are (getting unexpected result sets).
When you have 2-3 tables with 1-2 foreign keys than you may learn sub-queries in 12 hours. But when you do a very specific data mining work, combining several huge historical journals, several classification graphs, lots of assotiation maps and many lots of lookup tables, then you might realize that you still have to learn SQL even after 5000 hours of using it. If you don't think so, then you've never done any serious data mining by yourself. I spoke with many SQL programmers who worked with ERP, CRM and Supply-Chain applications and they had the same opinion.
Is there anything like this in the works for the penguin masses?
If the question is about migrating from Linux/PC to Mac, then the answer is Gentoo:
All time you invest to Gentoo on x86 platform will work for you when you move to Gentoo on PPC platform. Your skils, you config filesand patches will be reused with Gentoo.
That's the buity of a cross platform Linux distro: it's same everywhere, including Intel, Mac, Alpha and Sparc.
Never waste your time for that proprietary candy-enriched Mac OS X. And don't ignore people saying "BSD is dead" - there are lots of such people and they cannot all be stupid.
To be honest, Debian will save your investment almost the same way. And with some exceptions, redhat with YDL as well. Gentoo will just work faster and have less broken dependencies.
I have a hard time believing that Gentoo is better than any modern distro at Mac power management
Gentoo is the modern distro. You should try.
Most pro audio firewire devices are poorly supported in Linux or FreeBSD etc, because of the lack of applications such as Logic and Cubase.
I am not multimedia geek, I am a classical Unix geek. I work with databases and server applications. Multimedia is too boring for me.
Actually a well-behaved application may work on GNUstep quite nicely. It can certainly be engineered to do so.
Perhaps it can be designed. But it is not. And GNUstep is not a hardware platform.
I wear glasses already and I don't want my vision getting any worse.
The quality of anti-aliasing in modern X11 is not the reason of your glasses, if tuned properly.
Maybe you don't get it. I really like Linux. A LOT! However, I really like OS X a lot too.
Perhaps you don't get it. My question is not what do you like and even not about why do you like it. The question is why Unix geen should like Mac OS X more than Unix/Linux/X11 enough to forget about migration problems and switch from OS to OS.
Actually, it can. The technology is called portable distributed objects. It has existed for years, by the way.
Besides in article, in relaity I never saw any Cocoa application running remotely. And don't belive I can run them remotely on the other platforms, as I do with X11 applications - I can run X11 OpenView from HP/UX on Solaris, AIX, win32/Cygwin, Darwin/X11 and of course on Linux and BSD. Tell me that it is possible for any Mac applications.
Not the screen itself, but objects that would need such treatment are drawn as PDF and rotated by the display engine itself - using OpenGL on your 3D card!
Do you mean that the application should be re-designed and re-developed for beign capable to do that? Too bad...
Run-time performance is really a concern for system administrators, integrators and IT managers. The difference in run-time performance should be compensated by faster hardware, which gives a difference in cost of ownership. I expect such difference will be significantly less comparing to the difference in cost of software production, which is in essence a difference in performance of programmers, which in own turn time is very expensive.
Therefore, it is much better to compare how both technologies help individual programmers as well as their teams to work faster and to produce a code with less errors (debugging time and QA resources). That would be a function of how API is structured, how concerns could be separated, how customizable code can be and will programmers tend to hardcode "business logic" riles.
That's the problem. I am again limited to one proprietary vendor, same as with M$. Compare it to X11 where I can run X11 appications cross any platforms with X11: many commercial Unices, BSD/x86, Linux/x86, Linux/PPC even win32/Cygwin, Darwin/X11. But I cannot remotely AND cross-platform Mac OS X admin tools. Imagine problems Mac OS X server will have in most of hosting facilities.
Don't waste your time with Suse - if you need speed on PPC then go with Gentoo. After enjoyable installation the system will be both super fast (very optimizaed) and very user friendly (Gnome 2).
Server admins like to access their server remotely. Including GUI-based admin applications, which are basically X11. Mac OS X does not have GUI I can run remotely. There is no X11 admin application for Mac OS X.
Therefore, Mac OS X is not convinient for server admins.
Almost all of my x86s are FreeBSD machines, but FreeBSD gets pretty boring after a while. Set it up, it runs, you're done.
Do you mean that nothing interesting can be done with FreeBSD besides setting it up? That's really boring. One day you should try Linux one more time - try to do something different then just install it by default and you'll find that will be interesting, while it will still run.
So I play with Darwin now and again, just for the change of pace.
So, whatever you try to do to set Darwin up - it doesn't run?
If this article was called "Why you shold switch to OS X" I could see you point... but it's not, it's called "Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks: implying that you have already switch and just wanted some comfort because they felt a little wierd without the omnipresent command line of linux and unix, next time pay attention.
I did pay that attention and noticed that fact. But it doesn't mean I cannot ask the question which is relevant to the subject and still interesting to some./ers - at least to myself:)
if you don't want eye candy, don't buy a mac
You know that Mac is the only available platfom for eye candy. The others are commercial Unices and Intel. You cannot prove that Mac OS X is best eye candy platform unless you ignore successful win32 sales.
Mac OS X is not the only OS making Mac hardware somehow useful. Linux/PPC is the other one. No need to mention BeOS. Besides, don't forget "good old" Mac OS 9, which still used by lots of users who cannot find their Mac OS 9 application ported to Mac OS X (for some of those poor guys Mac-on-Linux is much better "unixification" solution then Mac OS X).
Both win32 and X11 don't stay without any progress in font anti-aliasing. Win32 has font smoothing, X11 has FreeType. The argument that Mac OS X is the best font rendering platform becomes pretty obsolete.
if you wanna stick with your command line and don't like looking at anything beside white text on a black background, then you better stick with what you know
Here is the major difference between me and you. I know Mac OS X, but you don't know anything about Unix, specifically about X11. All commercial Unicies, BSD and Linux has a very nice support of X11 - GUI where you don't have to use CLI if you don't want to. But most of X11 users (and even some win32 users) keep one or two shell windows because it is a very useful tool to compensate any missed commands in menu items and don't tell me that Mac OS X has in its menu items ALL possible commands.
give GPL to democrats and give BSD to republicants (or vice versa). And wait for upcoming elections. Let the american people to decide what license to use in all software made by the goverment for people's money.
Let me summarize reasons of switching from Linux/Unix to Mac OS x, that I was advised after postingmy original comment about WHY vs WHAT.
Mac OS X is nice rendering fonts. That is important when you do you professional document/web publishing work. Although no one criticezed the quality of fonts in TeX system (LyX if you need it in GUI). I also would remind that Interleaf and FrameMaker are produced originally for Unix. Conclusion: fonts is not a serious reason, just a subjective impression.
Mac OS X supports many of useful commercial GUI aplications. Although it is true, but it is not because of Mac OS X quality. From marketing point commercial vendors just ported old Mac applications to mac OS X in order to keep the same customer base. I don't know any new "big" applications if they has been added to Mac OS X and if they are not existed previously in old Mac OS. I don't know any big Unix applications ported to Mac OS X from Unix and discontinued in Unix either. Apple is known on desktop market for years. Commercial unices are dying. Linux is just newcoming to the market. I belive that explains. And I belive that the situation will be changed in a couple of years: Linux will be supported with commercial GUI applications wider than Mac OS X. Or at least not less. Conclusion: if you don't need any Mac OS X specific GUI applications then look for other migration reasons or don't migrate at all.
It's easier to re-configure something on Mac OS X than on Linux. I agree, it is true for common parameters. But if you need anything unusal than on Mac OS X it will be either very difficult or it will impossible at all. Same problem with Windows NT. Imagine to build a kiosk or POS with Mac OS X. I can't. Conclusion: Don't consider Mac OS X if you (or your IT) need own OS - with changed kernel, with re-written boot sequence, with cluster, with re-written desktop GUI or without desktop at all.
Besides, no one compared internationalization of Mac OS X with Linux. I heard about some problems on Mac OS X with i18n in Cocoa and I heard very positive feedbacks about Linux internationalization from around the world. No wonder: i18n is one of reasons when distributed open source community has more chances to find and fix problems faster than any commercial vendor.
Final conclusion: switch to Mac OS X from Linux/Unix if you ready to develop GUI applications that will work only on Mac hardware, specifically on Mac OS X; if you are ready to pay for overpriced hardware that still unknown for most of IT specialists, if you are ok with MS Windows quality and you need just better fonts and only English fonts. Otherwise - keep Linux.
No, but it's not your enemy either, install rootless X11 and you get your X windows in the same environment as your aqua windows. I start XDarwin at login, and don't even have to think about it...
That reminds me X11 in Cygwin. But thank you anyway for a resonable advise. I'll keep it in mind. Although it solves only half of the "remote GUI" problem - access to remote X11 applications. Now, how about access to remote Cocoa applications? In win32 world I have to use various VNC methods and I am not happy with their quality cmparing to X11.
GUI's are essential for nice documents, and it helps that Office is fairly compatible for complex documents across platforms (Try getting this done in OpenOffice, and having word understand the result...)
The difference in quality between MS Office and OpenOffice is big enough for people who use office as one of primary tools. But if I open and edit office document just some times then such difference is not important.
You just made the classic mistake of assuming that because you, a unix geek, don't care about something, no other geek should either. Many of us do care about such things as good fonts.
I guess it's time to define the term "Unix geek". Let's do it relationally. By my opinion, "unix geeks" care mostly about system integrity and data processing, while web designers and web developers care more about UI graphical elements.
Just because we like the command line, doesn't mean we are prepared to put up with any old tat.
I never told that CLI must be the only way of UI. Personally, I spend half of my Linux time in GNOME using various GUI applications.
Expand your mind, and accept that other people have views just as valid as yours. If you are a true unix geek, you will appreciate the value of choice and not put down those that are different to yours. It's the desire for choice that has been the driving force behind most of geekdom for the past several years, hasn't it!
My original comment was actually the question "why to switch from Linux/Unix to Mac OS X?". I respect the choice people made or will made. I just want to know the reason. I believe that the conecpt of freedom is not only to choose something, but also to ask the question about it. I respect all geeks shifted to Mac OS X, but I want some of respect to my questin. Instead of convincing me to shift to Mac OS X, I see that half of answers are trying to convince me to stop to ask the question "WHY".
I don't know of a Illustrator "equivalent". Any suggestions?
I don't need much of advanced Illustrator functions. But lem try anyway. I use Dia for UML, Open Office drawing for slides and embedded diagrams and Graphviz when I generate graph diagrams right from my programs.
Please don't say OpenOffice can do this, we both know there are many many documents it butchers.
I use exclusively OpenOffice since its release 1.0 - no big problems so far. One time I've fixed a problem after debugging XML in the document file, another one a small fix in the source code helped.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried several Linux/PPC distros (Gentoo, Debian, YDL and LPPC-Q4) on several Mac types (blue, grey, various Powerbooks). As for today Gentoo is the best distro and it's getting better even faster than other distros. All hardware works as under Macos9 and Macosx. And the packaging system (Portage) is just a dream.
Agree about DRM, but better try it with Gentoo - it will optimize EVERYTHING for your specific hardware, which I cannot tell about Debian, Mandrake or YDL.
Perhaps b/c Linux is open source, not proprietary, easy to fix, many to learn, cross-platform, vendor-independent OS with widely used cross-patform remotely working window system (X11).
What do you expect to hear in a macosx-biased forum?
The only answer I can see myself is that most of limitations in "pure" ANSI SQL are compensated (somehow) by integration (embedding) SQL with conventional (mostly procedural) programming languages. I agree that the result of such integration is "dirty". However does anyone else (besides me and you) in the world understand it?
Actually, there other such people, but their ideas about post-SQL are considered as crazy and no one commercial company wants to adopt it.
Perhaps open source can? How about functional programming extention to PostgreSQL? It's already got PL/* extension to integrate SQL with procedural languages. How about FL/*? It would be exciting to have FL/Haskell, FL/Lisp, FL/Scheme and FL/ML in PostgreSQL! Just remember, when I mean FL/Schema I don't mean pgsql *client* library linked to the guile or gauche interpreter. I mean that the scheme interpreter library will be added (embedded) to PostgreSQL *server* as a server-side FL/Scheme programming extension in a way similar how Python interpreter library is added (embedded) to PostgreSQL *server* as a PL/Python server-side language extension.
And why stop on FL? How about Logical and Function-Logical programming language extensions in PostgreSQL? LL/Prolog, FLL/Curry - you name it! :)
Now the question is who will do it and on what budget?
No hassles with any modems on all Powerbook models I've tried with various Linux/PPC distros (YDL, Gentoo, Debian) so far. Same for X11, sound, powerbook specific buttons and LCD backlight.
that OS 10.2 will run MS Office natively
What's wrong with OpenOffice? or what would be wrong to run MS Office (mac-os edition) on Mac-on-Linux? Well, if you really need "native" MS Office, than the laptop with MS windows will be the best choice anyway.
that it's still really a UNIX under the covers
Are you talking about Mac OS X? Do you know that Mac OS X is not the only Unix-like OS perfectly fine working on Mac platforms, including various powerbooks? Did you consider any of Linux/PPC distros, like Gentoo, YDL or Debian?
and that it's cool looking and not too heavy
It won't be any heavier with Linux/PPC - just a hundred bucks lighter :)
I agree with you. Almost.
But which FP syntax do you mean? Lisp? ML? Or Haskell? Their syntaxes are quite different. How would you define FP syntax?
And why DB products with "ugly" SQL syntax are more popular than ""pure" FP DBMS FramerD?
- A Guide to SQL Standard, by Hugh Darwen (Contributor), Chris J. Date
- Foundation for Future Database Systems: The Third Manifesto, by C. J. Date, Hugh Darwen
First book is the only good book about SQL standard I found. You can learn lots yourself and you can teach (if you are a teacher or a project leader) other developers.The second one very well explains when and why "pure" SQL doesn't work [well] anymore.
By the way, Date is not less bizarre character than Celko, neither he is less productive author. Especially together with Darwen.
Year, right. Next after 5000 hours. Even professional SQL programmers keep doing serious mistakes in sub-queries. Not only in performance optimization area (waiting for results forever), but also in consistency are (getting unexpected result sets).
When you have 2-3 tables with 1-2 foreign keys than you may learn sub-queries in 12 hours. But when you do a very specific data mining work, combining several huge historical journals, several classification graphs, lots of assotiation maps and many lots of lookup tables, then you might realize that you still have to learn SQL even after 5000 hours of using it. If you don't think so, then you've never done any serious data mining by yourself. I spoke with many SQL programmers who worked with ERP, CRM and Supply-Chain applications and they had the same opinion.
If the question is about migrating from Linux/PC to Mac, then the answer is Gentoo:
All time you invest to Gentoo on x86 platform will work for you when you move to Gentoo on PPC platform. Your skils, you config filesand patches will be reused with Gentoo.
That's the buity of a cross platform Linux distro: it's same everywhere, including Intel, Mac, Alpha and Sparc.
Never waste your time for that proprietary candy-enriched Mac OS X. And don't ignore people saying "BSD is dead" - there are lots of such people and they cannot all be stupid.
To be honest, Debian will save your investment almost the same way. And with some exceptions, redhat with YDL as well. Gentoo will just work faster and have less broken dependencies.
Gentoo is the modern distro. You should try.
Most pro audio firewire devices are poorly supported in Linux or FreeBSD etc, because of the lack of applications such as Logic and Cubase.
I am not multimedia geek, I am a classical Unix geek. I work with databases and server applications. Multimedia is too boring for me.
Actually a well-behaved application may work on GNUstep quite nicely. It can certainly be engineered to do so.
Perhaps it can be designed. But it is not. And GNUstep is not a hardware platform.
I wear glasses already and I don't want my vision getting any worse.
The quality of anti-aliasing in modern X11 is not the reason of your glasses, if tuned properly.
Maybe you don't get it. I really like Linux. A LOT! However, I really like OS X a lot too.
Perhaps you don't get it. My question is not what do you like and even not about why do you like it. The question is why Unix geen should like Mac OS X more than Unix/Linux/X11 enough to forget about migration problems and switch from OS to OS.
Actually, it can. The technology is called portable distributed objects. It has existed for years, by the way.
Besides in article, in relaity I never saw any Cocoa application running remotely. And don't belive I can run them remotely on the other platforms, as I do with X11 applications - I can run X11 OpenView from HP/UX on Solaris, AIX, win32/Cygwin, Darwin/X11 and of course on Linux and BSD. Tell me that it is possible for any Mac applications.
Not the screen itself, but objects that would need such treatment are drawn as PDF and rotated by the display engine itself - using OpenGL on your 3D card!
Do you mean that the application should be re-designed and re-developed for beign capable to do that? Too bad...
Therefore, it is much better to compare how both technologies help individual programmers as well as their teams to work faster and to produce a code with less errors (debugging time and QA resources). That would be a function of how API is structured, how concerns could be separated, how customizable code can be and will programmers tend to hardcode "business logic" riles.
Does anyone know such comparison of J2EE and .NET?
I guess you are living in USA, am I right?
I suggest you to come back to reality.
That's the problem. I am again limited to one proprietary vendor, same as with M$. Compare it to X11 where I can run X11 appications cross any platforms with X11: many commercial Unices, BSD/x86, Linux/x86, Linux/PPC even win32/Cygwin, Darwin/X11. But I cannot remotely AND cross-platform Mac OS X admin tools. Imagine problems Mac OS X server will have in most of hosting facilities.
VNC is slow. Besides, suggesting to use VNC after X11 is like suggesting to use floppy disk after CD.
Don't waste your time with Suse - if you need speed on PPC then go with Gentoo. After enjoyable installation the system will be both super fast (very optimizaed) and very user friendly (Gnome 2).
Therefore, Mac OS X is not convinient for server admins.
Do you mean that nothing interesting can be done with FreeBSD besides setting it up? That's really boring. One day you should try Linux one more time - try to do something different then just install it by default and you'll find that will be interesting, while it will still run.
So I play with Darwin now and again, just for the change of pace.
So, whatever you try to do to set Darwin up - it doesn't run?
I did pay that attention and noticed that fact. But it doesn't mean I cannot ask the question which is relevant to the subject and still interesting to some ./ers - at least to myself :)
if you don't want eye candy, don't buy a mac
You know that Mac is the only available platfom for eye candy. The others are commercial Unices and Intel. You cannot prove that Mac OS X is best eye candy platform unless you ignore successful win32 sales.
Mac OS X is not the only OS making Mac hardware somehow useful. Linux/PPC is the other one. No need to mention BeOS. Besides, don't forget "good old" Mac OS 9, which still used by lots of users who cannot find their Mac OS 9 application ported to Mac OS X (for some of those poor guys Mac-on-Linux is much better "unixification" solution then Mac OS X).
Both win32 and X11 don't stay without any progress in font anti-aliasing. Win32 has font smoothing, X11 has FreeType. The argument that Mac OS X is the best font rendering platform becomes pretty obsolete.
if you wanna stick with your command line and don't like looking at anything beside white text on a black background, then you better stick with what you know
Here is the major difference between me and you. I know Mac OS X, but you don't know anything about Unix, specifically about X11. All commercial Unicies, BSD and Linux has a very nice support of X11 - GUI where you don't have to use CLI if you don't want to. But most of X11 users (and even some win32 users) keep one or two shell windows because it is a very useful tool to compensate any missed commands in menu items and don't tell me that Mac OS X has in its menu items ALL possible commands.
give GPL to democrats and give BSD to republicants (or vice versa). And wait for upcoming elections. Let the american people to decide what license to use in all software made by the goverment for people's money.
Mac OS X is nice rendering fonts. That is important when you do you professional document/web publishing work. Although no one criticezed the quality of fonts in TeX system (LyX if you need it in GUI). I also would remind that Interleaf and FrameMaker are produced originally for Unix. Conclusion: fonts is not a serious reason, just a subjective impression.
Mac OS X supports many of useful commercial GUI aplications. Although it is true, but it is not because of Mac OS X quality. From marketing point commercial vendors just ported old Mac applications to mac OS X in order to keep the same customer base. I don't know any new "big" applications if they has been added to Mac OS X and if they are not existed previously in old Mac OS. I don't know any big Unix applications ported to Mac OS X from Unix and discontinued in Unix either. Apple is known on desktop market for years. Commercial unices are dying. Linux is just newcoming to the market. I belive that explains. And I belive that the situation will be changed in a couple of years: Linux will be supported with commercial GUI applications wider than Mac OS X. Or at least not less. Conclusion: if you don't need any Mac OS X specific GUI applications then look for other migration reasons or don't migrate at all.
It's easier to re-configure something on Mac OS X than on Linux. I agree, it is true for common parameters. But if you need anything unusal than on Mac OS X it will be either very difficult or it will impossible at all. Same problem with Windows NT. Imagine to build a kiosk or POS with Mac OS X. I can't. Conclusion: Don't consider Mac OS X if you (or your IT) need own OS - with changed kernel, with re-written boot sequence, with cluster, with re-written desktop GUI or without desktop at all.
Besides, no one compared internationalization of Mac OS X with Linux. I heard about some problems on Mac OS X with i18n in Cocoa and I heard very positive feedbacks about Linux internationalization from around the world. No wonder: i18n is one of reasons when distributed open source community has more chances to find and fix problems faster than any commercial vendor.
Final conclusion: switch to Mac OS X from Linux/Unix if you ready to develop GUI applications that will work only on Mac hardware, specifically on Mac OS X; if you are ready to pay for overpriced hardware that still unknown for most of IT specialists, if you are ok with MS Windows quality and you need just better fonts and only English fonts. Otherwise - keep Linux.
That reminds me X11 in Cygwin. But thank you anyway for a resonable advise. I'll keep it in mind. Although it solves only half of the "remote GUI" problem - access to remote X11 applications. Now, how about access to remote Cocoa applications? In win32 world I have to use various VNC methods and I am not happy with their quality cmparing to X11.
GUI's are essential for nice documents, and it helps that Office is fairly compatible for complex documents across platforms (Try getting this done in OpenOffice, and having word understand the result...)
The difference in quality between MS Office and OpenOffice is big enough for people who use office as one of primary tools. But if I open and edit office document just some times then such difference is not important.
I guess it's time to define the term "Unix geek". Let's do it relationally. By my opinion, "unix geeks" care mostly about system integrity and data processing, while web designers and web developers care more about UI graphical elements.
Just because we like the command line, doesn't mean we are prepared to put up with any old tat.
I never told that CLI must be the only way of UI. Personally, I spend half of my Linux time in GNOME using various GUI applications.
Expand your mind, and accept that other people have views just as valid as yours. If you are a true unix geek, you will appreciate the value of choice and not put down those that are different to yours. It's the desire for choice that has been the driving force behind most of geekdom for the past several years, hasn't it!
My original comment was actually the question "why to switch from Linux/Unix to Mac OS X?". I respect the choice people made or will made. I just want to know the reason. I believe that the conecpt of freedom is not only to choose something, but also to ask the question about it. I respect all geeks shifted to Mac OS X, but I want some of respect to my questin. Instead of convincing me to shift to Mac OS X, I see that half of answers are trying to convince me to stop to ask the question "WHY".
I don't need much of advanced Illustrator functions. But lem try anyway. I use Dia for UML, Open Office drawing for slides and embedded diagrams and Graphviz when I generate graph diagrams right from my programs.
Please don't say OpenOffice can do this, we both know there are many many documents it butchers.
I use exclusively OpenOffice since its release 1.0 - no big problems so far. One time I've fixed a problem after debugging XML in the document file, another one a small fix in the source code helped.