It is not unfair for a company to say that the newest version of their software is BETTER than their old version. If it wasn't, why release it?
I think the problem here is that its questionable whether Vista is actually BETTER than XP. We'll see when SP2 or SP3 comes out, but until then, there are lots of regressions.
Because, you know, it was just yesterday that Apple was telling us how 10.4 was the shiznit. Now we've got 10.5, and suddenly, they won't even sell 10.4 anymore!
Yes, but I don't see them saying how bad the security of 10.4 is. I see them advertising the new features of Leopard. They are focusing on the positives of the new product, not inciting fear about the old product. With Vista, there just aren't that many new compelling features that make Vista more useful, especially for a product they have worked so long on.
Or consider the Linux kernel. Back in the 2.0 days, everyone was telling me about how great Linux was. Now that we've got kernel 2.6, everyone's just dropping support for 2.0 and telling me it sucks compared to the latest version.
When 2.6 came out (and 2.4, and every previous version), it was still quite a while before stable distros started to use it. And are people really telling you how much a previous version of the Linux kernel sucked, or are they telling you what new features you have with the latest? Are these people Linux users or companies selling Linux-based products that you are talking about? I ask because the motives are going to be different.
There is a plugin you can get for iTunes that lets it support ogg, but last time I tried it there were problems with it (you couldn't stream music to another copy of iTunes for instance because it would stream at the wrong rate and break up every couple of seconds, nor could you stream to an Airport Express).
I tried that for a while. It's been a few years, but last time I tried the plugin it made iTunes crash frequently. Maybe its more stable now.
Thank you, I was going to say the same thing. I am tired of the overuse of the term "bricking". If your hardware is "bricked" it renders your hardware as useful as a "brick" in the more permanent sense. If you can fix it without via software, it is not bricked.
As it is now I jumped the gun on ordering and I upgraded a bunch of clients to 10.5, to my present dismay (including my wife). Basically I bought on the good feelings I had towards 10.4.8-> and this release hasn't lived up to that standard.
I got hosed by the craptacular iLife '08 (all the apps are terribly buggy) and that bad experience made me decide that I was going to wait before upgrading to 10.5. I really want Time Machine, but I think I'm going to wait even longer considering all the problems people are having.
People keep on talking about thin clients... but I just don't see it happening anytime soon for a host of reasons.
I'm going to agree with you, but only for the power reason and not the privacy/security reason. Most people don't even think about privacy/security until they get a virus or get hacked.
I'm moving more and more things I do using online and hosted services. I use different computers throughout my day and its just more convenient. I can actually perform my job (software development) over Remote Desktop which can be considered a "thin client." I actually do this quite often, and its more than fast enough. I think for a lot of people, a "thin client" could be all they need.
But thin client cannot catch up with the newer emerging technologies and some constantly evolving older technologies. Doing video editing over a thin client wouldn't work to well. With the popularity of YouTube, digital video cameras, etc, people want to be able to do this. Thin clients will probably never catch up to the state-of-the-art of gaming.
Then you have mobile users who are not always connected who need to be able to work off line.
I think we'll see a shift to more things being performed and many people only needing a "thin" client to do their computing, but only if bandwidth and connectivity keep increasing and improving. But the demand for powerful personal computers won't go away either.
Gutsy owners are installing Feisty, and now, apparently
Honestly, I never upgraded to Feisty. I bought a Mac Pro at that time and was too busy with that to upgrade my Linux machines. But 6.10/Edgy broke a lot of stuff for me. At the time, instead of switching back to 6.04, I just stuck with it, despite being disappointed. In retrospect I should have stuck with 6.04 a while longer.
Now 7.10/Gutsy on the other hand has been amazing for me. Everything works great and I've been completely happy with it. It even works perfectly on my laptop for which no other Ubuntu version (including Feisty) worked. Wireless and power management are working flawlessly. I'm hearing from most other people who are using it that they are having a good experience.
As for OS X, it's never been perfect for me, I've had plenty of problems. I'm currently on 10.4, and even that has issues. So 10.5 having issues doesn't surprise me one bit.
Sadly, I don't like rubbing the keyboard nipple either. I've considered getting one of the XPS laptops with removable bluetooth keyboard and mouse. That's a feature I was asking for for years.
Note that not all nipples are created equal. I find that the one on my Thinkpad T23 kicks ass. Not having to take my hands off the keyboard is great. But I bought a desktop keyboard that had one (from pckeyboard.com), it totally sucked and got in the way. When designed correctly, they are great, but they can suck if not done correctly. But still it comes down to personal preferences. And I am not nearly as fast with the Trackpoint as I am with a regular mouse.
I have to say I that I love my Apple mouse. Normal PC mice (I've tried lots) make my hands hurt after an hour or so but I can use my Apple mouse all day. It also looks good, has stood up to much use and abuse, and the trackball as middle button is genius.
Crazy, both me and my girlfriend hate Apple's Mighty Mouse. It actually hurts my hand to use the trackball. The Logitech MX310 is the perfect mouse for me, and its all I use.
But Apple has every opportunity to introduce OTHER iPhone models that aren't under contract with AT&T.
I'll repeat my original post:
Not while AT&T is the only provider.
If they figure out some way around the 5-year contract (with a new model, or whatever), great. But until that happens, the iPhone is just not that relevant.
It's in the design, usability, and functionality.
Personally I'm not impressed with the touch-screen technology. I find the virtual keyboard makes the iPhone pretty unusable for anything but consuming media. Put a real keyboard on it and it might be worth something to me. So its a decent music player, phone, photo browser, e-mail reader, web viewer, etc. But if I want to actually send a text message, e-mail, or type into a web form its a pain in the ass. And I'm not the only one who has a problem with this. All I want is a simple phone that is comfortable and quick to text message with. I want a phone that's a communication device, not a consuming device. The iPhone can't do the one thing I care about well. Sure, what I want doesn't represent everyone, but still I'm one person who doesn't want an iPhone.
The iPod was originally Mac only, for the first 9 months. That didn't seem to stop it, either.
The AT&T bundle works to both parties advantage, for now. Don't think the landscape won't change in six months; Apple is probably working on a 3G phone as we speak.
The contract with AT&T is much longer than 9 months (it's 5 years). They have promised to be exclusive to AT&T for 5 years. I don't think the iPod would have been nearly as popular if it was still Mac only.
Sure, after the 5 years is up, and they expand to other providers, the iPhone may actually become relevant (especially since they will improve it during that time). But until then, its not going to happen. Maybe in other countries where they don't have exclusive contracts... But in many other countries (like Japan), cell phone technology has advanced far ahead of what the iPhone offers.
Staff can also easily take their laptops into meetings
I find this useful, but what I do is use Remote Desktop to connect to my desktop machine. I never actually run anything on my laptop except for Remote Desktop.
What's worse is accidental use of the stupid touch pad. You're typing along and zoom your cursor goes flying somewhere crazy and you've just deleted something important or done something equally as horrible. Touch pads are horrible devices.
That's why I don't buy laptops with touchpads. The "Trackpoint" (aka "eraserhead") input device is so much better. I have a Thinkpad that only has a Trackpoint and no touchpad. Lenevo still makes laptops with this configuration, as do other manufacturers (HP nc4200 for example I think). If only Apple would do this, and provide 3 mouse buttons, I might actually want one of their laptops.
Your desktop can also be stolen, and the disk can crash.
I think the point is that its easier for IT to prevent a desktop from being stolen and to setup a procedure for backing up a desktop machine (much easier to do a nightly backup since the machines remains there overnight).
It it possible to get time machine to back up over the network, to a non apple server...
Is that a question? Because I'm wondering the same thing.
There is Linux support for HFS+ and AFP which may help achieve this, but I'd imagine they would need to update HFS+ support with the new filesystem changes and probably update AFP support as well. Maybe its possible to do some hackery and get it to work with an updated AFP and a typical Linux filesystem like ext2/3, considering that AFP works fine with Linux filesystems right now, and hard links are already supported. It would just be a matter of making the changes to AFP to support hard links.
Just my take on it, there may be some details that I'm missing.
Usually you get to a point when doing traditional incremental backups where you simply do a full backup and start all over again.
Not the case when you use rsync + copy with hard links. Don't know if that's really "traditional incremental backup" but it might as well be considering how often its used for that purpose.
The interface is the goofy 3d zooming through space view. The ease of use and he's referring to is that the incremental backups that are stored all appear like full backups from a file system perspective.
Well, the typical rsync backup with hard links give you "incremental backups that appear like full backups from a file system perspective." I've been doing that for years on my Linux machines and all I have to do is browse a folder that has all my backups in seperate folders sorted by date. I can then find which date I want a file from and just access it directly, copy it over if I want or whatever. So does rsync w/ hard links have the same ease of use?
Personally, I think the cool and innovative thing about Time Machine is it has an API for integrating into applications. Other than that, its the same shit I've been doing in Linux for years. Only now, non-techies can use it easily.
If things go wrong sometimes, then I would say that "it just works" isn't all that true. I don't use Apple stuff, but I still have a pretty good impression of their integration/user experience work.
I just started getting into Apple stuff with the release of the G4 Mac Mini. I then subsequently got a Mac Pro to replace my main machine which was running Linux. I decided to give OS X a fair chance to see if really was better than Linux.
In my experience "it just works" is far from accurate. It's definitely a slick environment and worth using, but comes with enough issues that it doesn't live up to the hype. But I guess its a mistake to listen to the hype (Apple's products fell far short of my expectations due to hype).
The problem, as with any commercial vendor, is that you are often stuck waiting for the company to fix things. For example, iLife apps crash. They crash a *LOT*. What can you possibly do other than wait for them to fix the bugs? OS X itself is usually pretty solid. Occasional something just won't work right. Sometimes I actually have to REBOOT to fix things. This is just not what I expect from an OS based on UNIX. I suspect (partially from experience) that they just haven't gotten it together after the Intel switch.
Apple's products have just as many problems as any other OS vendor. They may be different problems, but don't believe anyone who says they don't exist. And Apple is a company that is constantly changing things (OS9 -> OSX, PowerPC -> Intel, frequent OS updates), so you can't possibly expect stability from them. Having control over the hardware apparently still isn't enough to achieve this.
What version do you have? The first core duo based mini was slow, most of that due to the hard drive. The core 2 duo based ones are nice, though they still have a dog slow hard drive. Replace the hard drive with a 7200 rpm drive and it will be almost as fast as an iMac. The only slow part of the mini that you cannot replace is the crappy graphics. If Apple made a mini with a 7200 rpm drive and ATI graphics, it would be a very good system for all kinds of tasks.
I indeed have the first one. The hard drive *IS* the bottleneck. If I use an external 7200 rpm drive via Firewire as my main drive, it is significantly faster, sure. But my point was that I would never want to put together a machine with a slow 2.5" hard drive. It makes some sense in laptops, but really sucks in a desktop machine.
I bought a Mac Pro because despite it's price and it being overkill for my purposes, the hardware actually makes sense, unlike the Mac Mini and iMac.
The users. There's virtually no mention of them. There's talk about companies who are connected with Linux, about the technology, about the freedom of open software. But of the actual users there's only one passing reference.
Well, in some ways, companies are the users. But I agree with what you are saying about the end users, whether they be desktop users, server admins, or whatever.
There are still a few things holding me back from Linux... so I hope the community focuses on these soon:
- User-friendliness. Instructions on how to accomplish something should never involve command line anything. Some users just don't get it.
- Software support. Start pushing major vendors to make Linux versions. Start with major tools like graphics suites and IDEs. Then games. For example, I need Dreamweaver for it's code editor and Photoshop. And no, I don't want to use Gimp or buy the bloody expensive PHP IDE when I already own Dreamweaver licenses.
- Hardware support. Drivers for all my stuff.
- Make sure that the whole OS has integrated Help for anything you want to do. Again... no "Open a command window and...".
-Work on the attitude of the Linux fans on various support forms so they don't laugh at basic user questions. I need a supportive and friendly environment where I can go to for help.
It's been a while since I was looking into these, can anyone let me know if any (or all) of my points are already solved?
Well, I've been using Linux since 1995, so I've seen it go through many changes. I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 and was amazed at how far they have gotten and how well it worked (I wasn't too impressed with the last two released). Using this distro, I'll address your points:
User friendless: I still do things from the command-line out of habit, but then find that I could've done the same thing from a GUI settings manager. Barring something unusual, I think the typical user could get by without ever having to use the command-line.
Software support: I don't see how to push commercial software vendors other than a mass-migration to Linux. Commercial entities can only be manipulated by money and potential for gaining/losing profits. The only real choices the community has is to develop alternatives or work on improving things like WINE to support popular software such as Photoshop/Dreamweaver. I believe at least older versions of Photoshop work in WINE.
Hardware support: Similar problem to software support. This problem lies with the vendors for not supporting Linux. But its difficult to get them to release Linux drivers, especially open-source drivers or closed-source drivers that are kept up-to-date. People can reverse-engineer drivers, but this is especially difficult in things as complex as Wifi drivers. Wifi support is quite good these days, if you buy the right hardware and don't need any bleeding-edge features. My wifi card was supported out-of-box with 7.10. So was power-management (Suspend, Hibernate) and other features (CPU scaling, battery monitoring, etc) necessary for laptop use. It's important to buy the right hardware if you want a pain-free Linux experience, however. You wouldn't buy a copy of OS X and then expect it to work on any hardware.
Integrated help: Haven't checked this out yet.
Attitude of Linux fans: I understand that you have to deal with these people if you go to user-driven support forums. Supposedly, Ubuntu forums are quite friendly from what I hear. I don't spend too much time in support forums myself, so I don't know. Personally, I'd like to see Apple fans quit being such douchebags, but that doesn't stop me from using it. Expecting some kind of mass change in human behavior is just unrealistic. However, the more normal people that start using Linux, the more there will be a change in overall attitude, because more regular people will be using it to outnumber the rabid fanatics. I've actually noticed that trend with Apple, and a general decrease in douchebaggery, but the core douchebags are still there if you look in the right places. This is because Macs have appealed to a wider audience by switching to Intel and allowing Windows easily in VM's or natively. Linux is experiencing something similar, but the people with the attitudes will still be around.
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It is not unfair for a company to say that the newest version of their software is BETTER than their old version. If it wasn't, why release it?
I think the problem here is that its questionable whether Vista is actually BETTER than XP. We'll see when SP2 or SP3 comes out, but until then, there are lots of regressions.
Because, you know, it was just yesterday that Apple was telling us how 10.4 was the shiznit. Now we've got 10.5, and suddenly, they won't even sell 10.4 anymore!
Yes, but I don't see them saying how bad the security of 10.4 is. I see them advertising the new features of Leopard. They are focusing on the positives of the new product, not inciting fear about the old product. With Vista, there just aren't that many new compelling features that make Vista more useful, especially for a product they have worked so long on.
Or consider the Linux kernel. Back in the 2.0 days, everyone was telling me about how great Linux was. Now that we've got kernel 2.6, everyone's just dropping support for 2.0 and telling me it sucks compared to the latest version.
When 2.6 came out (and 2.4, and every previous version), it was still quite a while before stable distros started to use it. And are people really telling you how much a previous version of the Linux kernel sucked, or are they telling you what new features you have with the latest? Are these people Linux users or companies selling Linux-based products that you are talking about? I ask because the motives are going to be different.
There is a plugin you can get for iTunes that lets it support ogg, but last time I tried it there were problems with it (you couldn't stream music to another copy of iTunes for instance because it would stream at the wrong rate and break up every couple of seconds, nor could you stream to an Airport Express).
I tried that for a while. It's been a few years, but last time I tried the plugin it made iTunes crash frequently. Maybe its more stable now.
Thank you, I was going to say the same thing. I am tired of the overuse of the term "bricking". If your hardware is "bricked" it renders your hardware as useful as a "brick" in the more permanent sense. If you can fix it without via software, it is not bricked.
As it is now I jumped the gun on ordering and I upgraded a bunch of clients to 10.5, to my present dismay (including my wife). Basically I bought on the good feelings I had towards 10.4.8-> and this release hasn't lived up to that standard.
I got hosed by the craptacular iLife '08 (all the apps are terribly buggy) and that bad experience made me decide that I was going to wait before upgrading to 10.5. I really want Time Machine, but I think I'm going to wait even longer considering all the problems people are having.
People keep on talking about thin clients... but I just don't see it happening anytime soon for a host of reasons.
I'm going to agree with you, but only for the power reason and not the privacy/security reason. Most people don't even think about privacy/security until they get a virus or get hacked.
I'm moving more and more things I do using online and hosted services. I use different computers throughout my day and its just more convenient. I can actually perform my job (software development) over Remote Desktop which can be considered a "thin client." I actually do this quite often, and its more than fast enough. I think for a lot of people, a "thin client" could be all they need.
But thin client cannot catch up with the newer emerging technologies and some constantly evolving older technologies. Doing video editing over a thin client wouldn't work to well. With the popularity of YouTube, digital video cameras, etc, people want to be able to do this. Thin clients will probably never catch up to the state-of-the-art of gaming.
Then you have mobile users who are not always connected who need to be able to work off line.
I think we'll see a shift to more things being performed and many people only needing a "thin" client to do their computing, but only if bandwidth and connectivity keep increasing and improving. But the demand for powerful personal computers won't go away either.
Gutsy owners are installing Feisty, and now, apparently
Honestly, I never upgraded to Feisty. I bought a Mac Pro at that time and was too busy with that to upgrade my Linux machines. But 6.10/Edgy broke a lot of stuff for me. At the time, instead of switching back to 6.04, I just stuck with it, despite being disappointed. In retrospect I should have stuck with 6.04 a while longer.
Now 7.10/Gutsy on the other hand has been amazing for me. Everything works great and I've been completely happy with it. It even works perfectly on my laptop for which no other Ubuntu version (including Feisty) worked. Wireless and power management are working flawlessly. I'm hearing from most other people who are using it that they are having a good experience.
As for OS X, it's never been perfect for me, I've had plenty of problems. I'm currently on 10.4, and even that has issues. So 10.5 having issues doesn't surprise me one bit.
Who would have ever thought that having a secure browser that quickly loads pages and doesn't crash your machine would be enticing to users?
What browser is crashing your whole machine? Are you running Windows 98 and browsing with Internet Explorer?
Watching all that equipment turn into one big zombie spambot as soon as you press "play": priceless.
A true audiophile is going to rip his music from vinyl recorded at 24-bit/96kHz, therefore there is no chance of getting exploited.
Sadly, I don't like rubbing the keyboard nipple either. I've considered getting one of the XPS laptops with removable bluetooth keyboard and mouse. That's a feature I was asking for for years.
Note that not all nipples are created equal. I find that the one on my Thinkpad T23 kicks ass. Not having to take my hands off the keyboard is great. But I bought a desktop keyboard that had one (from pckeyboard.com), it totally sucked and got in the way. When designed correctly, they are great, but they can suck if not done correctly. But still it comes down to personal preferences. And I am not nearly as fast with the Trackpoint as I am with a regular mouse.
I have to say I that I love my Apple mouse. Normal PC mice (I've tried lots) make my hands hurt after an hour or so but I can use my Apple mouse all day. It also looks good, has stood up to much use and abuse, and the trackball as middle button is genius.
Crazy, both me and my girlfriend hate Apple's Mighty Mouse. It actually hurts my hand to use the trackball. The Logitech MX310 is the perfect mouse for me, and its all I use.
But Apple has every opportunity to introduce OTHER iPhone models that aren't under contract with AT&T.
I'll repeat my original post:
Not while AT&T is the only provider.
If they figure out some way around the 5-year contract (with a new model, or whatever), great. But until that happens, the iPhone is just not that relevant.
It's in the design, usability, and functionality.
Personally I'm not impressed with the touch-screen technology. I find the virtual keyboard makes the iPhone pretty unusable for anything but consuming media. Put a real keyboard on it and it might be worth something to me. So its a decent music player, phone, photo browser, e-mail reader, web viewer, etc. But if I want to actually send a text message, e-mail, or type into a web form its a pain in the ass. And I'm not the only one who has a problem with this. All I want is a simple phone that is comfortable and quick to text message with. I want a phone that's a communication device, not a consuming device. The iPhone can't do the one thing I care about well. Sure, what I want doesn't represent everyone, but still I'm one person who doesn't want an iPhone.
The iPod was originally Mac only, for the first 9 months. That didn't seem to stop it, either.
The AT&T bundle works to both parties advantage, for now. Don't think the landscape won't change in six months; Apple is probably working on a 3G phone as we speak.
The contract with AT&T is much longer than 9 months (it's 5 years). They have promised to be exclusive to AT&T for 5 years. I don't think the iPod would have been nearly as popular if it was still Mac only.
Sure, after the 5 years is up, and they expand to other providers, the iPhone may actually become relevant (especially since they will improve it during that time). But until then, its not going to happen. Maybe in other countries where they don't have exclusive contracts... But in many other countries (like Japan), cell phone technology has advanced far ahead of what the iPhone offers.
Staff can also easily take their laptops into meetings
I find this useful, but what I do is use Remote Desktop to connect to my desktop machine. I never actually run anything on my laptop except for Remote Desktop.
What's worse is accidental use of the stupid touch pad. You're typing along and zoom your cursor goes flying somewhere crazy and you've just deleted something important or done something equally as horrible. Touch pads are horrible devices.
That's why I don't buy laptops with touchpads. The "Trackpoint" (aka "eraserhead") input device is so much better. I have a Thinkpad that only has a Trackpoint and no touchpad. Lenevo still makes laptops with this configuration, as do other manufacturers (HP nc4200 for example I think). If only Apple would do this, and provide 3 mouse buttons, I might actually want one of their laptops.
This really isn't much of an issue if you don't give your users admin rights.
There's been a lot of remote exploits in Windows and server software that doesn't require admin rights to spread.
Your desktop can also be stolen, and the disk can crash.
I think the point is that its easier for IT to prevent a desktop from being stolen and to setup a procedure for backing up a desktop machine (much easier to do a nightly backup since the machines remains there overnight).
You don't think Apple will repeat history in 2007 with the iPhone what they did in 2001 with the iPod?
Not while AT&T is the only service provider.
It it possible to get time machine to back up over the network, to a non apple server...
Is that a question? Because I'm wondering the same thing.
There is Linux support for HFS+ and AFP which may help achieve this, but I'd imagine they would need to update HFS+ support with the new filesystem changes and probably update AFP support as well. Maybe its possible to do some hackery and get it to work with an updated AFP and a typical Linux filesystem like ext2/3, considering that AFP works fine with Linux filesystems right now, and hard links are already supported. It would just be a matter of making the changes to AFP to support hard links.
Just my take on it, there may be some details that I'm missing.
Usually you get to a point when doing traditional incremental backups where you simply do a full backup and start all over again.
Not the case when you use rsync + copy with hard links. Don't know if that's really "traditional incremental backup" but it might as well be considering how often its used for that purpose.
The interface is the goofy 3d zooming through space view. The ease of use and he's referring to is that the incremental backups that are stored all appear like full backups from a file system perspective.
Well, the typical rsync backup with hard links give you "incremental backups that appear like full backups from a file system perspective." I've been doing that for years on my Linux machines and all I have to do is browse a folder that has all my backups in seperate folders sorted by date. I can then find which date I want a file from and just access it directly, copy it over if I want or whatever. So does rsync w/ hard links have the same ease of use?
Personally, I think the cool and innovative thing about Time Machine is it has an API for integrating into applications. Other than that, its the same shit I've been doing in Linux for years. Only now, non-techies can use it easily.
If things go wrong sometimes, then I would say that "it just works" isn't all that true. I don't use Apple stuff, but I still have a pretty good impression of their integration/user experience work.
I just started getting into Apple stuff with the release of the G4 Mac Mini. I then subsequently got a Mac Pro to replace my main machine which was running Linux. I decided to give OS X a fair chance to see if really was better than Linux.
In my experience "it just works" is far from accurate. It's definitely a slick environment and worth using, but comes with enough issues that it doesn't live up to the hype. But I guess its a mistake to listen to the hype (Apple's products fell far short of my expectations due to hype).
The problem, as with any commercial vendor, is that you are often stuck waiting for the company to fix things. For example, iLife apps crash. They crash a *LOT*. What can you possibly do other than wait for them to fix the bugs? OS X itself is usually pretty solid. Occasional something just won't work right. Sometimes I actually have to REBOOT to fix things. This is just not what I expect from an OS based on UNIX. I suspect (partially from experience) that they just haven't gotten it together after the Intel switch.
Apple's products have just as many problems as any other OS vendor. They may be different problems, but don't believe anyone who says they don't exist. And Apple is a company that is constantly changing things (OS9 -> OSX, PowerPC -> Intel, frequent OS updates), so you can't possibly expect stability from them. Having control over the hardware apparently still isn't enough to achieve this.
Change "two new SUV's" to "two old SUV's" then. Americans like their SUV's.
What version do you have? The first core duo based mini was slow, most of that due to the hard drive. The core 2 duo based ones are nice, though they still have a dog slow hard drive. Replace the hard drive with a 7200 rpm drive and it will be almost as fast as an iMac. The only slow part of the mini that you cannot replace is the crappy graphics. If Apple made a mini with a 7200 rpm drive and ATI graphics, it would be a very good system for all kinds of tasks.
I indeed have the first one. The hard drive *IS* the bottleneck. If I use an external 7200 rpm drive via Firewire as my main drive, it is significantly faster, sure. But my point was that I would never want to put together a machine with a slow 2.5" hard drive. It makes some sense in laptops, but really sucks in a desktop machine.
I bought a Mac Pro because despite it's price and it being overkill for my purposes, the hardware actually makes sense, unlike the Mac Mini and iMac.
Installing it with GUI tools (e.g. Synaptic) is also equally easy.
The users. There's virtually no mention of them. There's talk about companies who are connected with Linux, about the technology, about the freedom of open software. But of the actual users there's only one passing reference.
Well, in some ways, companies are the users. But I agree with what you are saying about the end users, whether they be desktop users, server admins, or whatever.
There are still a few things holding me back from Linux... so I hope the community focuses on these soon:
- User-friendliness. Instructions on how to accomplish something should never involve command line anything. Some users just don't get it.
- Software support. Start pushing major vendors to make Linux versions. Start with major tools like graphics suites and IDEs. Then games. For example, I need Dreamweaver for it's code editor and Photoshop. And no, I don't want to use Gimp or buy the bloody expensive PHP IDE when I already own Dreamweaver licenses.
- Hardware support. Drivers for all my stuff.
- Make sure that the whole OS has integrated Help for anything you want to do. Again... no "Open a command window and...".
-Work on the attitude of the Linux fans on various support forms so they don't laugh at basic user questions. I need a supportive and friendly environment where I can go to for help.
It's been a while since I was looking into these, can anyone let me know if any (or all) of my points are already solved?
Well, I've been using Linux since 1995, so I've seen it go through many changes. I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 and was amazed at how far they have gotten and how well it worked (I wasn't too impressed with the last two released). Using this distro, I'll address your points:
User friendless: I still do things from the command-line out of habit, but then find that I could've done the same thing from a GUI settings manager. Barring something unusual, I think the typical user could get by without ever having to use the command-line.
Software support: I don't see how to push commercial software vendors other than a mass-migration to Linux. Commercial entities can only be manipulated by money and potential for gaining/losing profits. The only real choices the community has is to develop alternatives or work on improving things like WINE to support popular software such as Photoshop/Dreamweaver. I believe at least older versions of Photoshop work in WINE.
Hardware support: Similar problem to software support. This problem lies with the vendors for not supporting Linux. But its difficult to get them to release Linux drivers, especially open-source drivers or closed-source drivers that are kept up-to-date. People can reverse-engineer drivers, but this is especially difficult in things as complex as Wifi drivers. Wifi support is quite good these days, if you buy the right hardware and don't need any bleeding-edge features. My wifi card was supported out-of-box with 7.10. So was power-management (Suspend, Hibernate) and other features (CPU scaling, battery monitoring, etc) necessary for laptop use. It's important to buy the right hardware if you want a pain-free Linux experience, however. You wouldn't buy a copy of OS X and then expect it to work on any hardware.
Integrated help: Haven't checked this out yet.
Attitude of Linux fans: I understand that you have to deal with these people if you go to user-driven support forums. Supposedly, Ubuntu forums are quite friendly from what I hear. I don't spend too much time in support forums myself, so I don't know. Personally, I'd like to see Apple fans quit being such douchebags, but that doesn't stop me from using it. Expecting some kind of mass change in human behavior is just unrealistic. However, the more normal people that start using Linux, the more there will be a change in overall attitude, because more regular people will be using it to outnumber the rabid fanatics. I've actually noticed that trend with Apple, and a general decrease in douchebaggery, but the core douchebags are still there if you look in the right places. This is because Macs have appealed to a wider audience by switching to Intel and allowing Windows easily in VM's or natively. Linux is experiencing something similar, but the people with the attitudes will still be around.