"Macs are overpriced for the components they have " this has been shown to not be true many times.
It has also been shown to be true many times. I have a £400 widescreen laptop (HP DV6000 series) with 802.11a/b/g wireless, dvi, nVidia graphics with 768MB dedicated (not shared) video RAM, 3GB RAM, 120GB harddrive, Intel Core Duo @ 1.66ghz (admittedly slower than a Mac Mini, however the video RAM which the Mac Mini does not have pays off big time), SD card reader, bluetooth, firewire, optical audio, DVD/CD writer & HD DVD ROM, some built in webcam and microphone I never used, 3 USB ports all with maximum bandwith available for each port and it runs the majority of my games at maximum settings quite well. Compare this to the Mac Mini which begins at £499, can't even exceed the performance of my system for most tasks, plays my games like complete utter shit (probably due to the onboard graphics sucking so much - even that slightly faster CPU doesn't help), can't convert movies as fast via VLC.
Sure, this isn't a 1:1 comparison of hardware, but I can get more for less, so why should I settle for very specific components which are not really that great to begin with? If I was willing to spend more, I could of still got a better laptop than what is currently available from Apple and it would cost less with more features - so, for me, non-Apple computers are cheaper and offer more value.
most people don't customize there PC.
..But gamers do.
no, it's better.
No, it's worse, there is far less choice when it comes to graphic cards for one and the ones offered aren't exactly fantastic for gaming.
BTW, must hard core gamers don't customize their PC anymore either. It's pretty pointless these days.
Every hard core gamer I know has at least customized one component after they got a custom built system, be it changing a soundcard to a far better graphics card etc. While not as many, may not build an entire machine from scratch, they do usually customize it to a degree that Apple likely doesn't offer and then customize further after.
Good luck buying equivalent parts for less.
I have heard and seen some great deals on newegg.com for some components, so I do not believe that is a problem.
Of, and most importantly. If you were truly and hard core gamers, and you new shit about computers, you would WANT OSX to run games because they will run better do to how it manages memory and devices.
Why would he want OS X?
It has piss poor OpenGL support, to the point that projects like crossover games have to write custom fixes for each game they support to work on the buggy drivers (there is your superior hardware support!) and messed up OpenGL, while on Linux, BSDs crossover has universal fixes that work for all games for any potential problems which is not application specific.
The memory management is superior? I disagree, OS X's philosophy of applications is to have each application duplicate libraries that aren't frameworks and therefore a lot of common libraries end up taking space multiple times for each application that uses it. I don't see how that is superior memory management at all. This problem does not exist on Windows or Linux, they are both more efficient in terms of memory usage. Windows does have a problem with sometimes with allocating certain wanted information to swap files, however this not really a concern since generally only 'idle' processes and data get sent to the swap file, allowing for greater bursting capability from applications that need it - that said, there are times this does goes wrong, of course most true Windows applications do not suffer from this problem.
(Background: my first exposure to UNIX in general was FreeBSD in 1995 on an ISP's dialup shell; I installed Slackware maybe two years later, played with Red Hat when it first came out a year or two after that, have compiled Linux From Scratch, and have had Debian and Mandrake installed at various times as well)
I can't remember when I touched Unix-like system first. That said, I am platform agnostic and pretty much every operating system, distribution under the sun.
It's probably the least stable, and definitely the least transparent and discoverable, Linux distribution that I've ever used. It is completely non-standard; absolutely nothing is where I expect it to be, at all.
I haven't really seen any difference in paths used between Ubuntu and Debian, are you sure you used Debian enough to know it?
There is a truly eldritch kernel compilation framework; modprobe.conf does not apply at all.
Because in Ubuntu, it's split up into multiple files inside/etc/modprobe.d/ (ie: blacklist, options, aliases etc) - quite clean way to do it, in my opinion. I think this keeps with the Unix philosophy of KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid.
If you try and remove them, apt will remove the rest of the system with them.
If you knew how to use DPKG, you wouldn't have this problem.
I've had ALSA crashing and becoming corrupt entirely randomly, requiring a complete reinstall.
I haven't.
I had a weird crash a few days ago which rendered my nvidia drivers completely inoperable for playing games, but for some inexplicable reason 3D still works just fine for Compiz.
I haven't had this issue.
The command "mount -a" doesn't work
It's working here as intended.
Windows partitions aren't automatically added to/etc/fstab, so after I add them, I either have to mount them individually or reboot.
True, because the desktop environment should mount those for you when you try to access the device in the GUI. However, with your/etc/fstab issues -- Are you sure you're adding them correctly? Because they automatically mount here and I didn't have to do anything special with them.
The package "build-essential" doesn't install anywhere near everything that is needed for a Linux From Scratch build
Build essential is just the basic building tools, what you're asking for is provided normally in "build-common" - just like Debian.
Go into the Ubuntu support channel on Freenode as well; I was there yesterday, and it is an absolute madhouse. The place is packed, and there are people firing questions at the ops faster than they could ever hope to answer them.
This is certainly true but the community does try to help.
The single biggest complaint people have, is that hardware of various kinds randomly and intermittently simply stops working.
It really depends on the day in the Ubuntu channel. Some days it's lots of complaints about packages not working correctly (usually because the user went and installed packages from another distribution), other days it's networking issues etc.
If you want user-friendly, get Fedora Core.
Fedora is about the development of Free/opensource software, not ease of use or being user friendly. I would really put a distribution like OpenSuSE way higher than Fedora.
In my experience, Ubuntu (or at least a version of Ubuntu within the recent years) does not normally behave the way you stated and I would normally recommend it above Fedora.
Until the Linux community comes together under a common vision for Linux it has virtually no chance of competing with Microsoft Windows for a place on the desktop.
If that really was the case, Microsoft wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail trying to demote Linux's name etc.
As long as the Linux community is split between the different Linux distros
Why does the community matter? With Microsoft the community doesn't matter, with Apple, the community doesn't matter. A lot of the contributing developers in Linux would continue developing for Linux without the so called "Linux community"
But it takes someone with a higher degree of technical skill to install, support, and maintain Linux as compared to Microsoft server solutions.
I'm a net admin for both Window and Linux systems. In all honesty, there are many times I have found I needed greater technical skills to deal with some Windows issues as I had to reverse engineer closed-source software to discover exactly where a fault was (for example: Microsoft Exchange doesn't like it when disk controllers tell it to wait, and will likely cause database corruption - I discovered this with extensive debugging and reverse engineering). Speaking of which, do you even know how difficult it is to get Microsoft Exchange working properly for more than a hundred users? The amount of work is bloody insane, hell even doing simple things like getting effective spam filtering working is mind bogglingly ludicrous and you want me to believe that?
I find I can setup most common administrative functions in a company with a copy of SuSE in around 30-60 minutes while on Windows it can take me several hours. This is with knowing the procedures (YasT makes it so simple, Windows doesn't have everything as readily exposed in the GUI in a easy to setup manor - see differences between setting up active directory, webservers, mail, spam filtering, dhcp, update servers, network boot installation, hardware configuration, networking, package management, security and so on).
Sorry, I am sceptical of your friend's claims.
Until the Linux community stops whining about the evils of Microsoft
On this situation it depends. If Microsoft is going out of their way and attempting to stop Linux growth by underhanded tactics - I don't feel that this information shouldn't be publicized and as we all know, they do plenty of it.
begins to deliver a Linux-based desktop OS that is as simple and user-friendly as Microsoft Windows
In quite a few cases I have found Linux distributions to be far easier than Microsoft Windows, that said, there is always room for improvement - ease of use in my opinion is not the issue.
Linux has been around for a decade but its [usage] numbers are still low.
Personally I think that's the best approach. I've looked for programs that do similar on linux but haven't found one yet (does anybody have any suggestions?)
Click the seamless mode button in VMware workstation like you would on Windows and OS X.
I've looked for programs that do similar on linux but haven't found one yet (does anybody have any suggestions?)
A quick Google showed me VMware as the first search result - Bit confused as to why you couldn't find it.
With a good sampling of sites, it is possible to get reasonably close. Obviously, you can't do your checks on one site or one kind of site. I see no reason why net applications and similar measurements should be cast into doubt because they aren't just checking a few sites, IIRC, it's a few thousand popular sites. Even if Linux dominates the less popular sites, the user base is enough smaller that you're not going to get a major shift in the proportion by adding 10x the number of sites.
Most of the websites involved are targeted to US audiences, this is not relevant to the rest of the world which has a higher usage of Linux and lower usage of Macs.
Look at all the people you know who use Solaris/*BSD/Linux systems of any distribution and almost no-one does not dual boot Mac or Windows for one reason or another, either at home or at work.
I hang out a lot with people in the opensource community and I can confidently say that about 75% of the ones I talk to, use Linux exclusively - many out of certain principles of avoiding supporting organisations that do "evil" things. I am going to have to disagree with you there.
I like OS X for two reasons - 1) underneath the hood, it is pure Unix goodness
Not really... Underneath the hood, it's a BSD subsystem running on top of a hybrid, derivative of the Mach 3 microkernel which can't get simple things like signalling, posix threads right (OS X's Unix certification didn't fix it).
1. Game, 2. Use Adobe products, or 3. Use some other Windows-only software
then it's already desirable for non-tech-literate users. Certainly if it's already installed and configured by a manufacturer, with a simple recovery disc that fixes everything if you somehow manage to break it (no more likely than with Windows, and probably a bit less likely).
I often do the exact oposite of this, i bought a copy of x3 reunion, took one look at the drm and downloaded a cracked version. So i paid for the game but have never actually installed it from the disc itself as the cracked version has no drm and doesnt require a disc in the drive to play.
X3 Reunion doesn't have any DRM in the current version. And the pirate versions had the full DRM, which required you to disconnect your optical drive to get it to work. When they released the patch to remove the DRM, it was also distributed as pirate copies after.
You know what I don't get? Why is Microsoft being slapped with all sorts of antitrust lawsuits for IE, but Apple that not only "bundles" Safari with every system they sell but also has little support for competition, is in the clear?
It's because Microsoft attained a monopoly illegally and because of that, they are having some harsh regulations to make it more fair for competitors now.
Well duh, that's because those sites are run by POLOCKS!!!
Of course they did, Polish people can be found in plenty of jobs from cleaning to webdesign in every country. So you will find many, many websites are made by Polish people, not a tiny minority. Thus, this reasoning is not good enough for why Safari doesn't work on those sites.
Safari works great here in the first world.
Apparently not, Poland is classed as a first world country and those banks aren't even Polish.
The only problem with Privoxy is, it isn't as easy to use at all. Adding whitelists, blacklisted sites, fixes parameters is easy with no script or adblockplus, in Privoxy it requires studying the file configuration formats among other things.
Now, I may be well competent enough to use Privoxy, but setting it up is a royal pain in the ass (default rules break so much stuff), adding/deleting rules is a pain in the ass too. For most users, browser centric blocking support of such things is easier, faster and more efficient.
Now, if you were running a network.. That's another story.
Slashdot Mirror
But also plenty of people claimed it would work too.
Now with Apple, I haven't really seen that many say it would work, but it might be because of Apple's previous experience.
Note: I am not the grand parent.
It has also been shown to be true many times. I have a £400 widescreen laptop (HP DV6000 series) with 802.11a/b/g wireless, dvi, nVidia graphics with 768MB dedicated (not shared) video RAM, 3GB RAM, 120GB harddrive, Intel Core Duo @ 1.66ghz (admittedly slower than a Mac Mini, however the video RAM which the Mac Mini does not have pays off big time), SD card reader, bluetooth, firewire, optical audio, DVD/CD writer & HD DVD ROM, some built in webcam and microphone I never used, 3 USB ports all with maximum bandwith available for each port and it runs the majority of my games at maximum settings quite well. Compare this to the Mac Mini which begins at £499, can't even exceed the performance of my system for most tasks, plays my games like complete utter shit (probably due to the onboard graphics sucking so much - even that slightly faster CPU doesn't help), can't convert movies as fast via VLC.
Sure, this isn't a 1:1 comparison of hardware, but I can get more for less, so why should I settle for very specific components which are not really that great to begin with? If I was willing to spend more, I could of still got a better laptop than what is currently available from Apple and it would cost less with more features - so, for me, non-Apple computers are cheaper and offer more value.
..But gamers do.
No, it's worse, there is far less choice when it comes to graphic cards for one and the ones offered aren't exactly fantastic for gaming.
Every hard core gamer I know has at least customized one component after they got a custom built system, be it changing a soundcard to a far better graphics card etc. While not as many, may not build an entire machine from scratch, they do usually customize it to a degree that Apple likely doesn't offer and then customize further after.
I have heard and seen some great deals on newegg.com for some components, so I do not believe that is a problem.
Why would he want OS X?
It has piss poor OpenGL support, to the point that projects like crossover games have to write custom fixes for each game they support to work on the buggy drivers (there is your superior hardware support!) and messed up OpenGL, while on Linux, BSDs crossover has universal fixes that work for all games for any potential problems which is not application specific.
The memory management is superior? I disagree, OS X's philosophy of applications is to have each application duplicate libraries that aren't frameworks and therefore a lot of common libraries end up taking space multiple times for each application that uses it. I don't see how that is superior memory management at all. This problem does not exist on Windows or Linux, they are both more efficient in terms of memory usage. Windows does have a problem with sometimes with allocating certain wanted information to swap files, however this not really a concern since generally only 'idle' processes and data get sent to the swap file, allowing for greater bursting capability from applications that need it - that said, there are times this does goes wrong, of course most true Windows applications do not suffer from this problem.
I can't remember when I touched Unix-like system first. That said, I am platform agnostic and pretty much every operating system, distribution under the sun.
I haven't really seen any difference in paths used between Ubuntu and Debian, are you sure you used Debian enough to know it?
Because in Ubuntu, it's split up into multiple files inside /etc/modprobe.d/ (ie: blacklist, options, aliases etc) - quite clean way to do it, in my opinion. I think this keeps with the Unix philosophy of KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid.
If you knew how to use DPKG, you wouldn't have this problem.
I haven't.
I haven't had this issue.
It's working here as intended.
True, because the desktop environment should mount those for you when you try to access the device in the GUI. However, with your /etc/fstab issues -- Are you sure you're adding them correctly? Because they automatically mount here and I didn't have to do anything special with them.
Build essential is just the basic building tools, what you're asking for is provided normally in "build-common" - just like Debian.
This is certainly true but the community does try to help.
It really depends on the day in the Ubuntu channel. Some days it's lots of complaints about packages not working correctly (usually because the user went and installed packages from another distribution), other days it's networking issues etc.
Fedora is about the development of Free/opensource software, not ease of use or being user friendly. I would really put a distribution like OpenSuSE way higher than Fedora.
In my experience, Ubuntu (or at least a version of Ubuntu within the recent years) does not normally behave the way you stated and I would normally recommend it above Fedora.
If that really was the case, Microsoft wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail trying to demote Linux's name etc.
Why does the community matter? With Microsoft the community doesn't matter, with Apple, the community doesn't matter. A lot of the contributing developers in Linux would continue developing for Linux without the so called "Linux community"
I'm a net admin for both Window and Linux systems. In all honesty, there are many times I have found I needed greater technical skills to deal with some Windows issues as I had to reverse engineer closed-source software to discover exactly where a fault was (for example: Microsoft Exchange doesn't like it when disk controllers tell it to wait, and will likely cause database corruption - I discovered this with extensive debugging and reverse engineering). Speaking of which, do you even know how difficult it is to get Microsoft Exchange working properly for more than a hundred users? The amount of work is bloody insane, hell even doing simple things like getting effective spam filtering working is mind bogglingly ludicrous and you want me to believe that?
I find I can setup most common administrative functions in a company with a copy of SuSE in around 30-60 minutes while on Windows it can take me several hours. This is with knowing the procedures (YasT makes it so simple, Windows doesn't have everything as readily exposed in the GUI in a easy to setup manor - see differences between setting up active directory, webservers, mail, spam filtering, dhcp, update servers, network boot installation, hardware configuration, networking, package management, security and so on).
Sorry, I am sceptical of your friend's claims.
On this situation it depends. If Microsoft is going out of their way and attempting to stop Linux growth by underhanded tactics - I don't feel that this information shouldn't be publicized and as we all know, they do plenty of it.
In quite a few cases I have found Linux distributions to be far easier than Microsoft Windows, that said, there is always room for improvement - ease of use in my opinion is not the issue.
According to Microsoft they are higher than Apple's.
Linux has been growing at an ever increasing rate every year, not decreasing, so they are doing something right.
I don't understand your logic. It's code, if I modify code to do something else, it's designed to do that new task now.
I don't see the problem.
I don't need the data generated by my games.
Click the seamless mode button in VMware workstation like you would on Windows and OS X.
A quick Google showed me VMware as the first search result - Bit confused as to why you couldn't find it.
"A new computer."
Most of the websites involved are targeted to US audiences, this is not relevant to the rest of the world which has a higher usage of Linux and lower usage of Macs.
I hang out a lot with people in the opensource community and I can confidently say that about 75% of the ones I talk to, use Linux exclusively - many out of certain principles of avoiding supporting organisations that do "evil" things. I am going to have to disagree with you there.
Not really... Underneath the hood, it's a BSD subsystem running on top of a hybrid, derivative of the Mach 3 microkernel which can't get simple things like signalling, posix threads right (OS X's Unix certification didn't fix it).
Yes. I have osx86 running in VMware under KDE just fine.
My phone has never set off a metal detector.
I would like to point out that almost nobody uses Opera.
*shrugs*
I don't use Adobe products but, I certainly do game on Linux with various games and I definitely do use some Windows software too. Didn't really take much more effort than running the installers too.
I get fed up of hearing about the "killer applications" that everyone needs on Linux, a lot of them do run just fine already.
X3 Reunion doesn't have any DRM in the current version. And the pirate versions had the full DRM, which required you to disconnect your optical drive to get it to work. When they released the patch to remove the DRM, it was also distributed as pirate copies after.
It's because Microsoft attained a monopoly illegally and because of that, they are having some harsh regulations to make it more fair for competitors now.
She's in shock.
Whooooooooooooosh~
Of course they did, Polish people can be found in plenty of jobs from cleaning to webdesign in every country. So you will find many, many websites are made by Polish people, not a tiny minority. Thus, this reasoning is not good enough for why Safari doesn't work on those sites.
Apparently not, Poland is classed as a first world country and those banks aren't even Polish.
Whoooooosh~
No, journalists have shown us that if it doesn't work on Linux out of the box, you give up completely.
When you login into www.online.citibank.pl and/or www.ingbank.pl, Safari doesn't work with those sites. Firefox works fine.
And yet they sell so much more than Apple does. Microsoft must have the better copy.
The only problem with Privoxy is, it isn't as easy to use at all. Adding whitelists, blacklisted sites, fixes parameters is easy with no script or adblockplus, in Privoxy it requires studying the file configuration formats among other things.
Now, I may be well competent enough to use Privoxy, but setting it up is a royal pain in the ass (default rules break so much stuff), adding/deleting rules is a pain in the ass too. For most users, browser centric blocking support of such things is easier, faster and more efficient.
Now, if you were running a network.. That's another story.