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Re: [LUG] If "Boot Camp" switches windows users to Macs then ....

 

On Sunday 09 April 2006 11:33 pm, Ben wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 20:32 +0100, Benjamin A'Lee wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 09, 2006 at 06:57:10PM +0100, Tom Brough wrote:
> > > Will we all end up being GNU/ Linux users on Apple hardware ?
> >
> > Is there any particular reason to use Apple hardware anymore, now it's
> > not PowerPC based?

No. Use it if you've already got it. If not, run away.

It's no better as a portable free software installation than a PC based 
laptop - you still need the proprietary OSX components to get things like the 
modem and suspend working. The same faults as any PC-based laptop. Apple 
could have released the Macmodem drivers and the ACPI driver under a GPL or 
BSD licence but they haven't.

The only merit is the battery life.

Desktop/workstation boxes are no different to PC boxes. Who cares that it's in 
a fancy case?

> Yes, it's staggeringly fast, extremely pretty, compact, reliable,
> ergonomic and it runs OS X. No standard PC has yet been got to run
> Apple's commercial, packaged version of OS X, and one of the reasons I
> use Linux is because it's the closest equivalent to OS X.

Spoken by someone who can't have tried writing GNU software for OSX.
:-(

It's not particularly fast when trying to build software, it's actually VERY 
slow if you try to run X11 because it is still running Cocoa beneath X11.
It runs crying to swap space far too often, even without X11.
A default install is 13Gb so it's hardly compact. My Debian install was closer 
to 6Gb.
It's less reliable than Debian unstable, although not by much.
OSX isn't that close to GNU/Linux, it's much closer to BSD. That is the crux 
of the problem as far as development is concerned - the same tools APPEAR to 
be available but they work in subtly different ways that break packages in 
spectacular ways.

Compact and ergonomic are not compatible concepts. Try writing code on the 
thing and you'll realise how cramped the keyboard really is.

And before anyone complains about criticising OSX as a development platform, 
just think how new software for OSX is written. Yes, by developers who are 
too busy cursing the OS to keep up with the latest releases on other 
platforms. Even the CVS unstable packages for Fink on OSX are the best part 
of a year behind Debian.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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