OT - Care to share your opinion?

[Rick Thomas]

Hi Matt,

I've avoided putting Linux on my Mac laptop for the following reason:

Apple plays the power management stuff on their machines very close to 
their chests.  They consider hardware details like that to be 
"proprietary intellectual property" and they don't want it to become 
part of an open-source software project until it's obsolete enough not 
to be a threat to their future hardware sales.  (Personally, I find it 
hard to get inside the head of anybody who believes in "proprietary 
intellectual property", but I suppose they are afraid that some x86 
laptop manufacturer will get hold of it and use it to design a 
better/cheaper/faster/whatever machine that might cut into their sales. 
  Who knows?  It could happen, I suppose...)

It usually takes a while for the Linux community to reverse engineer 
the details of the PMU on a new machine.  On a laptop, power management 
is not just a nice thing to have.  It's a necessity.

So, if you buy a state of the art Mac laptop today, it will be a year 
or two before you can run Linux on it without either burning it up or 
running the battery down too fast for it to be of practical use.

So, IMHO, your practical options are Linux on an X86 laptop, or MacOS-X 
on a Mac laptop.

Rick


On May 4, 2005, at 5:21 PM, Matthew Page wrote:

> This is not flame-bait.
>
> I am soon going to be going to graduate school to get myself a little
> more edumacated.  I plan on following a parallel programming/data
> visualization track.  (Just as background information for my question.)
>
> The question:
> I plan on running Linux on a laptop, so my question to you is this...
> Is there a compelling reason to buy a Powerbook and put Linux on it
> instead of ordering a fat-bob x86 laptop and putting Linux on it?
>
> I have about $3000 in the budget and the laptop should be able to last
> me through a PHD without having to be replaced.  (If possible...  I'm
> not talking about theft here...)
>
> Any opinions are welcome!
>
> - Matt