linux is too expensive

[Eric Dunbar]

On 26/09/06, kansaibear at mac.com <kansaibear at mac.com> wrote:
> I read several times on these boards how the gui on osx was only marginally better...
> I have to ask, is drug use rampant in the linux world?
> There is no comparison. Even 10.2.8 is as far ahead of either ydl 3. and ubuntu 5. as osx 10.2 is ahead of windows 3...

Chuckle. I have to (dis)agree with you there (can you tell I'm
procrastinating). OS X (even 10.2.8) is far ahead of Linux in many
ways (particularly robustness and quality of GUI) but it's not that
much ahead of Linux than it is Windows.

Modern Linux (e.g. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, YDL 4) is a fantastic desktop
solution that dwarfs Windows 3.x. It is so much more stable than
Windows and the software for 95% of user needs is equal to what was
available on Windows 3.1 (especially given that Abiword has now
migrated to F/L-OSS (my all-time favourite Windows word processor)).

> Most any open sourse linux product can be compiled for darwin and X11. Might be a little time consuming but...worse than I have already suffered? Most of what I would need is included anyway.

They _can_ be compiled but Darwin's X11 is nowhere near as smooth as
X11 in a modern Linux. I played with fink for a while and eventually
eviscerated it from my system because the apps simply worked that much
more smoothly in native Linux. X11 has a place on my system still, but
that's only because I have a Linux server on my network which I can
use as an alternate 'desktop' using the server to run client software
and display it on the X11 host under Mac OS X (I think I've got the
client-host terminology right?).

> At least the base system works perfectly out of the box on the hardware. Language, Settings(come on, set the trackpad by editing configx file and comand ine), cds, video, audio....

Agreed. OS X does 'out of the box' very well and maintains 'out of the
box' functionality quite well (it's easy to change settings... of
course, once you _really_ learn Linux it's even easier to change
settings there but how many people are at that stage ;-).