Thanks for clarifying Eishay. Clearly Apple is very good at picking
quality components and pushing new aesthetic boundaries, and that's
good for all of us as consumers. What scares me is the lock down
issues and "milk-the-cow" policies. Colleagues with Apple computers
have to pay twice as much for a RAM upgrade, they can't just plug in
arbitrary hardware and for 1½ year were unable to run some of our
software because it's written for Java 6.
The one thing that still annoys the hell out of me is dual-head
support. While I tend to get configurations I want, changing them
involves restoring my backups of the xorg.conf file -- configuring it
using the UI is just too fiddly and doesn't always work. And you have
to restart X to change, which is a pain even with KDE's excellent
session management.
But while I believe I understand what the Apple crowd is talking
about, my pain is just not big enough to lose my freedom. Of course
there is the option to run Linux on Apple hardware, which sounds
enticing :-)
Peter
Hardware support is much better if you buy hardware that is explicitly
supporting a particular OS and I think that is one of the major
advantages of Apple -- they deliberately restrict themselves to a
small collection of hardware and they are happy to stop support for
old hardware in newer versions of MacOS. Which is really fair enough,
but I don't think it is fair to claim Linux has lots of problems with
hardware that MacOS hasn't -- any comparison of that type should be
made on components that were chosen for Linux use, not the old box dug
out of the closet.
Peter
On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 8:40 AM, Frederic Simon
<frederi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> First thing I tried (just in case) to put Ubuntu on my Mac book pro, and not
> very successful... So, I'll wait.
> The dual head was a big pain for me too. I managed to have a really good
> conf that worked most of time (with xrandr to play with the resolution) but
> the X reboot was a pain.
> Now with 8.04, ATI driver (on my T600p Lenovo) are not even supported
> anymore, and I can't develop Stellarium... So, I'm happy to check JOGL bugs
> on Mac and finally have a great version of Stellarium for Mac, but rigth now
> :( No sky...
> Frankly, I really love this feeling that OS competition is not dead, really
> exiting time.
> On the other hand I can't ignore Windows deployment and Sun buying Virtual
> Box and making it full for Mac is solving it all: Ubuntu Hardy and Windows
> XP on top of my Mac OSX...
>
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 1:29 AM, Peter Becker <peter.b...@gmail.com>
The fact that you can't test a Dell before buying is a bit of a
problem, though. Fortunately down here you find some stalls in the
hallways of larger malls now.
Peter