[NTLUG:Discuss] Mac v. Linux

[brian@pongonova.net]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 02:29:58PM -0500, Jim Goode wrote:
> I offer the following opinion to this discussion. I have used many types
> of hardware and software (IBM mainframe, Sun OS and Sun Solaris, Mac,
> Windows, AIX, HP, DEC, and Linux) in my career and always found the Mac
> OS to be the most intuitive for non-geek users (my own immediate family
> included). 

> People who like command line processing, or who really like
> digging into the internals of an OS, generally choose non-Mac systems.

This is the very reasons why I'm doing a slow migration away from
Linux and towards OS X (in fact, the only job my Linux box does now is
duty as a mail server).  I enjoy working from the command line, but I
also want a rich GUI environment that is performance-oriented and
works without a lot of arcane magic.  I swore off KDE and Gnome many
moons ago in favor of lightweight WMs such as XFCE, but none hold a
candle to the OS X GUI.   

I've been using and programming on Linux boxes for over 10 years now,
so I'm not exactly a newbie...the decision I've made to migrate to the
OS X platform isn't something I came up with overnight in a dream, or
listening to one of Jobs' pieces of propaganda.  After 10 years of
having to muck with Linux internals, I've simply grown tired of it.
Building the kernel the first time is fun; after twenty or thirty
times it's just drudgery.  Likewise with building from source:  I
can't tell you how many times I've built KDE, XFCE and other WMs.
It's been a learning experience, but I'm at a point in my life where I
just want my computers to *work*.  

On a side note, ten years of Linux in the house was not enough to
convince my family to switch...the G4 I bought two years ago was an
instant hit, and we haven't looked back at Windows (or, to a lesser
extent, Linux) since then.

Just my 0.02 from someone who's been there and done all that...

  --Brian