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Re: I *love* goodbye-microsoft.com


On 24 Feb 2007, at 12:44 pm, paddy@panici.net wrote:


Strangely, I feel a tiny pang of guilt. I now have an apple box
for the first time in decades. One of the main deciding factors was to 
buy unixy goodness :-)


That was my main reason for buying an Apple four or so years ago.


but also to get some exposure to OSX. I tried for
a while to live in OSX, but in the end I installed Debian on it. It's
not that I couldn't build everything I wanted, it's just that not having everything just work is like going back in time ten years. It's not that 
there isn't ports or fink, but there isn't debian, short of a full
install, and the alternatives don't measure up.  It's not that I
couldn't take debian to osx (in my fevered imagination), it's that I'm
too lazy to even try.


Well, that's sort of what fink is.
I have to sheepishly admit that I use OS X every day on my Apple machines. I don't have Debian installed on any of them - I do my DD work on server machines. The main reason for that is that I still think that for GUI things Apple have the edge over any of the Linux alternatives. The UI is simple, functional, and well integrated. Debian is fabulous in so many ways, but I still don't think any Linux distribution really cuts it on the desktop (although I do administer a network of 300 Debian desktop machines at work, so I don't think it's *that* bad).
I've also been very pleased to not the fairly vibrant OSS community that has grown up around OS X. There is a *lot* of really quite good free software work going on for OS X (Fink, Camino, Adium, SSHKeychain being the principal ones I use every single day). Yes, there's a lot of Windows-style shareware too, but I think the free stuff is reaching critical mass, when it becomes difficult for the shareware authors to justify their position, when that developer over there ---> is offering something open and free.
Having said that, when I can justify it to my good lady wife, I'm looking forward to buying an Intel Mac and being able to run OS X and Linux simultaneously - I tried doing DD work under Virtual PC for a while, but it was a non-starter. Just way too slow. Just the configure script on one of my packages (am-utils, which admittedly has the configure script from hell) took more than an hour to run under Virtual PC on my 1 GHz PowerBook. 

Tim
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