Cecil wrote:
How do the 2 OS's compare? Anyone have real-world experience on both?
If you just want to do work (or play), Mac OS/X is pretty sweet. Things like iMovie and iTunes are pretty awesome. USB devices "just work". Plug in an external firewire drive, and poof!; there it shows up on the desktop.
However, when you get ready to get under the hood or do Power-Administration, you'll be wishing you were sitting at a Linux box instead of an OS/X box. Not because you can't do the power-admin stuff on OS/X; it's just . . . different.
As a minor example; suppose you have a user who needs you to do something for them. You sit down in their chair, and after a couple of minutes you realize you need to need to do something as root. You know the root password, but you don't know the user's password. You don't want to log him out, because you'll need to test your changes under his password. You can enable Fast User Switching, and switch to a second GUI session (like having a second X session, but when you switch sessions there's a really neat graphical screen-turns-into-a-cube-and-rotates-to-another-side-for-the-next-user effect). There you do your admin stuff. But then when you go back to the first user, you find out you need his password after all to get back. Yeah, it's more secure than the typical X session switching in Linux (and probably configurable on both OSes), but it's a pain.
Another example, there's no such thing as Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to the first VT, etc.
Another example, even in Terminal (an xterm equivalent), even root can't see the Desktop files, etc of another user without resetting permissions or doing other magic.
On the other hand, Mac OS/X "just works".So again, from a user's standpoint, OS/X has a lot to recommend it. From a power-user's standpoint, Linux has more "access".
-- Kent