Red Hat Diaries/005e

I picked a winner

On 26 September 2002 Slash Dot exploded with a discussion of seldom seen magnitude. It all started with a referral to an article at BYTE by long-time Unix author and guru Moshe Bar published three days earlier.

http://byte.com/documents/s=7620/byt1032475416823/0923_bar.shtml

Once Slash Dot honcho Hemos had published the link, and let slip that he and CmdrTaco were considering moving to titanium PowerBooks and OS X, the dam broke. By early morning there were nearly 1,000 (one thousand) posts in the thread.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/26/0058238

And surprisingly enough, the thread was filled with serious testimonials to just why hard-core Linux users were migrating in droves to the new Apple desktop. I've summarised the best of them in the following list.

Why OS X is better than Linux

1. No dual booting from Windows to Linux. You have it all in one OS.
2. People want nice looking, well thought-out things to look at.
3. Apple produce stuff that is visually pleasing as well as functional.
4. Even the most die-hard GNU/Linux fanatic who has taken the time to look at OS X has admired/been jealous of the polish.
5. None of the Windows laptops cut it with battery life or displays.
6. Great for watching DvDs, work most days, bed for writing, downstairs in front of the TV for emailing, the kitchen for recipes.
7. The iBook is a workhorse and just keeps on slogging. It's without a doubt the best PC ever made.
8. Significantly easier to set up and use on a daily basis than Linux.
9. All the control panels are in one place and follow a consistent design.
10. You can get MS Office and Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash MX, and AOL for it.
11. Excellent free development IDE (Project Builder & Interface Builder) that makes native apps with an audience of 5 million paying customers.
12. Great commercial tools like BBEdit, Oracle, Sybase, SQLGrinder, and JBuilder Enterprise, that make developing for production systems as easy as developing on Linux.
13. With Linux, there's no one willing to pay the money to legally play DvDs. With OS X, a small portion of the purchase price covers the R&D and licensing required to have this feature.
14. Linux is not nearly as simple or obvious.
15. No good alternatives if you need business apps and Unix apps.
16. Apple make far better hardware.
17. For laptops, no one beats Apple.
18. Better response time.
19. The instant-on feature of the TiBook makes it worth something like eight times the money, considering you can get an easy day's use out of one battery by only opening the laptop when taking notes. Great for conferences.
20. Too many people wander around the office with laptops open because they don't want to wait through the wakeup cycle - if it even wakes. And they're always trailing cords because they have to have the thing plugged in most of the time to last a day.
21. The great network switching ability: moving between various wireless and wired networks can be done without thought.
22. The hardware is better quality.
23. It is a joy to use.
24. OS X is a great blend of Unix and beauty.
25. Tired of switching between Linux and Windoze.
26. Sick of fighting with machines.
27. Sick of things like trying to get Gnome 2.x to compile, only to discover that Gnome 2.x is possibly the worst user interface ever.
28. Start up the computer, it works. You do your work on it, that's all.
29. Linux isn't supported by Dell.
30. Drivers for laptops can come out ages after the laptops roll out - if at all - and their quality varies.
31. There's no guarantee that Linux will work and be stable on a laptop.
32. Dell's aren't cheap.
33. Who wants to have to pay for a MS OS that comes pre-installed if you'll never use it?
34. There isn't a laptop (or desktop) in the PC world that is as well designed as the iBook.
35. The battery life is amazing. 4 hours on a single charge, sometimes 5 hours, even listening to music.
36. When you close the lid, the machine sleeps. When you open the lid, it wakes up, often before the lid is fully open.
37. You will never have the whole OS crash - what PC can do that?
38. Because OS X is Unix, there are loads of apps and libraries out there just waiting to go.
39. OS X's PDF-driven graphics layer makes everything look gorgeous, sharp and readable. It's like looking at a printed page - maybe better.
40. After years of spending hours and hours to get anything working, it's amazing to just plug in devices and have them work the way they should.
41. Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
42. The pissing match between KDE/Gnome, their complex setup/usage and so forth have kept them off corporate desktops.
43. Mac users never call you for help.
44. The interface just makes you smile. It's like they locked a bunch of graphics designers in a room with a pile of heroin and told them to go wild.
45. Engineers are switching in strides to OS X laptops, usually TiBooks.
46. It is simply starting to make less and less sense for professional developers and engineers to be running Windows versus OS X, unless you are developing Windows software. OS X is just too powerful.
47. The hardware is very superior.
48. Sleep Mode: All you do is close the lid and the machine suspends itself and a spiffy glowing pulsing LED turns on, lighting up the room like a night light. It's that simple.
49. OS X is the best desktop for a Unix environment ever seen.
50. It just works. And works. And works.
51. IT JUST WORKS.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. I picked a winner. I've done this twice now. It makes me glad.

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