Thread: Moving away from Windows

Good article published today
Pitting Ubuntu against OS X, for anyone who's thinking of moving away from Windows

http://www.informationweek.com/share...leID=201002048

If you're a Vista-wary Windows user who would rather switch than fight, should you move to a Linux distro or Apple's OS X? We asked a Mac fan and a Linux advocate to lead a guided tour of each OS.

I run Ubuntu on this lappy... allows me to take full advantage of the 64 bit dual core AMD without popping for the Windoze 64 bit version.

It also gives me access to some sweet tools for... um... poking about.

All this talk about linux...bsd ftw!

However, many tools are written for windows and I see no reason to run them in an emulated environment so will continue to run windows on most of my servers. Will probably do a dual (or triple) boot for the new ones I'm getting though.

I automatically thought we were going to be discussing standing away from windows during a lightning storm when I read the title of this thread. Goes to show you that I am not much of a computer person.

The article is fine, but Ubuntu doesn't really represent the main selling points of free UNIX-like operating systems. "Newbie distros" -- i.e. distributions that cater to Windows converts who want as gentle a learning curve as possible -- such as Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora/RHEL, and Mandriva wrap everything in a RAM-consuming GUI, unnecessarily. While they still have a few advantages over Windows (e.g. free in both senses and more secure), they put as much space between the user and the OS's internals as Windows does, preventing the user from achieving maximum productivity and power.

Distros like Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo (as well as other UNIX-like OSes such as FreeBSD), especially when running a highly productive X setup instead of a bloated desktop environment, are much more representative of the highly stable, secure, powerful, and flexible UNIX way (for lack of a better word).

Edit: But since that article is geared toward Windows converts anyway, I guess comparing Mac OS X to what I would consider a "good" distro might not be practical, so never mind my rant.

OSX has far more software for it that Linux and is really stable. Linux is also notoriously hard to use, especailly for newbies, while OSX has Apple's long reputation of ease of use. Linux has no standard, software written for KDE has no guarentee of working on Ubuntu.

They mentioned higher prices for the Mac operating system. WHAT? Compared to Linux yes, but Vista is $599, while Leopard will be $129. The machines themselves are more expensive because they are higher end, but software on Macs are far cheaper than their Windows counterpart ($499 for Office and $79 for iWork)

I didn't like that they said that Macs lacked in gaming. Mac games run faster than the same game on Windows because of it's using the second core as part of the graphics card (like a cell processor.) Most of the big games have a Mac version now and EA and iD both use Mac as a large part of their market. Microsoft even used Macs are development platform for their early Xbox 360 games (both use PPC processors)

I find it odd that they failed to mention that Parallels as of yet doesn't support hardware acceleration for most of DirectX.

I like both Ubuntu and Mac (I use both,) but I think the Mac is better in almost everyway. I really only have Ubuntu running on a machine because I needed an Intel processor and didn't want to deal with Windows.