Windows woes

[Fredrik Olsson]

Anders F Björklund skrev:
> Fredrik Olsson wrote:
> 
>>> The morals of the story: computers ARE NOT for everybody yet now in
>>>  the 2006, even with dumb-oriented systems as Windows XP. You
>>> choose with which harshness you want to live with when choosing an
>>> OS depending on the time you have and the tasks you'll be
>>> performing on the system
>>
>>
>> I beg to differ, we have Mac OS X. A unix for pretty much everyone.
> 
> 
> Mac OS X is only partly UNIX, though ? And not for the poor ;-)
> There are *several* reasons to chose one of the alternatives...
> 
> Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, etc.
> 
> One is the lack of open source, or choosing your own hardware.
> Another is the recent number of security issues, on Mac OS X ?
> 
Lack of open source I would not agree on, pretty close to all major open 
source projects out there works on OS X as well.

The hardware and price I agree on, mostly because I chose Mac not for 
the hardware but purely the software :/.

As for the security issues I have a feeling that the press have blown it 
out of proportions. With not a single virus in the wild for five years, 
the first one is big news. But comparing that to the thousands available 
for "other operating systems" is not quite fair :).

> 
> I happen to like Macs, but they're clearly not for everyone...
> Mac OS X is something of a strange hybrid (MacOS and OPENSTEP)
> 
> So nowadays, I'm platform agnostic.
> 
And personally I like it because of the hybrid thingie :). I tried using 
Linux as my main workstation, and had it working for close to a year. I 
think it was best phrased by BCS:
"Unix, is novice hostile... Windows, is expert hostile"
I find that OS X positions itself in the middle; easy enough to get the 
what ever the daily routine puts in front of me, and hard core enough to 
  do the tweaking when I like to.


I think most peoples trouble with OS X and "not unix enough" is that 
they are familiar with Linux, and OS X have more BSD roots.


> Fortunately, GNU and Linux runs fine on both of my machines,
> so I can always dual-boot into that when I tire of OS X / XP ?
> 
> 
> I think it's sad, really. Computers *should* be for everyone.
> And here I think that Mark Shuttleworth is on the right way...
> 
> --anders
> 
> 
> PS.
> I remember when Apple introduced the Xserve. One slide said:
> "simplicity and elegance of Unix, power and stability of Mac"
> I found that particular translation (to Swedish) was hilarious.