[mdlug] Linux push an economic phenomenon?

[Wojtak, Greg]

On 1/21/11 12:07 AM, "Dan Pritts" <danno at umich.edu> wrote:

>On Jan 20, 2011, at 1:03 PM, Garry Stahl wrote:
>> Sure Apple has pretty toys, but they practice lock in like Microsoft
>> wishes it could.  There are flaws in the hardware and software and they
>> are stuck with what is known to be the worse phone service in the
>> nation, still, the faithful flock year after year to be inconvenienced
>> and pay too much money for the flawed pretty toys.
>> 
>> I considered a Mac at one point.  The price drove me off.  They are not
>> that much money better than say Acer.
>
>Another viewpoint...
>
>I use apple on the desktop, linux, windows (blech), solaris, freebsd on
>the server.  
>
>You are right, apple is expensive.  and the hardware is nice but
>definitely has its flaws.
>
>but...it's Unix, and it's a nice desktop environment.  And I do not EVER
>spend time dorking around rebuilding my kernel to get something to work,
>nor do I ever have to dork with an Xfree86 configuration.  There are
>things that don't work exactly as I like, but the time I used to spend
>customizing things to be "just so" I spend doing something else instead.
>
>You don't like apple, it's fine with me.  But apple surely doesn't
>"inconvenience me", at least not on the desktop (iphone, well, you have a
>point [*] ).  But on the desktop, I don't "pay too much" - I pay a
>premium price for what I consider to be a premium product.
>

I'm in a position to be able to to choose between a Mac and Windows
workstation.  I started using a PC because I thought it would be easier to
work with since there's a large Windows server presence here too.  I
finally got sick and tired of all the problems I was encountering (how can
a dual core laptop with 8 GB RAM run so slow with Windows 7?!) and
requested a Mac Book Pro.  I would *never* go back.  Some of the
integration isn't quite right but I manage for those couple things.  This
laptop cost probably double what the Dell did.  But how much of a drawback
is that when I was spending a few hours a week total (I kept track)
waiting while I reboot or trying to track down problems in an "OS" where
the end user has 0 visibility into what's going on internally (ie lack of
error logs, or cryptic ones at best)?  If I had the choice to run Linux on
the desktop, that would be ideal for me.  But the Mac comes in an awful
close second, especially when the desktop environment is so much better
than what I've used on a Linux workstation (admittedly, the last time I
actually *used* a Linux desktop environment was about 5 years ago).