from IBM to Mac?

[carrot]

Switching to Linux takes quite some effort. I have not personally had experience with Linux on Mac, but I wouldn't recommend it, especially on PPC. Half of the reason to get a Mac is for OS, which makes for a good user experience and tight hardware integration. You also end up paying more for a Mac, and Apple's hardware, while good, is too expensive for what you get. As I've said before, with Apples you're not just paying for the hardware, but for the User Experience. (Why else have iPods consistently sold so well if the competition has arguably better hardware? ... this is a rhetorical question, btw.)

If you are the type who loves to tinker and you're willing to learn things and do some research and tweaking to make things work, then Linux will suit you fine. Those who just like things to Just Work™ should stick to commercial operating systems and stock hardware. That's not to say that it isn't possible to easily get a Linux system working perfectly, however. In my brief foray into Slackware Linux, I found myself with a working system in an hour and a half, including printer support. Slackware's surprising lack of documentation, however, required me to use what I had learned from other distributions, and so I cannot recommend it to the Linux newbie.

UI across applications in Linux are usually an inconsistent mess, but there are quite a few really polished applications. Also, I've found Linux to be much more memory/CPU-efficient and never *needs* to be rebooted, whereas OSX and every app you run on it just eats up RAM and cycles like cookies. OSX also needs to be rebooted every so often, either for updates or to "flush out" the cruft that accumulates during the time the system is running. (I run my machines for weeks, even months at a time.)

OSX automates everything. Linux, in general, does not do something unless you tell it to. This is a double-edged sword, because on OSX you have to do considerably less to get things working (let's see you get Apache, Samba, SSH, and CUPS daemons running on Linux with just a few clicks...) But with Linux, you become much more aware of what your system is doing and generally, when something breaks, it's never the fault of the system. It's something you did. A properly tuned Linux system is a joy to use, and on OSX sometimes you simply cannot fix that little thing that irks you, though OSX has way fewer annoyances than Windows. (Why can't OSX remember what type of keyboard I have each time I plug it in? Why can't it remember my external display settings? And why are Dashboard Widgets HUGE?)

I love Linux, but three reasons keep me using a Mac as my primary computer: lack of a native Microsoft Office (no, O does not suit my needs), no Exposé (the existing Linux clones of it don't do it right), and multimedia (video, mostly) support on Linux is not as good as on OSX.

 

[James S]

The usability of the OS may not be affected but the apps that run on them and the security have and will be significently affected and most people buy a computer to run programs. MAximumPC reported on the huge difference in speed between running XP and the App on the new Macs vs running them under the Mac OS. The Mac OS lost by a considerable margin in many cases. Most of the problems are because those apps have not yet been optimized and that will take time, if it gets done at all.
As for security, most of todays hackers cut their teeth on Intel systems. I suspect Mac, which has been releasing about the same number of patches as XP has the last few months might be attracting their attention.

Actually, every single app that I use daily have already been updated to the new universal binary format. I'm a Mac developer I've already started the process of updating the apps that I'm developing, it's mostly a no brainer. The only apps that wont be updated are the ones that aren't being developed anymore. There are some excellent apps that are more or less discontinued that will probably be stuck running in the emulation for ever, and there are folks that are using old versions of software that will have to run in emulation or pay for an upgrade, but the performance hit isn't so bad as those reports say. I read a bunch of those articles and they were done with a pre-release version of the thing. The actual release is quite a bit better. It's still slower than a recompiled binary, but it really works OK. Unless you have a whole library of stolen software that you can't afford to actually purchase or upgrade it's not going to be a serious issue for anybody. Course, here I'm talking about running apps that are still MacOS apps, just not recompiled for the new processor, not running XP apps or anything like that.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean about running XP and the app on it vs running MacOS on it? Are you talking about loading windows on the hardware and running a windows app? People running tests on the Mac hardware loaded with windows find it to be very snappy, on par with the very high end PC hardware as far as native windows performance.

As far as it opening up the platform to hackers or other kinds of malware, I can't honestly see how this is an issue at all. Hackers do not write their attacks in platform agnostic assembler code, and just because the opcodes that the processor processes are going to be the same, doesn't mean that any meaningful program written with them would be. The binary format on windows and the mac is significantly different. The calling conventions for libraries and system functions to actually DO anything with your program are very very different at the bytecode level. Code written for one will NOT run on the other. If you run windows, natively or in some emulation layer though that will open your windows partitions and software up to the same dangers that regular windows users face.

Overall the impact of switching to a different processor for the new Macs is completely nil for the average user. all your old apps still run, all the system apps and new apps or apps you upgrade will run much faster, and we get dual and other multi-core options for cheaper than we ever did with the old chips.

 

[raggie33]

james we all know ya are realy steve jobs

 

[HarryN]

james we all know ya are realy steve jobs

:laughing:


BTW - I have used SUSE Linux with some good results. I did buy the Sun Office suite, and it had some surprising challenges, but is ok for generic use.

Printer support was mediocre in the version I used.

The main issue in the end was that my wife refused to learn multiple OS / software combinations for different computers. She's not dumb, just "determined" - a nice way to say stubborn.

 

[James S]

james we all know ya are realy steve jobs

:laughing: :lolsign:

it's possible... but it would require some really fast thinking... I've actually seen him and me at the same time...

 

[copykat]

Why switch or choose? If you can, run both. I run Mac and PC at work and at home and it works out well. These days 1 computer often isn't enough. I'm adding a couple Linux boxes next.