The Mac Won Me Over
feld.com
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My story began with a $200.00 laptop and GNU/Linux. I spent four days installing and configuring GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) on that poor laptop; I should have been more diligent about checking up on hardware compatibility... The roaches were X.org and the f'ing wireless card. This laptop was $200.00 for a reason. It turns out many of the parts inside of it had chipsets from unheard-of Taiwanese companies (this is were diligence would have saved me time and money); therefore, they were largely unsupported or had nasty hacks to work with it.
After four days, I had X.org finally working the way it was supposed to (including the nvidia graphics card binary!) and after wrangling ndiswrapper to the ground, I had a fully functional laptop (shutting the lid didn't sleep it, and X would freak out when I would lift the lid, so not "fully" functional).
Life was good for a little while until Ubuntu came out with an update. I figured a system update couldn't be too bad and went for it after backing up all my data. After that update, X.org stopped working, the wireless card stopped working, and none of my previous steps to get either working worked. I decided to give up on that laptop and reasoned this: OS X has a beautiful GUI, Unix underneath, and everything seems to work "just right". I bought a 13" Black MacBook that day.
Ever since, I have had 0 problems with it. I'm a heavy user of the command-line and compile a lot of software on it; updates don't break things, and Time Machine can rollback anything (not just data) if something does break. That's good software.
Now, I'm not hating on GNU/Linux by any means - this pivotal experience was four years ago and I'm sure a lot has changed since then, not to mention my choice of hardware could have easily moved me in a different direction had I been more fastidious about checking the hardware compatibility lists. From that experience, however, and observing the community as a whole over the last few years, one thing is obvious to me: GNU/Linux isn't meant for the desktop (speaking of everyday users here, not RMS or your sysadmin). OS X is a desktop operating system, Windows is a desktop operating system (I'll never touch windows again, now that I've had Linux and OS X), Haiku (the BeOS fork) is a desktop operating system (for which I have high high hopes).
I currently, probably, do fewer things in the GUI than most OS X users; I use the Visor extension for Terminal, I have a fully customized ZSH shell, and I pretty much live inside of full-screen Emacs - but I do love interfacing with OS X. Fan boy? Not quite, my choice is more of a logical and rational one arrived at by much experience and experimentation; if Haiku gets to a reasonably stable stage, I'm sure to switch to that platform more in support of diversity than any irrational emotional attachment.
Unfortunately no. I have had your experience on two other laptops (each in the $1000 range). In one case, it was a Gateway with wireless and video card issues in linux. In the other case, it was an HP that I decided to update to the latest current Ubuntu, and now I cannot get it to sleep properly -- and it had no issues four releases ago (other than being behind the times). Both laptops work wonderfully with Windows.
It is pretty disheartening because I really enjoy working in the linux environment.
I mean, if Apple were not heavy-handedly preventing people from installing MacOSX on their run-off-the-mill non-Mac notebook, we'd hear similar horror stories, maybe also Vista-like disappointment when people try to install it on an underpowered machine.
Why would anyone complain about something they are very clearly not supposed to be able to do? It's well understood that OSX only runs on Apple hardware, it is far less clear that you need to be careful with Linux.
Looking at ubuntu.com and going through the download process, the only mention I see of supported hardware is worded as "certified hardware" and placed in the footer under "Partners".
I don't recall finding an exhaustive list of supported machines for other well known operating systems, either. Typically when purchasing hardware we rely on the manufacturer to indicate which operating systems the hardware works with. It seems wholly unreasonable to hold Ubuntu accountable for not running on a piece of hardware that no-one, including the manufacturer, claims it's compatible with.
Matter of fact, I have my girlfriend's netbook (this one was "designed" for GNU/Linux) running GNU/Linux; she hates it. Why? Because when she closes the lid it shuts down. When the battery is about dead, it just kills power, it doesn't gracefully sleep (or even warn her). There are countless other complaints that are completely valid.
That is why GNU/Linux is not ready for the desktop. Sure, I could cope with those issues, but I work in the command line every day and I'm also a programmer.
I will defend GNU/Linux any day for its philosophy, culture, software, and massive influence; but I will not defend it as a desktop operating system, it simply isn't refined enough for that.
Not rocket science.
My girlfriend uses Ubuntu and she's totally fine with it, why? Because I set it up for her and everything "just works", taking the role that would otherwise be taken by the system integrators at Apple.
It's not the Linux core system that's broken, it's the dodgy culture built around rapid and poor attention to detail at the low end of the computer market, and this is what you're expressly comparing Apple's high end offering to.
With Apple, instead of the extra time/thought, it's a bit more money to make the purchase. It also doesn't hurt having a single entity doing most of the communication and making sure the customer is happy, by making choices/support relatively simple.
The problem here is that they aren't easy costs to compare, since they are listed in different resources. I think this is why a lot of Apple users say things like "You just need to use it.", since quantifying all the little user experience gains doesn't lend it self well to a comparison of technical specs.
Windows is only $50-300 if your time is worthless. MacOS only costs $129 if you happen to be fine with buying a laptop that costs twice as much as everything else. Linux is free if you buy a laptop that isn't a total POS or the highest end.
I have had ZERO problems with Ubuntu on a $500 Toshiba I bought two years ago. Everything worked great out of the box, and continues to do so, countless updates and upgrades later. I've had far more issues with Vista on it, actually.
My mother (a total technophobe neophyte) has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for over a year now, and vs. XP, 'support' calls (to me) have dropped by 80%.
That said, I'm actually fine with any OS - Windows Mac or Linux.
Where's the story here? Because he's a VC this is news?
I always feel like I need to set aside a day or two when I have to do something similar to a Windows system. Has that improved with Windows 7?
I think the "app-as-folder" convention and the lack of a central registry are the main contributors to the success of these migrations. "Move this list of folders and files from A to B" is a simple, if tedious, task.
FWIW, I have NOT performed that migration on any machine that had Parallels or VMWare installed; Adobe installs have been the most complicated thing that I've migrated using this utility. If any readers have used the migration on machines containing software (vmware, parallels, etc) that adds kernel extensions, I would be very interested to read the results.
Didn't bother me, but there's a whole tranche of people that it did. Personally I've moved on to a tiny Samsung netbook with Ubuntu (a market Apple skipped mostly because it's low margin) and much prefer it.
This effect also seems to be working on Apple, not just it's customers: selling mobile devices seems to be making Apple more enterprise friendly, so that they work more seriously on things like Exchange support.
I agree with the author that Exchange and chrome works(though flash causes it to break often) but these work on Windows too, so these are not things I would want to pay extra for.
I haven't found much in the software to pay extra for the Apple experience, if I do buy another Mac it'll probably be due to better hardware than anything else (but I cringe on the thought that I can't upgrade the RAM/hardware myself though the iMac looks really nice on my desk)
Now if only Linux had a sane DE. I can't stand GNOME or KDE. Gnome is so inconsistent and hard to configure properly. KDE's defaults for everything and standard widgets (Esp like in preference dialogs in applications) is just atrocious.