Apple seeks to trademark “startup” in Australia

I agree however looking forwards the brand could grow sufficiently large to gain this enhanced protection. I think even if this did happen Apple would be unlikely to enforce overly harshly but their stance on the App Store mark goes some way to show their approach to TM enforcement (though the discussion over the distinctiveness is another discussion!)

Thanks for that. Interesting! Looks like in Australia there has to be a likelihood of confusion even where a mark has reputation.

This is not the case in the EU, where the mere act of taking unfair advantage/causing detriment is sufficient for a TM owner to take action, even where there is no likelihood of confusion. Likewise, in the US, a TM owner would also have an action for TM dilution which does not require confusion.

Is 'Friend' a surname or merely a miscellaneous third party?

I have been using it full-time circa 2006-2009. I guess that counts as "past decade".

1. There was no out of the box support of my particular NVidia video card, so I've had to build the driver from source and fiddle with my system to install it.

2. I've had userspace processes freeze on network activities and become impossible to kill, because of a kernel deadlock in my wireless driver.

3. Proper smooth fonts required work at the time (freetype did not ship with good subpixel hinting).

4. Proprietary media codecs did not work out of the box and required a third-party repositories.

5. The whole KDE four-point-not-really-zero debacle.

A minimalistic XMonad+Vim+terminal setup was decent and worked for me, but eventually I got sick of desktop Linux and moved to OSX.

I realise that many things have been fixed in the meantime, but it was not a flawless experience back then. If I was to give desktop Linux another shot today, I'd be cautiously optimistic, but not expect a miracle.

Things like the close button position irk me quite a lot. Are there ways to make it look as simliar as possible to win7?

Laptop battery life.

Multiple screen support.

I don't know the current state of high density display support in X11 (and I may just be an ignorant user and plain old wrong about this), but it was a totally broken deal breaker for me a year ago.

Chinese language fonts (especially when mixed with English fonts) and input methods. And I don't just mean the default fonts the OS comes with (those these are better on OSX by a wide margin), but the way font selection and fallback works for GUI elements that contain a mix of Chinese/English.

Also switching the system language on the fly.

OSX works out of the box; No distro fragmentation that could cause dependency issues; larger device support (that's a manufacturer thing as we know).

But I haven't used Linux in about 6 years, so things might've improved...

I've run both linux and OS X as my default setups (currently linux), and I have to say, OS X does a lot of things better. I like linux better overall, but that's just too strong a statement. Here's a few that OS X does better:

-- Font anti-aliasing.

-- Package management - people using linux should be expected to be able to compile from source, I know, but at least most packages released for Mac OS X are developed with binaries.

-- Graphics card drivers, specifically Nvidia (which Mac ships with).

Cater to naive users. I say this as someone who particularly dislikes Apple's way of doing things, but who still recommends OSX to naive users.

Something goes wrong with linux? Better hope there's a congenial neckbeard around, and if it's a hardware problem, good luck to you. In OSX? A larger online presence, and then of course you can always take it into a "genius" bar... and they replace the hardware gratis often enough.

Not strictly OS X, but, damn, their trackpads are good.

My experience is that when a UI feature is present in OS X and Linux, the OS X version will typically (though not always) be less buggy and more polished.

I've got Ubuntu 12 open in VMWare, running Firefox, and so I can compare it to my Mac running Mountain Lion. I'll pick on window resizing. Here are ways that Ubuntu's window resizing is objectively worse than OS X:

1. The resize edges on the right, left, and bottom are exactly one pixel in extent. They're nearly impossible to hit.

2. When resizing the Firefox window larger on the left/top sides, there's ugly flicker and transient drawing artifacts on the right/bottom side.

3. The resize cursors are misleading. For example, if I grab the top and resize the window as tall as it will go, the cursor still implies it can grow taller. On OS X the cursor changes when the window reaches a limit.

4. An Ubuntu Firefox window can be sized down to three pixels wide. It's hard to click on this window to make it bigger again.

5. Ubuntu allows me to position the window under the launcher and then resize it smaller. Such a window then gets "stuck" behind the launcher. I was also able to get an OS X window stuck behind the Dock, but it was harder: I had to make the Dock smaller, reposition the window, then make the Dock larger again.

6. If you position a window partially offscreen and then try to resize it smaller, it does this weird jitter thing.

7. Ubuntu does not appear to support background, fixed aspect ratio, or centered resizing, which are power-user features in OS X that you can access with modifier keys. If I hold down the shift key, then the Ubuntu window does some sort of snapping thing where it alternates between being as wide as it can, and being three pixels wide (??)

That's from a few minutes of poking around with a single UI interaction.

This isn't a fanboi post. While I like OS X, I noticed things that Ubuntu does better. But in turn, an objective Linux user cannot miss the many things that OS X does better.

That commen means: you can take any company and find that its practices are shady. Nobody questions semantics. You think Apple is shady, I think Google is no less shady, maybe more, given their business model.

My point was that the amount of money spent on R&D does not matter. Apple came up with iPhone and iPad anyway. Your point is? That R&D is apples and R&D is oranges?