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Comment by zimbabwe | Hacker News Reader

I booted up Ubuntu just now. I support the JWZ quote. Ubuntu is the best Linux has ever been, but there's no competition in any way with OS X, and I'd probably choose Windows 7 over it if it didn't instantly support all my drivers.

This is attracting a lot of downvotes, but I'll restate what I said in more certain phrasing: If your operating system doesn't support my drivers without my having to do work, then you have failed to make your operating system easy to use. Say what you will about Windows, and I'll say a lot, it has never failed to give me audio/video, which Ubuntu has failed to give me every time I've used it.

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You must have really weird software. OS X, Linux (and BSD), and Windows all suck in different ways. One way that they all don't suck is out-of-the-box hardware support, all three OSes support most common hardware just fine. I run Debian Unstable and I don't think I've ever explicitly installed a driver, everything is in the default install. (I think Intel is mostly to thank for this situation on Linux; Intel has written great wireless and video drivers, so if you have Intel hardware, everything is likely to work really well.)

So if hardware is not a problem, it comes down to the software. Everyone uses the same web browser on all three platforms, so it's not that. Linux has better terminal editors and support for programming. (I ditched OS X after never getting emacs to work right.) Nautilus and Finder are about the same, although I do not like to use a GUI for managing files. Linux lets me choose, OS X forces its opinion on me. (I also don't like manually arranging windows; OS X forces me to do that anyway. It doesn't even have working "maximize".)

Anyway, I spend maybe an hour every two weeks caring for and feeding Debian, and that means all my software is always up to date. On my OS X machine, I spend less than that, but every piece of software I have is outdated since it is too annoying to manually update everything.

YMMV, but Ubuntu is probably a fine OS for 90% of computer users (especially with OO.org 3).

Huh! Perhaps it's a fault of the virtualization software, then? I'm using a Macbook Pro, the drivers of which I'd assume are in fairly common use, but I can't get audio to work properly. Would virtualization have anything to do with that?

Software like VMWare or Parallels usually makes a fake audio device available. One that has nothing to do with the actual audio hardware in your Mac. They both probably emulate a Soundblaster 16 or so. Which should work fine on anything from Windows to Ubuntu running virtualized.

The maximize on Mac OS X works, then concept is different from Windows. Maximize does not necessarily mean "fill the whole screen with one window" under OS X, but that doesn't mean it is broken. Play around with Preview to get it.

I've played with it. Apparently the algorithm is, "generate one random number and set the window height to that, generate a second random number and set the width to that".

Ok, than you don't get it. I've decided to make a mini-tutorial about this. I will update at this place when it's ready. Stay tuned (if you want).

OS X works only on a limited set of hardware. I can't install it on any netbook. I can't even legally run it on any new laptop under $1000. The vast majority of people who install linux have 0 problems on thousands of different kinds of computers from a decade old to new netbooks to supercomputers.

Moreover, OS X also has numerous problems with peripherals. I bought a camera, standard usb camera sold by the millions, and there are no OS X drivers for it. I spent hours scouring the web and installing various programs into this location and that location. Supposedly those drivers support some cameras, maybe even mine. But no, to this day I cannot use skype video on my Mac Mini. On my Ubuntu partition, it works with 0 configuration. Plug it in and I'm done.

Another example: a shared printer. In Ubuntu jaunty, there's a brilliant dialog that automatically finds and sets up a shared printer with a few clicks. My friend Jeremy tried to set up the same printer with his Macbook Pro, and he asked me, we poked around, couldn't find it. We got a cryptic error message that said something about 'could not find bla...'. We tried for a few hours searching online to no avail. Today, he goes upstairs to physically plug in the printer directly every time he wants to print.

He tells me that for most Mac problems you have to spend a few hours searching online and you might find some blog post where someone mentions a trick. No, OS X is where Linux was 10 years ago when I was using Debian. Worse, because Debian always had apt-get, so I had lots of good free software at my fingertips. Ubuntu is far ahead in terms of being painless, and it improves every 6 months...

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