Should we call out the Apple lovers amongst our ranks?

Post by **Patrick** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 12:01 pm

Some of you love Apple stuff. You own several Macs, iPods and iPhones. You don't care that Apple is in many more ways even more closed than Microsoft. You regularly buy from iTunes and use it to listen to Linux related podcasts with it. You go to F/OSS related conferences and see a ton of Macbooks. What gives? Do you just love shiny gadgets branded with Apple logos and don't care about any of the other aspects involved with technology?

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazin ... rentPage=1

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 12:24 pm

Pat, being the fairly staunch free software guy around this section of the Intertubes, I'd like to humbly request an extra poll option, that says something around the lines of "Both Apple and Microsoft produce proprietary software, they're equally bad in my opinion". Feel free to add whatever twist, you may feel like adding, to it.

* Troels bows.

Edit: Thanks a lot for adding my suggested option to the poll.

allix · Post by **allix** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 1:22 pm

We should be asking them why they still use it, the linux and open source community should not be shy of constructive criticism.
A a die hard linux friend of mine who has everything running linux once said in a lecture, "apple just works", even though he does not have a apple at all or osx in any shape or form. I don't personally get whats with the osx label , "it just works". Setting up a web,file,printer and other servers on linux,bsd just work but nobody in the linux community makes a noise about that, they just keep calm and continue hacking code.
If i want to write a formal letter in koffice,openoffice,abiword "it just works" and then i print it which "just works".
I want to check my email , kmail, alpine,thunderbird "just works" .
I want to modify a photo because i warm to add a warmer tone to the over all appearance, so i open up gimp and "it just works".

I could go on forever with these "it just works" analogies.

So what is it with apple users than make them go hysterical over a programme that works ????????????

LinuxMint-4 · Post by **LinuxMint-4** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 4:11 pm

I have two G3 I-Macs and one B & W G3. I like Mac products. Two of them came with OS 9 and could not connect on the internet . Now all three run Ubuntu 7.04 for PPC and work good. Cost next to nothing , who said Mac products were expensive? lol

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 4:42 pm

Patrick wrote:You don't care that Apple is in many more ways even more closed than Microsoft.

Apple is no worse than Sun or IBM, or any other proprietary UNIX vendor. Yes, Apple engineers both the software and hardware. So what? So does IBM with AIX and their POWER servers. So does Sun with Solaris and their SPARC systems. If anything it provides a superior level of integration by tying the operating system and hardware together. Of course, people are entirely free to install Linux or anything else on those platforms, so saying it's a closed system is a moot point. At least Sun, IBM, and Apple respect open standards and open protocols. That cannot be said about Microsoft.

allix wrote:We should be asking them why they still use it

Because I enjoy choice and variety? I have no desire to restrict myself to only Linux systems when there is a bright and vibrant world out there of closed, *and* open source software.

allix wrote:I don't personally get whats with the osx label , "it just works".

On Mac OS X, installing a program involves downloading a binary, and dragging it into the applications folder. That's it. It's the most simple and painless installation procedure on any OS. There is no compiling, there is no messing with the command line, you don't need to use obscure software repositories, it doesn't need to resolve dependencies, it just works. That is the type of mentality that runs throughout Apple and Mac OS X. Make everything as simple and powerful as possible for the end user.

allix · Post by **allix** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 5:43 pm

Wally Balljacker wrote: On Mac OS X, installing a program involves downloading a binary, and dragging it into the applications folder. That's it. It's the most simple and painless installation procedure on any OS. There is no compiling, there is no messing with the command line, you don't need to use obscure software repositories, it doesn't need to resolve dependencies, it just works. That is the type of mentality that runs throughout Apple and Mac OS X. Make everything as simple and powerful as possible for the end user.

You can download a rpm, deb and others from the software's website and just double click on it and it will install, infact that's how i installed flash on fedora. Most graphical front ends to apt-get,yum etc are very simple to use. Its a lot quicker than searching the web for the binary package.
I personally think built-in repositories is a lot better than crawling the web.
I remember using windows and having to remember where i got the binary from with yum,apt-get or whatever i no long have to remember where it is as there are what you "could" call itunes style package managers , instead of managing songs for a ipod , you manage program's for the computer without ever having to worry about searching google.

so both systems "just work"

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:42 pm

allix wrote:
Wally Balljacker wrote: On Mac OS X, installing a program involves downloading a binary, and dragging it into the applications folder. That's it. It's the most simple and painless installation procedure on any OS. There is no compiling, there is no messing with the command line, you don't need to use obscure software repositories, it doesn't need to resolve dependencies, it just works. That is the type of mentality that runs throughout Apple and Mac OS X. Make everything as simple and powerful as possible for the end user.
You can download a rpm, deb and others from the software's website and just double click on it and it will install, infact that's how i installed flash on fedora. Most graphical front ends to apt-get,yum etc are very simple to use. Its a lot quicker than searching the web for the binary package.
I personally think built-in repositories is a lot better than crawling the web.
I remember using windows and having to remember where i got the binary from with yum,apt-get or whatever i no long have to remember where it is as there are what you "could" call itunes style package managers , instead of managing songs for a ipod , you manage program's for the computer without ever having to worry about searching google.

so both systems "just work"

Usually. Installing software on Linux mostly does just work. Emerge, APT, etc, are wonderful and reliable tools, but they are not perfect. It's still a pain to get software installed that isn't included in the official repositories. You either have to attempt to compile it from source, or find a third-party repository. For the typical user, it's easier and simpler to download a binary from a website and click and drag to install it like on OS X.

I'll concede that software installation on Mac and Linux is generally very easy, but I still give the advantage to Apple. For Apple users, the entire internet is their repository, and compiling from source and resolving dependencies is completely unheard of.

davijordan · Post by **davijordan** » Wed Mar 19, 2008 6:48 pm

(The new notice at the bottom of cups)
if you love apple, you'll love this:

The Common UNIX Printing System, CUPS, and the CUPS logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. CUPS is copyright 2007-2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

I am os agnostic, but prefer linux. You now get about the same about the sames apps for all platforms anyway,.

Cost - Item
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free - 1 now caseless scsi based umax g3 >> stripped for parts for my pc's
Free - 1 white box g3 >> stripped for parts for my pc's, (We might put it back together and make a server out of it).
$20 - 1 imac >> put debian on it and it is now one of my daughter's computers. (She is super smart and she gets it from her mother)
Free - 1 blue g3 tower has osx 10.4.11 (has the same opensource apps as most of our pc's)
$ 30 average - 2 blue tower g3's >> 1 has edubuntu and 1 has debian
When I need extra thin clients for family gatherings, I unplug the hard drive in the g3 towers and netboot them to my pc ltsp server.) My daughter will probably get all these soon also.

Soon to be Appleless! No more computers from Steve joBS.

Chess · Post by **Chess** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:25 am

Ultimately, I think you have to use the best tool for the job depending on the circumstances and your audience. All things being equal, I would prefer it to be free software.

I do think Apple is worse than Microsoft in many ways and I have really grown to dislike Apple. Personally, I only use free software operating systems at home (I have to use Windows at work). We have one Mac at home, which was a free hand-me-down, and which my wife uses mostly for making home movies of our kids. There is nothing in the free software world that works as well as iMovie, unfortunately. She recently hosted a huge retirement party for her boss, and gathered all this video of him and got photos from his wife, and made an extremely professional-looking video with really cool menus and the like as a retirement present. And she did it all in 4 weeks. As much as I wish this was not the case, she could not have done that in Linux.

Other than that, my wife mostly uses our Ubuntu laptop, which our kids also use.

allix · Post by **allix** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:45 am

You can do that with autodesk's fire, smoke and a few other of there apps, sadly none of there products are really affordable.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/in ... eID=123112
read the linux advantage bit

and the features it allows

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/in ... id=7245633

as you can see its properly can do what you want and it runs on linux.

jnash2001 · Post by **jnash2001** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:54 am

oh my ... the fine line between personal opinion and flamefest is getting very thin

i own and use a mac on daily basis as a desktop and i'm also a big fan of openbsd
for it's simplicity and "it just works" as unix like. they seem to match my thinking.

when you're in somewhere for sometime the bad and ugly starts to show up.
at that time you know if the good things compensate for the bad ones so then
you just choose the one that's best for you.

if u like linux so much, why do u care if i don't use it?

</rant>

p.s. this isn't directed at anyone in special, i just felt compelled to express myself

murph · Post by **murph** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 12:06 am

I have another question. Should we also call out the Windows lovers in our ranks?

Is "I only use it for games" an excuse to keep the familiar around?

How many Linux users still have that Windows partition on their machines?

--murph

(Linux, Mac, occasionally Windows, and even occasionally Amiga user.)

davijordan · Post by **davijordan** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 12:30 am

You might as well call out the bsd users also if you are going to get that detailed. If the application software you need is only on a particular os and or desktop, then more power to you. Everything is becoming so cross platform now anyway. kde is going to mswindows as a lot of other apps have. Safari and other apps are going to the windows from the apple. I guess soon it won't matter what you have. But I sure would like to see an expandable ps3 desktop!!! We need to have something besides x86 on the desktop.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 12:44 am

murph wrote:How many Linux users still have that Windows partition on their machines?

Not I. I haven't used Windows since early 2005. My most recent desktop came preloaded with Vista and I wiped it out after just one boot, just to make sure all the hardware was functional. I didn't even let it finish installing the Microsoft security patches.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 4:53 am

murph wrote:How many Linux users still have that Windows partition on their machines?

Me neither, I have not used Windows since August 2004 on any of my computers. These days I refuse to pay Microsoft any money, so if I buy a brand new computer (And not a used one off something like eBay, which I mostly do), I build it myself, not only do I find that fun, but I also avoid the Microsoft extortion fee being forced on me.

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