[Tfug] 2 weeks of Hackintosh fun..

[Bowie J. Poag]

Hi Jeremy,

Thats what I meant by "hobbyist".. I've got a guy across the street from 
me who spents 10x the amount of time tinkering with the engine of his 
Corvette than he actually does driving it...and that's fine. He enjoys 
it. More power to him. What's nice about OSX is that it's still Unix 
under the hood, and it is FAR from being bolted shut.

The thing thats always bothered me about the Linux community is that it 
lost its underlying anger and drive to conquer back during the dot com 
boom. The boom turned adventure into rape, and there were alot of people 
walking funny by the time 2001 came along. The talk of making Microsoft 
obsolete subsided, and the Linux community began settling for 2nd 
place.. Don't think ahead, just imitate this, imitate that.. It's been 
that way ever since. "Can do" became "Can't, and wont bother." "Why do 
something new if it's going to fail?"  "We make it that way because 
people are used to it in Windows."

Sure, Linux has *grown* exponentially since then. But to what ends?  
Moving from one niche to another niche isn't progress. It's a lateral move.

Cheers,
Bowie




Jeremy D Rogers wrote:
> Hi Bowie,
> I've agreed with a surprisingly large amount of what you have said 
> lately. Especially about goose poo, having grown up in MI and no being 
> back in the midwest.  And I actually have been pretty interested in 
> OSX for a while now, so I enjoy the comments and am glad to have you 
> share your experiences. I have been thinking for some time about going 
> with a Mac for my wife next time around (pay the price for the real 
> hardware, even).
>
> But what I think you are missing is what linux is to many of us. I 
> honestly couldn't care less if linux desktop never becomes mainstream 
> (as long as it gets enough attention that drivers and such work). As I 
> get older and more consumed by things other than linux, I have sadly 
> become more and more a 'user' rather than a tinkerer. I have less time 
> to trouble shoot oddities, so I really want something to just work. 
> However, that said, I still like to to be able to lift the hood and tweek.
>
> What I meen is, I agree that gnome and kde try too much to be like 
> windows, which is part of why I mostly use fluxbox and keep a close 
> eye on E17. There's something quite satisfying about  having so many 
> choices in desktops all within the same OS and being able to switch 
> and try each out whenever I feel like it.
>
> It's probably the same reason I own a soldering iron. There's really 
> no reason for me to spend my time fixing a broken $2 fan, or spend 
> hundreds of hours building a telescope from scratch that has the 
> performance of something I could buy for less than $100 at walmart. 
> But the reason I do it is because the process fun and educational. 
> Sometimes it's more about the journey, not the desitination. But for 
> my wife it's the destination (at least with computers), so I may well 
> buy her a mac or try out the hackintosh. I continue to enjoy your 
> thoughts and experiences on that.
> Cheers,
> JDR
>
>
> --
> Jeremy D. Rogers, Ph.D.
> Postdoctoral Fellow
> Biomedical Engineering
> Northwestern University
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Bowie J. Poag <bpoag at comcast.net 
> <mailto:bpoag at comcast.net>> wrote:
>
>
>     Well, it's been two weeks now since I gave up my Linux desktop in
>     favor of an Darwin/x86 OS X "Hackintosh" desktop.
>
>     I'm not looking back.
>
>     I've got some sobering news for you guys... I really think we're
>     entering a post-Linux sort of era, if not already there.. Having
>     enjoyed 2 weeks of a consistent, elegant, functional, stable,
>     efficient Unix desktop, there's really nothing attractive left to
>     draw me back to Linux as a day-to-day environment. I'm sure Linux
>     will always occupy a strong position server-wise, but as a desktop
>     environment, the game's over.  Even after 10 years going, the
>     Linux community has failed to deliver a desktop with the
>     attributes I listed above..That's about has frank and as honest as
>     I can be with it.
>
>     Call me smug, but the thing I've always warned and yapped
>     incessantly about is now the proverbial writing on the wall. If
>     the primary development focus of a desktop project is to do
>     nothing more than try and mimic an existing design, you'll resign
>     yourself to perpetual 2nd place flea market knock-off status. Both
>     KDE and GNOME are absolutely consumed with this approach, and it's
>     only a matter of time before the end user realizes both projects
>     have only succeeded at perpetually failing to deliver. If you're a
>     hobbyist, that's fine, enjoy it.. But as a mainstream desktop,
>     when it comes to Linux it just ain't gonna happen, i'm afraid.
>
>     Cheers,
>     Bowie
>
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