[Tfug] The Joy of OSX, and the friction coefficient of goose droppings.

[Joe Roberts]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Rich <r-lists at studiosprocket.com> wrote:

> This is a commonly repeated fallacy.

It's just what I observed.  I have no vendetta or even opinion about
Macs except specifically what is in my limited experience with them.

I know about Fink, but at that point if I'm running all of that
anyway, why run OS X?  For me, personally, if I'm going to switch my
whole platform over, I'm going to want to run native apps (or why
switch?).  Now, fine, if my experience getting simple NFS working was
highly atypical of the experience, I'll take that under advisement,
but having to use crippleware to do something so elementary didn't
exactly fill me with enthusiasm.  Remember, this is about switching
whole platforms for me, not encountering something anew.

> First, it's Unix. All the popular Linux apps have been ported. If not
> natively, then running on X. Look up Fink and MacPorts. They work.

I did not know about MacPorts but I will have more of a look.

> In my experience, FOSS tends to be packaged better for OS X than for
> Linuxes, because fewer assumptions are made about what libraries will be
> available. For example, try getting VLC going on RHEL 4 without upgrading it
> to a point where Red Hat won't support it... Whereas it just works on OS X
> 10.4. Yes, the two OSs were released within a few months of each other, and
> you pay a heck of a lot more for RHEL.

Yeah for RHEL.  Why would I run RHEL on my desktop?  I probably should
have mentioned I am talking about my home desktop, which despite being
a home desktop, I use extensively.  I would prefer either the option
of a Mac or anything else over Windows, which I am forced to use by my
company.

That said, I run Gentoo for free and I have few complaints.  Sometimes
it breaks.  Then I fix it.  Not something I love but it's something
that doesn't happen often enough for me to rate it as a significant
negative.

> And then you have the availability of the popular commercial apps.
> Unsurprisingly, Gimp and Inkscape don't cut it for some people. It's nice
> not to have to break out a VM just to run a single app.

Well I already mentioned video editing (something like Adobe Premiere,
even, would be fine).  Cinelerra crashes constantly on every system I
run it on.  I run Kino but that's extremely half-assed.  It would be
nice to have reliable, easy-to-use video editing.

As for Gimp, I guess I'm one of the four or five people in the
universe whose needs it meets.  I'm well aware of complaints about it,
but as I don't do anything in print, colorspace or whatever is not a
particular issue for me.  Its interface is something I've long since
come to grips with, eccentricity-wise (I know where everything is and
can use it fairly efficiently for my needs).  As for Inkscape, etc, I
rarely do vector graphics, but I can see in both cases, having used
Photoshop and Illustrator, how you'd at least want industry-standard
tools, not to mention Flash, which someone previously mentioned (which
as a player works fine here on Linux - for me, at least).  That is, if
you did either of those seriously.  I guess (don't know much about
them).

But again, maybe it just comes down to, given my needs personally,
there is no compelling reason to switch, but there would be if my
needs were different.  I don't mind the little g3 in the corner but I
saw nothing on it (it runs Tiger) which I found particularly
compelling.

But I'll have a look at Macports and look at available freeware more closely.