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

[Rich]

On Oct 29, 2008, at 1:39 am, Joe Roberts wrote:

> 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 know about Fink, but at that point if I'm running all of that
> anyway, why run OS X?
You can install the same software via Sun Freeware on Solaris. You  
can install it on Windows via Cygwin. So...
Why bother running Solaris or Windows? Just run a free OS, right?  
Like Darwin for instance...

Why eschew it, just because it didn't originate on your platform of  
choice?

>   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?).
Well "native" on Mac is a special usage of the term, meaning "running  
under the Aqua UI". But Fink-installed apps are still, strictly  
speaking, "native", because they're compiled for your platform.

Why switch? Because you want the stability and flexibility of the  
platform... right? Ancillary apps just flesh things out a bit.

>   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.
http://www.macosxhints.com/search.php? 
query=nfs&mode=search&type=all&keyType=all

I'm not sure I can say it's a "highly atypical" experience, but it's  
certainly not where it ends.

> Yeah for RHEL.  Why would I run RHEL on my desktop?
It was purely for age comparison, writing about what I know about.  
Fedora, Debian, etc. from the same vintage are pretty much as  
crippled as RHEL, but offer easier ways of upgrading to a new release.

I'm not getting at you; but the only real argument for not getting a  
Mac is its proprietary nature. And now, as Bowie has shown, the  
hardware side of that argument has gone out of the window, and  
there's pretty much nothing Apple can do about it to individuals!  
Just don't forget to demand a refund for your Windows tax.

Freedom? Yeah, it's not a no-cost Unix, but it's not as restrictive  
as some OSs, and you *can* run it without the proprietary UI.

R.