[quote1207841896=Flippy Squirrel]
[quote1207840212=RESPAWN]
As an old Linux user, I love the fact that I can get to a command prompt in MacOS these days and use the (much more powerful than Windows) *nix standard commands. Boss wants a listing of all directories down from a specific level? No problem, open up a Terminal, type "ls -lAR|grep dr>output1.txt", and email the .txt file to him. Oh wait, he wants to know what hasn't been copied from that directory to the external hard drive? No problem. "diff -y output1.txt <(ls -lAR|grep dr)>diff.txt" and then email the diff.txt to him. You can't easily do stuff like that with the built-in command line for Windows.
[/quote1207840212]
That's part of the reason that Microsoft developed
Windows Powershell, although it's more to compete with *NIX as opposed to Mac. I totally agree that the FreeBSD core of MacOS is a boon, and is probably the only reason I was able to use it for a year.
See, I decided that I was prejudiced against Apple, and needed to get experience in order to overcome that. I used a Macintosh computer for a year to do my work, and let my Win machine sit idle on a shelf.
After a year, I came to the following conclusion. If you want the power of Linux, use Linux. "It just works" is a load of horse droppings. As is the case with both Microsoft and Apple, 90% of what is said about their operating systems is just marketing mumbo-jumbo. The big difference seems to be that the Apple community (in general, so don't kill me) drinks the kool-aid that much faster.
Apple, like Microsoft, steals ideas and claims they're original. They say that MacOS is easier to use, and it is, if all you've ever used is MacOS. As someone who started on the Commodore VIC20 and worked my way through Windows to Linux and then to Mac, I can tell you that nothing is inherently easy to use, and MacOS is just as user-unfriendly as anything else.
Okay, I need to step back from the keyboard. This is a topic that I could go on about for days, because it's always annoyed me. I'm done now.
[/quote1207841896]
LOL. As I see it, MacOS only has two advantages over Linux. The first, is a very pretty, flashy GUI. I only consider this an advantage in marketing terms and nothing else. Because that's what a pretty GUI is there for: eye candy to attract users. While I'm sure there are window managers for Linux that can emulate the entire look and feel of a Mac, I have yet to see a single distro with an out of the box GUI as pretty and flashy as OSX's. Nevertheless, that's an advantage that can easily be overcome. The OS does provide tools that make some things, especially hardware management, easier, but some Linux distros are fast approaching Mac's ease of use. I sat my mom down in front of my Ubuntu box and she was surfing the net and checking her mail within minutes, but the coolest thing is that she was able to find the mouse sensitivity adjustment fairly easily in Ubuntu.
The other advantage Apple, and this is the big one, is their mass market support. Open Office is great, but it's not 110% MS Word compatible, and I have no idea what their Word 2007 support is like. And I don't think anybody's managed to write an Adobe CS3 style suite of apps for Linux yet. That makes a pretty big difference. That will be hard for linux to overcome that hurdle.
In the end, though, what people have to remember is that Apple is a very good marketing company.
My old man still uses his C64. It's hilarious. He has a stockpile of antiquated technology that would blow your mind, and its funny because he's not a tech or anything; he just retired last year but he's been a roofer his entire life.
