Alright alright, I’m not saying Linux sucks – Linux is awesome for what is does and what it does well – 1. be cheap and 2. be fast – which makes it a great choice for a server – not desktop users.
I got real sick real fast of Vista – for all the reasons I don’t need to explain – and being low on funds I tried out some Ubuntu goodness (not greatness) – you can see some of my endless frustration in previous posts about getting wireless working (not only just working, like turning on, but connecting to WEP and WPA encrypted networks), getting ANY hardware to function well has been a pain in the ass – I don’t want to go hacking system files to get my mouse or monitor work the right (I’m not saying I can’t do it but my mom isn’t a l337 hax0r and if Ubuntu is Linux for people this shit has got to change).
Ok so the point of this is get a Mac. Why? Because for the most part, shit works when you plug it in – monitors, mice, mobile broadband cards, printers, networking, vpn, wireless – all of it – and the OS is fast as shit. Ok its expensive but Apple has provided the first serious Unix environment intended for real stupid people to use. the company i work for will only buy macs for the development crew – why – because shit works – you don’t dick around all day with hardware or software issues. So just save up the cash and get one (mac mini…maybe not…mac book pro…yeah definetly. Oh and get an external hard drive – we’ve had a couple disk failures but TimeMachine or SuperDuper! will restore your machine in about an hour to the last backup point (apps and all).
Rails says "RoR!" 
Yeah right… Then explain to me why you can’t even change a sound card decently in mac os? (no drivers at all) sorry… mac os ain’t half as great as people paint it
@Arthas… dunno if you’ve tried getting sound to work on a Linux install on a laptop…and sure not everything is going to work perfectly (Apple’s whole deal about getting a unix system to work so well is “Unified Hardware Platform” so as long as you’re not messing with hardware you’re cool)…but why are you needing a different sound card?
I’ve heard first hand from professional musicians (Gabriel and Dresden) who use the 1/8 inch in and out…and if you wanted serious sound horsepower why not just use a Firewire mixing board…or are you trying to be a gamer on a mac…please tell me no.
Except if they stop supporting something because it isn’t the coolest ever in the RDF.
oh well, Ubuntu is just for “Training people for linux” then they all end up using other dist.. me myself used Ubuntu for few months, then started using Linux Mint and now Fedora (well, for me, Fedora recognizes my printer, camera and everything I need; ubuntu didnt detect my camera :O ) and sometimes, the Dist. itself doesn’t suck, the desktop einviroment does, The latest GNOME sounds cool and it’s better !
hell with noobuntu
oh yea, and preinstalled laptop with Ubuntu are better!! because the companies that made ’em chose the best drivers for it..etc
@orgthingy I agree about the “training wheels” aspect of ubuntu. I was first exposed to RedHat back in 1999 for a class and then came back to linux in the form of ubuntu (I guess it was the distro making the most noise on the internets). But now with work I have to deal with several servers, none of them requiring an desktop functionality, and so we’ve gone with CentOs.
And about the companies doing preinstalls…can you say “unified hardware platform” they are guaranteeing some level of things working when you plug them in b/c they are providing you the hardware much the same as Apple does. But the systems I’ve looked at still aren’t cheap. I guess the real dream of a linux desktop is for it to work on any platform of hardware for any user anywhere in the world. It aims to remove people from depending on corporations to take care of your computing needs, I guess that’s why the linux crowd tends to be a more advanced computing community b/c you do have do be able to get your hands dirty to get things working.
Anyway, thanks for the comments.
Tyler
oh and @Bill Apple can be pretentious about what legacy hardware they want to support. I guess they don’t subscribe to the “if it ain’t broke” philosophy.
I think you are missing the point. Linux can be a good choice for you depending on your usage. I wouldn’t even say that it’s an awesome server OS, it very much depends on what kind of server you use. (I had a bad experience with Linux as a server OS).
IMO Linux is perfect for the desktop if you either are not planning to change configuration for a long time or if you consider yourself as a computer enthusiast. So the first case mainly applies to the mentioned studid people. By the way: You actually don’t set up a MacOS system yourself, it’s pre-configured.
In your case I think you either didn’t take the newest Ubuntu (at least the _now_ current one should’ve solved all WLAN issues) or you had really bad luck. WLAN actually used to be a big problen but you can now consider it as being solved.
In any way, installing a current Ubuntu on some non-exotic system is easier than installing Windows. And after installation in most cases everything works. (did you ever have a non-working Windows installation? You have pretty much no option than reinstalling it with a slightly changed configuration hoping to make it work.)
But power users coming from the Windows world, knowing all the tricks about the system are usually very frustrated when using Linux. Everything is different and you have to deal with weird errors. So you’ll need to use Google, IRC and internet forums to get your answers (IRC can save you a lot of time).
Still here the good things about a Linux desktop: A highly customizable desktop enviroment enabling you to speed up your work flow having less head-ache. The Mac philosophy is actually that you have _one_ medium solution for everybody (on _one_ hardware platform). Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to build such an easy to use system.
Windows is different in this way. But there you pay the price of an unreliable and often weirdly behaving system. I wonder if they managed to make Vista work stable after one year of usage on an average computer. But I assume that we’ll have to wait for Windows 7. My XP just stopped working two years ago (I didn’t reinstall it) – unfixable. Only solution: Backup, format, fresh installation. I’ve seen the same situation on lots of other computers.
This is also a nice thing on Linux: Actually you can fix nearly everything.
(30 year vet of all micros and OSs)
YADCSP (Yet Another Disorganized Community Software Project)
Tried downloading Ubuntu and burning it to a CD for testing from that CD – in my capable Toshiba notebook currently running XP Pro.
What a mess. The web-page organization bespeaks a high-school level of rhetoric and organization – read: half-educated, a human-factors disaster that certainly pegs any experienced professional’s skepticism meter about the project and its products before even getting to first base. Everything’s jumbled together – the project, the products, the versions, the wiki, the community, lookie here, lookie there, let me tell you how neat I am, join the community ect… utter rubbish! I want to see if your software is worth anything by seeing it operate and I don’t want to waste my time in finding out. Period. A-hole elitist? No, just a typical user that this community has, apparently, lost sight of. And that’s a shame, because if Ubuntu is half as good as some claim, they are probably losing 9 out of 10 samplers on their first contact.
I won’t bore you will all the problems there were with simply getting the download and the upside-down and backwords sequence of steps – really not like a sequence at all, but more like some one free-associating on the theme of something that they knew should happen and then just adding lines (or barely related links) as each new thought about alternatives and possibilities came to mind. Finding and getting the check-sum and program to check it was another adventure in hide-and-seek though the bushes of disorganized web-pages and linux jargon – I wonder if any of them can speak common computerese, or English even.
Anyway, I burned it with THEIR program that reported everything was hunky-dory, but when I booted from the CD, it started to load, put the splash screen up on the display, ground around for a while with less than obvious alternative options on the screen (more evidence of human-factors challengedness), then the system just died with both internal and external display screens blank. No input – no output – dead’r ‘n a mackerel.
Try to find a step-by-step trouble shooting guide for a PC notebook? Forget it. These guys are too wrapped up in their “community/project/touchie-feelie/philosophical” b_shite to do something so mundane as to spell out how to go from A to B to C reliably – if it’s possible at all.
Go ahead and just install it on my hard-drive? Over my dead body. I wouldn’t push a button on something made by people that cannot even discipline themselves to do something as simple as organize a set of web pages to get an experienced, but unfamiliar, user quickly and efficiently to their test product – especially if it’s going to start mucking around with boot sectors and tracts. I’ve been down that foggy road with incompetent SUSE before and, things better look credible on the surface, at least, before taking myself for a ride I might regret. G__ only knows what kind of fole-de-role they have wrapped up inside their version of Linux – endless personal testimonials to its wonderments notwithstanding.
So, as long as they robbed me of my afternoon, I thought I’d return the favor. I’m all for community-source free software as a concept but, truth be told, producing a good product requires a lot of fun work but, as well, a lot of dreary dismal tedious slogging and disciplined try-after-try until its right – not only in the developers eyes, but critical reviewers eyes as well. “Volunteers” prefer to do the sexy stuff that gets their names on product, but few want to do all the tedious jobs that rarely get a thank you. Ubuntu seems no different in that respect.