Linked by Jon Atkinson on Tue 20th May 2003 18:14 UTC
I entered the world of Apple hardware about 3 months ago now, with a second-hand iBook2. It was a 500mHz, 256mb, ATI Rage 128 model, with a standard CD-Rom drive. I spent the first few days trying to tweak Mac OS X to my liking, then a few further weeks installing and learning to use the applications I thought I'd need. Chimera, BBEdit, the developer tools, even the Fink X server so I could use Gaim.
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500MHz G3 w 256MB RAM. On OS X I have applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Painter, Reason, Final Cut Pro. Were I to install YDL I could replace these with... the Gimp... and Kontour, losing some 90% of the functionality on the latter. Of course, there are no usable OSS counterparts to things like Painter, Reason, and Final Cut Pro.
Did I mention I can also watch Flash animations in any one of IE, Safari, OmniWeb, Mozilla, or Camino? In Linux I could try watching them with... the open source Flash plugin that lacks things like clipping masks.
Scrolling a Finder window with more than 10 or so icons in it would produce skipping and visible refreshing, something I thought died with Windows 3.1.
This is what I saw as his primary reason for switching to OS X. Well, first, this would hardly motivate me to drop all the applications I use and switch to Linux. But... OS X composites frames and draws them to a backbuffer then pageflips at the end of a vertical refresh. It's impossible for there to be "visible refreshing" in OS X... the compositing engine simply "drops frames". You will never experience tearing artifacts... so I don't see how he can claim that there's "visible refreshing".
I still fail to understand the arguments about OS X's performance compared against GUIs circa 1991. Certainly these GUIs didn't have performance problems... but on the flipside they were visually apalling.
In the end, it seems if you don't "do anything" with your computer on the creative side, Linux may be a suitable choice for you, however you might want to consider why you purchased a Mac in the first place.