Linked by Jack Perry on Thu 3rd Jun 2004 17:55 UTC
It's all Waterloo-Maple's fault, really: if they had maintained a version of their computer algebra system for the Amiga, I wouldn't have found it necessary to switch to Mac. Or maybe it's Commodore's fault for mismanaging themselves into oblivion; I don't know. Either way, I became painfully aware three years ago that my little Amiga would no longer satisfy my computing needs. I needed a new home computer.
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As for freedom, I addressed that above.
Linux can not have all the "cosmetic" features of MacOS X but it is free, run on chep hardware, it is easier to install LaTeX, Scilab, Octave, etc softwares (you don't have to "UNIXize" your system to run unix applications).
Actually, I think that Crystal and Keramik look somewhat better than Mac. Also, most things seem to work a lot more smoothly than they used to since KDE 3.1.
However, it is not necessarily easier to install LaTeX, Scilab, Octave etc. I say this, having done so on both Realm Linux, and on the iBook. You don't have to Unix-ize a single thing in order to install LaTeX, thanks to Gerben Weirda's i-Installer: http://www.rna.nl/ii.html
Since Apple now includes a nice X-Windows configuration with each iBook (such was not the case at first), there's very little manual labor left to be done, if any. Some X applications start rather transparently from icons (Matlab, IIRC).