Linked by Scot Hacker on Mon 17th Dec 2001 17:34 UTC
The story of how a BeOS refugee (and not just everyone, but the author of the 'BeOS Bible' book) lost faith in the future of computing, resigned himself to Windows but found himself bored silly, tore out half his hair at the helm of a Linux box, then rediscovered the joy of computing in MacOSX. Scot Hacker will describe his personal adventures with today's operating systems after he was set out to find an alternative to his beloved (but with no apparent future) BeOS. Update: Make sure you read the second part of the article, a rebutal, found here.
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The main thing that's kept me away from Macs over the years has been the pricetag. For half the price I can get equal CPU and memory performance from x86 iron, and can get stability from one of the *IX flavors (*BSD, Linux, Solaris X86). The second thing is that I was never especially fond of the Mac OS UI. OS/X has drawn me towards the Mac hardware once again.
Though I haven't worked with it myself, I suspect that running an alternative to Aqua on OS/X should be as easy as launching the X server on its own and firing up any of the fine window managers available for the X world. I've seen versions of Enlightenment that look prettier and are far more configurable than Agua. Plus they support multiple virtual desktops.
As I understand it, Darwin is the underlying OS and is itself based on FreeBSD which means there should be a huge range of Open Source applications availble for simple porting to the Mac hardware. It may not be easy, but it should be doable.
To get back to my topic, Mr Hacker seems to have had a bad experience with Linux. I'll agree that package management can be more than a little lacking (I usually compile from source, myself) and that apt-get and the BSD Ports Tree are better solutions than RPM in many case, but overall I've rarely had any issues with the desktop - and I'm not alone. major problems seem to be an exception, not the rule.
Personally, should I have the funds available to acquire a Mac, I'll be more then happy to play and work in the OS/X world - but I'll also have the box tripple booted to LinuxPPC. . .