Re: [SLUG] linux on ibook

[Erik de Castro Lopo <erikd-slug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 6 May 2003 11:56:45 +1000
Luke Burton <luke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 11:41  AM, Steve Lindsay wrote:
> 
> > Most of what I find on the net about linux/ibook is glowing, so 
> > naturally
> > I'm suspisicous....
> 
> Out of curiosity, what makes you want to run Linux and not use OS X?

Well, I have an iBook and I run OSX for about an hour or two per month
and Debian for the rest. This is a machine that is used for 60+ hours
a week.

I don't run OSX, because on my 400Mhz G3 model OSX runs slow as molasses
in winter while Linux is fast and snappy. 

Other reasons I don't like OSX:

  1) By the time you get OSX and FINK (GNU tools for OSX) and X windows
     (I simply can't work without X) you have chewed up about 5Gig worth
     of disk space which starts to seriously restrict the amount of MP3s
     I can carry. Linux would provide more in less than 2Gig.

  2) Upgrading from 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 has broken things left right
     and center every single time. My biggest grizzle is that it always
     overwrites my sshd_config file and I can't X display on my laptop
     anymore. During upgrades, Debian asks if I want to keep my version,
     install the maintainers version or manually merge the two.

  3) The development platform is a constantly changing moving target (and
     thats just the portable POSIX part of it). Things like; 10.1 didn't
     have C99 <math.h> functions while 10.2 did, but to have software run
     on both you have to assume that they are missing. GNU getopt is missing,
     

  4) Some important POSIX/Linux APIs are still missing (10.2) which makes
     porting some software to OSX a real pain.

  5) Its so *&^*&%)&^&*%&$ing SLOOOOOWWWWWWW when compared to Linux on
     the same machine. The first instance I found of this was compiling 
     one of my libraries. 2.5 minutes with Linux and 13 minutes with OSX.
     Turned out that the Bourne shell shipped with OSX is completely brain
     dead. Replacing it with a symlink to bash (which behaves like sh
     when called as sh) brought the time down to 3.5 minutes.

  6) I don't need the gloss. Blackbox as a WM and a couple of xterms and
     I'm happy.

I could probably go on. Linux is simply a far better fit for my purposes 
than OSX.

On top of that, I really don't like Steve Jobs' and Apple's stance towards
Free Software/Open Source. I'm also convinced that if Apple had 95% market
share Steve Jobs would make Bill Gates and Steve Balmer look like Richard 
Stallman and Eric S. Raymond.

Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Q: What do you call a christian who accidently read the bible 
with his brain turned on?
A: An atheist