[OT] Re: Is Ubuntu safe to try

[Larry Grover]

Frederic Soulier wrote:
> Ante Karamatić wrote:
> 
>>On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 09:03 -0400, Larry Grover wrote:
>>
>>>I could go on and on, but in general, the problems I have with OS X 
>>>boil down to:  (1) poor OS X interoperability with linux  (to be fair, 
>>>I think Apple only cares about interoperability with windows, but 
>>>that's of absolutely no use to me), (2) OS X "just works", but only if 
>>>you want to do exactly what Apple thinks you should do and do it in 
>>>exactly the way Apple wants; if you don't, then prepare for big 
>>>frustrations.
> 
> 
> If you buy a car and decide to run it on 3 wheels instead of 4 don't you
> think you'd had to prepare for big frustrations.

Well, if the automaker claimed their car would run just fine on 3 
wheels, then I'd rightly feel quite frustrated when I found out that 
is not true.  OS X uses CUPS, and claims to be able to print to an IPP 
network printer, but using Apple's configuration tools, I couldn't 
make it print to an IPP printer on a linux system.  I spent hours 
trying to set this up, but was not able to do so using OS X.  In my 
book, this is not "just works."

That said, OS X does work pretty well for many things and much of the 
time.

> Apple made some technical decisions to achieve their goal of producing
> something usable by 99% of the people.

Well, I find OS X usable a lot of the time.  I also recommend it to 
others, depending on their needs, skill level, available support, etc. 
  But it's not the pinacle of OS design that some people seem to think 
it is, and for someone used to the freer and more flexible system, it 
can be very frustrating to use.

> Peace :)
> I'm sending this email from Thunderbird under Hoary with KDE but
> definitely enjoying my Powermac at home.
> At home, choice between Linux and Mac OS X, I choose OS X.
> At work, choice between Linux and Windows 2K/XP, I choose Linux
> 

;) This email comes from Thunderbird under Hoary with XFCE on an 
iBook.  At home, with a choice of inux and OS X, I choose inux for 
most things, OS X for the rest.  At work, with a choice of inux and 
Windows 98-2K-XP, I choose inux for most things, Windows for a few 
(yup, Windows can be useful too).

Regards,
Larry