Les Jones

Holy cow!!

100% of the respondents chose Linux! It's a clear mandate. The people (well, technically, person) have spoken. Linux it is!

Whomever those admins were either lied to you or are trying to keep their jobs secure (quite possibly both).

I use both Mac and Windows, I've dallied in linux, but it just has never been truly ready for the general populace. Its getting better and pretty darn close, but I can't see turning a newbie over to linux.

With Mac OS, stuff just works, sure they're more expensive, but a lot of folks will pay for that.

The one-button only laptop used to be the Mac deal-breaker for me, but Apple finally solved that in a really clever way. So now the pro/con thing boils down to this:

MAC
Laptop resolution choice is awful. There's only one that has even a minimally acceptable resolution (1680x1050). And it's $2800. And it's 17 inches huge.

LINUX
Driver issues remain totally frustrating as all get out. If you don't shop around very carefully to make sure all the hardware has decent drivers, you're almost for sure going to wind up with something (and probably 2 or more somethings) that eitehr won't work, or which you have to figure out how to fix only to have it break again in a different cryptic fashion 3 or 4 months later.

Les, ya turncoat, I read your previous post about your XP problems and had a giggle at your expense.

I'd been using a company-issued IBM Stinkpad w/ XP and found it to be OK. When I left the company, I refused to spend my own dollars on Windoze.

I hit the local Apple store, bought a MacBook hot rod, and never looked back. It's been reliable, friendly, everything I remembered Macs to be.

Return from the Dark Side, you'll be glad you did.

Go for the Mac. OS X has all the eye candy, commercial apps, etc. on top of a solid Unix core. I've been a hard-core Linux user since 1996, and I'm using OS X for my desktop now.

Many of the Linux guys I know are using Mac laptops -- they 'Just Work(TM)', no more futzing around with X configs, wireless drivers or hardware that isn't supported.

.cp

If you have to change and have some unix experience, I would reccomend going with linux. Getting hardware that works is really pretty easy these days. Now that Ati/AMD is releasing linux drivers for their graphics chipsets, the list of supported hardware is only going to get larger. In my experience Intel hardware always works out of the box in linux, i've had good luck with laptops and the centrino chipset. Like Steve K. said, linux isn't for a newbie, but if you have some command line experience you'll probably be OK.

At work, we've switched to providing macs equipped with parallels for our clients. I'm glad we switched due to the fact that 90% of our support issues were due to windows viruses/malware.

Honestly though, that's the only reason I would ever reccomend a Mac. For the individual that wants a basic machine that doesn't require any type of user maintanance, Macs are great. Otherwise I find the hardware to be obscenely over-priced and the OS clunky and slow compared to a similarly equipped clean windows machine running XP.

Even though the machines have worked out nicely for our clients, I personally find the mac hardware to be obscenely overpriced and the OS to be clunky and slow. I've heard all of the hype, but after configuring a dozen or so of the new intel macbooks/pros I refuse to believe OSX 10.4 is faster than an equally equipped Windows XP machine that is up to date and runs a good lightweight antivirus.

Get a Mac.

It's been a 2 or 3 years since I used Linux but I found drivers hard to come by. A growing number of the open-source software available for Linux is going cross-platform now as well, plus with web apps taking center-stage there will be even more cross-platform applications competing (I'm in the middle of testing out thinkfree.com for my company as a complete replacement for MS Office). I do like that (depending on your distro) you can take your pick of a variety of GUIs for the Linux, but I wasn't a fan of just how much time you had to spend at the prompt to actually do anything.

Mac, obviously.

I'm too old to take joy in futzing around with configurations and setups and installs anymore. I want to push a button and start typing.

Personally, I really like Vista. It had a couple driver issues (from other vendors, not from them), but overall it is good. This is on hardware I purchased myself. So, I'm using it and pretty happy.

However, if I weren't using Windows, it would be Linux for me. Pretty easy to install and use now, but very powerful tools, shells if you want to use them.

Kevin: jeez, I shoulda known this would bring out you Mac loonies. Ha!

Some of the comments above add to my impression that Linux still has driver problems. By the time I have to decide (if I ever have to) those problems might be fixed, but if I had to switch today I think I'd go with a Mac because of the "it just works" argument.

I'm past the days when I felt passionately about my computer's operating system. I just want something that lets me get things done.

I had only owned my new machine for a few days when Vista's "Go Dark" feature kicked in. It was triggered by a simple driver update that the machine itself prompted me for. Took me quite a while on tech support with both Dell and MS to merely get the machine working again.

If you like having a big fat Sword of Damocles hanging over your head and you enjoy seeing expensive hardware resources being devoured for no purpose whatsoever - buy Vista.

I'm going to "downgrade" the machine to XP with Dell's assistance. After the downgrade the machine goes to my oldest daughter for her to use for school. I'm putting back some money. After the holiday rush I'm buying myself a Mac.

I've used all three (well, not Vista, yet).

They all piss me off to some extent. I have to switch between all three of them, depending on what I am doing.

The Mac operating system update cycle is a bit annoying. It seems that a lot of software immediately becomes outdated with the release of the upgrade.

Windows has Cygwin available, which allows for a POSIX-like experience within Windows itself.

Linux can probably be run on the most powerful hardware available, and then emulate Windows (though this is much slower, of course).

McZombie: Yeah, one annoying thing I remember from my Mac days is having to pay for incremental MacOS upgrades (like OS 8.5 to 8.6 or whatever). I considered myself a Mac guru back then (past president of the East TN Mac Users Group, author of The Mac Demystified 2/e, paid Mac consultant, etc.) and didn't mind it then, but I suspect it would bug me now.

And Cygwin is pretty cool. Not enough people know about it.

Cygwin is the best way I've seen to turn a Windows XP box into a decent server without having to go through loads of paperwork and irritated IT professionals. A good sort of SSH is nearly necessary today, but without paying big bucks or getting the necessary permission to bring something over to a Nix box, Cygwin's the cleanest and easiest way to deal with it.

I hate Windows. I have to use it; there's no ifs, ands, or buts involved these days. It's still clunky, and filled with weird motion at a distance sorta stuff. I do IT work for a small development company, and that means I get to track down those small motion at distance things. Few things will fill you so full of hate as spending months tracking down a hard-to-notice TCP/IP error.

I hate Macs. There's nothing wrong with the systems (other than the vertically integrated Mac tax), but I just can't handle the GUI down to a decent level. The Dock has all the flaws of Window's favorite tendency to act when something entirely unrelated moves, with the additional Mac habits of choosing what sorta behavior will be the best. The Leopord Dock was, as far as I've experienced, the worst; where I expect a task bar or start menu, there's a bar that acts like the bastard child of a desktop and an alt-tab menu. There's just enough information to know that there is 'something' in each container, but no actual idea what.
It's to the point where I'd rather load up a Darwin terminal or run GIMP on a Windows/*nix machine rather than deal with the Mac's options. Add in the vertical integration, paying for what feels very much like a Windows Service Pack with an animal name, and refusal to ever get the keyboard to act like a Windows/*Nix box's with any reasonably accessable options, and I'm quite tempted to toss a good number of these stupid white, silver, and clear boxes off the roof. I have no problem advising folk to use them, but only if they actually try the damned things out first. I just wouldn't be able to move to a Mac operating system myself.

Linux is the only one I can go so far as to say I have a love-hate relationship with. If you need an Asterisk VoiP server, a web server or mail server for multi-hundred user access, or simply a decent amount of pure capability, Linux is the cheapest and most reliable option. Big companies may be able to afford more dedicated *nix systems and operators, but small places will find available, free, and simple-to-use software in Linux only. The level of control and power is amazing; the average distribution can operate as a normal user station, a firewall, HTML server, a graphics design station, all without adding extra software, and without complex and costly licensing systems.
That said, I wouldn't advise it to any normal user. While I can use and enjoy GIMP and OpenOffice, every single basic user I've run into hates them. Even with WineX and its spinoffs, there are too many programs that just don't run right on Linux machines. Drivers are still a problem, although with distributions like Ubuntu, less of one than before -- while nearly all towers are covered, laptops will almost never be until such time as the laptop manufacturer start actually providing driver information to the *nix programmers.

Personally, I'd head to Linux. I doubt much of the real world would do so, though.

That said, I think a lot of the concerns about Windows Vista are overblown. I dunno if it's the individuals surveyed working off bad data, or just the results of a small survey size, but a few of these complaints don't seem realistic. I've tested and tried to break Vista, and had it recover cleanly from things XP can't. It's stayed clean enough for me to keep my system on for several weeks straight, with normal use, installations, gaming, graphics work with GIMP, and cygwin'd SSH access.

No advise on what to get -- just pointing out an interesting article about the next "big" transition in computing. The move to 64-bit processors might cause a change in which system is dominant; the authors have a definite bias in favor of Linux.

I'd rather stick my head in a blender set to "liquify" than buy anything from Apple. It's not their products, per se, but their condescending, holier-than-thou, "would you like to be trendy?" advertising.

A typical Mac commercial goes something like this:
Mac User: "Hi, I'm a trendy metrosexual. I don't have time to learn how a computer works, so I use Macs. It doesn't hurt that all my super cool popular friends have one. And they come in colors. Or something. PCs, like, require work. And you actually have to choose between different companies that compete to make parts for them. You can't buy overprice proprietary junk for 'em!"
PC User: "Hi, I'm a PC user. I'm a social outcast who should be laughed at because I have brains."
Mac User: *laughs*