I am thankfully ignorant to the subtleties of the text rendering. I have seen the complaints, but have never felt affected by them. I do want to check out the new documentary Helvetica, to get a taste of that side of the experience. My colleague Matt Thomas is a typography geek.

I will have to check out Safari’s web page debugger, I have now hard numerous times that it’s fantastic!

“So what? That proprietariness is a large part of the reason the Mac experience works so well”?!

I have to disagree that there is any intrinsic design properties of a proprietary product.

The small “what” is you had played the “built on open source BSD unix card”.

The big what is that yourself, myself and many others are working on products built in a community of free culture, trying to recreate some of the successes of the academic collaborative work environment.

My discomfort is the only discomfort I can relieve.

I am a freedom lover!

1) Video conversions
2) Working with video in presentations (powerpoint since Openoffice Impress stinks, as does NeoOffice)

The only saving grace is that I can run Powerpoint (the only MS app I use on my Mac on a regular basis) on the Mac, and I have programs for everything else I need to do. I’ve compiled two lists…one of free tools, one of commercial apps (that mostly you don’t need on ubuntu):

Free stuff – http://tinyurl.com/yooajc
Commercial apps – http://tinyurl.com/ysad7v

Take care,
Miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner-MGuhlin.net
http://mguhlin.net

As for the proprietary “mac experience” – so what? that proprietariness is a large part of the reason the Mac experience works so well. The fit and finish is much higher than on any other OS I’ve used (open source or otherwise).

My investigation into the cost of computers was hardly conclusive, was definitely unscientific, and had rather large margins of error. I was just trying to point out that a comparably spec’ed PC was about the same cost (and possibly more, in some cases) as a comparable Mac system. I’ve seen this in the purchases made in our department, as well as my poking around on the various online stores.

I have had absolutely no problems with Apple hardware that I can remember, and I’ve been living in Mac-land since about 1990. Sure, hard drives have failed. Peripherals have died. But my Apple gear has been rock solid. And MacOSX has been unbelievably good to me. I know that others have had problems – Brian has had systems melt down – but I am speaking from my personal experience.

In my dabbling with Ubuntu, I think I’d be doing much better than under Windows, but I’d be giving something up in moving from MacOSX. YMMV.

What do you find better about Safari than Fx?

I guess what you consider as being part of the OS is different than my own definition, or I don’t know what “much of” means. I like how Jim describes it as “the OS is proprietary, despite pockets of openness”. The Mac experience is almost exclusively proprietary.

Myth about cost? Are you suggesting that your investigation in one category of computers and against one competitor is conclusive?

Since the switch to Intel my friends have had more problems with hardware than I would expect, and the turn around time on servicing has been lousy. Though at the end of the day, for most of my family and friends I would still recommend a Mac.

I recently spec’ed out new macbooks and dell latitude series and the Dells were a bit cheaper. Significantly so if you count the docking station and external monitors I threw in for almost the same price as the Mac alone. Not having a docking solution with the Mac is a serious drawback for me. A friend at work mocks my “pedestrian” looking Dell– and they are not beautifully engineered– but they WORK and when I set into the dock and get my dual monitors, external raid and DVD, sound system, etc with one click, it’s all worthwhile . Not to mention the constant niggling problems she experiences with her series of sexy Asus and other machines… after a long succession of laptops the Dells remain the workhorses. Even the macbooks have hardware problems more often. With five times as many PCs we have 1/3 the hardware problems, though I expect that will continue to get better.

The other gotchas are apple peripherals. For instance, the Apple LCD displays are good, but undeniably overpriced given the competition nowadays. At one time, when they were the only game in town, I could understand going that way. But now?

The only reason I remain interested in Mac is the coolness of the integrated Unix base and a few apps that only run on Mac, particularly tools for writing and organization. The Mac has it going on there.

@michael: workflow lock-in I think that’s what Google Docs and OpenOffice.org are trying to solve…

@chris: yeah. some mac zealots are so annoying I want to punch them. but many linux zealots are as annoying. RTFM only gets newcomers so far…

@jody: you could have likely switched from Windows to a Vic20 and seen an improvement. If I was using Windows, I’d jump to Ubuntu in a heartbeat. But, MacOSX isn’t Windows, and Ubuntu is sort of a parallel/reverse move.

If I did the jump, it would be for ideological reasons, not usability. That’s not really the most effective way to plan technology use.

I would (and have) use Ubuntu Server without hesitation. It works wonders, is fast and stable, and easy to maintain. I’d just miss the niceties of MacOSX on the desktop. What can I say? I’m a spoiled Mac-head…

I made the switch from Windows to Ubuntu this summer and haven’t looked back since. The main reason for the switch was headaches with deploying Ruby on Rails apps from a Windows box to a Unix server. Having the same o/s for both development and deployment boxes greatly simplifies things. As for the applications available on on Ubuntu, they seem pretty good but that wasn’t really a factor in my switch. Most of the productivity tools I use now are web based (salesforce, 37signals suite, and Google apps). As long as the o/s has a good browser, which Ubuntu does, it really doesn’t affect my toolset.