OSX vs. Linux February 1st, 2007
So I’ve been using OSX now for about three and a half months. Before that I was running Debian Linux on my work laptop. I decided to switch when I left my last job and had to return my laptop. So when I went out looking for a new one, I decided on the MacBook because it was small enough to be portable, yet powerful enough with all the features I wanted.
For the most part OSX has been great. Microsofts Windows has nothing on OSX, even Vista which was just released a couple days ago pales in comparison to OSX. Leopard is supposed to be released soon which will give it more features that us Linux users have taken for granted.
One of the things that I love about my mac is that everything just seems to work. At least this is what I initially thought. All of the normal end user things work, printing works like a dream. My first printing experience was awesome, I plugged my USB HP printer into my MacBook and was able to print instantly without installing any drivers or configuring the printer/service. I know that OSX comes with a lot of the drivers you need already, and this is how it was possible to be so effortless. Why can’t the worlds largest and most used Operating System do the same? Most everything is developed for Windows, so why not incorporate some of the most used features?
I know the article is titled Linux vs. OSX so let me get started on some of my *nix observations. I would say that graphically OSX and Linux are equal. Recent advancements in Linux GUI technology give Linux an actual edge when it comes to aesthetics. However, installing and configuring these great looking desktops can be somewhat troublesome even to the seasoned Linux user.
Another nice feature in OSX is Spotlight. This feature allows you to search your entire hard drive instantly. This is accomplished with a continuous spider crawling your drive indexing your data. I have several plugins for Spotlight installed so it also searches through PDF’s and some other binaries for text and meta-data. Linux has a couple options for desktop searches, but they don’t come close to Spotlight in usability and relevancy.
One of the downsides to using a commercial Operating System such as OSX is most of the developers think everyone has a lot of money to buy their applications with. The largest offender of this is Apple themselves. Linux wins hands down when it comes to the availability of applications. For almost any commercial application on the market Linux has a free (open source) alternative.
I notice a lot of people doing web development using OSX. Personally I find that it ships with some broken environments. I recently though about learning Ruby and quickly found out that Ruby on Rails is broken on OSX. There are ways to fix it, but I found them to not work as described. On Debian I quickly installed Ruby along with Gems and was on my way in a matter of minutes. For development I would have to say Linux wins hands down as the better platform. Unless of course you need the proprietary OSX files.
All in all I would have to say they are both equally good. The target audience is different, but either side could use either OS comfortably I think. Yes, assuming Linux is already installed for the layman who can’t figure out why his cup holder is broken on his PC. I’ve been wanting to install Linux on my MacBook so I can boot between the two, but I found that the resize tool that Apple provides doesn’t work so well. So I’ll need to wipe my drive, partition, and reinstall OSX and then install Linux. This will also give me the opportunity to clean up my OSX now that I know what apps I like and how to get them.
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