So Tim Bray is back to using a Mac now that his Powerbook is back in his hands. Unfortunately, I have to wonder if this guy is really even firing all the neurons in his brain.
He makes some valid complaints about Ubuntu in the first section (the keyboard shortcut thing is just weird, however, I didn’t really bump into it because, for the most part, when you live in KDE, it does all work, as it does in Gnome). But he says something that really amuses the crap out of me.
His reasons Ubuntu beats the Mac just don’t make sense to me AT ALL.
1. You don’t have to think, when you’re Alt-tabbing, about applications vs. windows.
I don’t. I’ve long since adapted to the idea that Command-Tab switches between apps and not their individual windows. Windows are switched to by the dock. It’s the way OSX works. OSX also has Expose which solves that problem in a much more elegant way anyway.
2. You don’t have to worry about Fink vs. DarwinPorts vs. build-from-source, everything you’ll ever need is in a package and ready to go.
No, instead you have to worry about KDE v. Gnome builds, dependencies, and strange quirks. Really you trade one set of issues for another. Truth is, you don’t have to worry about building most software for the Mac because most stuff is precompiled. Just sayin’.
3. Linux is a little better at poking around SMB space, finding and connecting to Windows servers.
I really wish he would’ve expanded on that one.
4. The Gimp has a Curves control, which you have to spend a thousand bucks to get from full-bore Photoshop.
Oh, you mean the Gimp that’s available for the Mac, also? Come on dude, a third-party program available for both platforms isn’t a plus for one platform. Let’s at least pretend to use our brains here.
5. I have so had it with Apple applications. A couple weeks with Thunderbird made it obvious I should have long since dumped Mail.app. Every week iCal gets slower and every week I hate it more. When I was on Ubuntu, I maintained my schedule by typing it into a plain-text document in Emacs, and that was so much less painful.
Ummmm… Would that be the same Thunderbird you could download and use for the Mac right now? And Emacs? Come on dude. There are about a bazillion text editors for the Mac, including quite a few Emacs clones / ports. Same dumb mistake as the argument in #4.
6. Linux (Debian & friends anyhow) is the winner for package management and running on an infinite variety of different hardware.
Now I know this guy has no clue what he’s talking about. Just ask anyone who’s tried to get a Broadcom-based WiFi card working on Ubuntu how infinite that variety really is.
Honestly, Tim may be the nicest guy in the world, but his points of comparison are so weak, they’re laughable.
Sorry Tim. The fact that you can use Thunderbird and Gimp on Ubuntu doesn’t appear, at least to me, to be a compelling reason to switch from OSX, upon which I can run both of those programs.
[tags]mac, linux, ubuntu, osx[/tags]