Posts by otoh

Distro diaspora: Four flavours of Ubuntu unpacked

Re: Minty

I've been using Mint also but am switching folk to Xubuntu. Its the most attractive XFCE distro, and although not quite as pretty as Cinnamon is still pretty good. But with either of them, I find folk are generally up and running in no time, as opposed to the Win8-ness/WTF-ness of Unity/Gnome Shell.

Cinnamon is a great desktop, but I find some glitches in Nemo (memory/CPU leaks); but more to the point, there's no upgrade path on Mint. Although it's possible to do an in-place upgrade, officially it requires a complete reinstall and migration of data. This is a bit tiresome, after tweaking your computer to just how you want it; and keeping current is often attractive as some packages don't get included in older repos.

NB If using Xubuntu, strongly recommend using Whisker Menu as it's a nice upgrade to the stock applications menu.

Apple MacBook 13in with Retina display

Fair points

You make good points - the MBP is a well-made, premium machine and it's not entirely fair to compare. In fact, even after ditching the Mac (after 25 years, no less), I still defend their prices - search around for a similar spec - and build quality - PC and a) you won't actually get one with a comparable display and, b) it will cost as much or more than the MBP.

What I don't like now is that with Apple you have no option but to buy exotic, premium hardware; and as a (Mac) sysadmin, I do regularly swap out memory, storage etc to keep them going a bit longer and don't want something I can't do that with. And despite it's not-quite-as-nice-ness, my HP is still more practical, at least for an IT person; I use all the ports on it that Apple deem unnecessary.

I therefore agree with the reviewer that 'Pro' may not quite apply to this (and note the ambivalance about the retina display, although maybe that's just sour grapes!). The non-retina MBP is still a good option - but Apple seem to be downplaying it and I imagine it will be dropped before long.

This sort of thing is one of the many reasons I switched to Linux almost a year ago. My 13" HP laptop is not as nicely built as the MBP it replaced... but it was half the price and has easy and quick access to the HDD, RAM and network card; 4xUSB; Ethernet and HDMI/VGA (the latter so I can plug it into a projector without the adapter which is generally never to be found). And a matte screen.

Pop OS X Mavericks on your Mac for FREE while you have LUNCH

Re: If they really wanted to stick it to Microsoft ...

Don't think that would ever happen - Mac OS X works as it does partly because they have such strict control over the hardware. Making a hackintosh is fun-ish way to spend some time but it's fiddly at best - Apple make Mac OS to sell Macs - even if there was a business case for them to make it available on PCs, they wouldn't want to dilute the experience by making it flaky.

Despite my misgivings - see above - it's entirely their perogative to either not pander to, or actively lock out, folk installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware.

More Macs under Apple control

I was a Mac user for 25+ years, and Mac-centric sysadmin for pretty much 20, so am pretty well versed in Mac OS. This year I switched to Linux because in recent years, Apple have been increasingly controlling of both their hardware and software - you basically can't fix/upgrade much of what they make, and Mac OS X is becoming more of an iOS-like walled-garden with each iteration. Although I still concede that Mac OS X is good, and possibly the 'best' OS, this policy doesn't sit well with me - to the point of switching a decades-old allegiance.

This policy of giving away the latest OS update, then, arouses my suspicion. Much of Mac OS X is closed source, so - like Windows - we don't really know quite what it does. Making 10.9 free will very quickly give them a much larger user base of their latest OS than previous versions - a much larger base of computers that they can then control, lock down if required, collect data from if they choose.

Admittedly I'm also a bit of a conspiracy theorist about such things :)