Our network has iMacs, Macbook Airs, Mac Minis, and Ubuntu systems. I like them all of them for different reasons. But in my experience, the Macs are not as reliable under load, and applications can more easily crash the OS (particularly MS Office).
My wife regularly runs 20 Mac applications at once (with sufficient RAM). The number of times I have added some innocuous little operation, like opening Terminal, and watched the system go down are uncountable. The number of hung applications that haven't responded to the Finder's "Force Quit" command is also large. (Thank goodness for "kill -9.") There was a period of about 5 years where rsync refused to copy the entire Mac internal drive to an external drive. It would always die somewhere in the middle with an alleged external disk error. Tried it with 5+ different external drives. Nowadays I run ssh+rsync from a Linux box to back up the drive. So, Macs are friendly & useful but I don't rely on them for anything intensive. The only time our Linux boxes crash is during hardware failures, or maybe once a year when something goes nuts and spews out a zillion processes. Even then, they sometimes recover by themselves. Linux has other issues, but reliability under load is not one of them. :-) -- Dan Barrett dbarr...@blazemonger.com _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss