another excellent reason, is to get away from apple's increasingly proprietary and monopolistic practices. don't get me wrong, i love the mac os, and have loved macs for a long time, but apple is becoming nearly as bad as microsoft if not worse. for instance, i was excited about the g5 machines, until i found out that apple has tied the microcontroller that runs the cooling into the os! there's no reason for this, except to prevent people who spend good money on a g5 from running anything other than the mac os. the os could still have calls to monitor the cooling or interrupts to detect problems without a lack of the mac os causing the cooling to fail. this is documented in the developer notes, which warn that if the machine is on and hasn't managed to successfully boot into the mac os it can overheat and fail! cheesy, particularly from a company that has done so many wonderful things in the past. not that they haven't always done some things deliberately in the name of proprietizing their os and hardware, but this is a new low, comparable to forcing people who bought x86 machines to buy a copy of windows even if they wanted to run linux, well on a g5 you have to buy and use apple's os or the machine will melt down. they've refused to document the software calls used to manage the cooling, and no doubt will try and sue when someone does figure it out, just like the movie industry did when people wanted to play dvd's on their linux boxes, not because any legitimate damage was done to intellectual property, but because they could and they are obsessed with control. i don't like control of that kind, i like freedom, the freedom to experiment and improve rather than be chained to how a manufacturer thinks the world should work, and how their pockets should be lined.
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