This being the Portland Linux/Unix group, I will share a tidbit about the "other" Unix machine, the Mac. We bought a used Mac Mini for the office assistant; she is scared of Linux (for now), and I would rather maintain a Mac than a Windoze box.
I am slogging through 650 pages of "Learn Mac OSX Snow Leopard" so I can answer her questions and maintain the darned thing. Appendix C lists "Our Favorite Applications", with the prices at the time of writing. Almost all have usable Free Software equivalents, i.e. BBedit -> (vim, emacs, etc). So while the book is good to mention a number of free programs, buying all their proprietary favorites would set you back over $6000 . Yikes! In the Mac's favor, most free software has been ported to it. So I can stull run vim and Libre Office and Gimp and Firefox and all that other good stuff. I am also struck by all of the propeller-(x) keyboard shortcuts. I suppose a Mac-only person will eventually remember all these, just as some of us remember the control-(x) shortcuts for open source programs. It is nice that a user can remember one set of shortcuts that work for everybody's proprietary Mac programs. But in return for this comfortable uniformity, Mac users go without a lot of the oddments that open source hackers kludge up their software with. 50% of the oddments are silly, but the other 50% can become essential. I haven't got to the programming chapters of the book - perhaps there are some Really Easy ways (that is, five minutes of work) to wedge open source apps into the Mac paradigm. Doubtful. Overall, a Mac seems like a good computer for people with lots of money who prefer a slowly evolving curated experience to a customized experience with niche apps. These days, with any platform, all you really need is a decent web browser and the right sort of web apps, worldwide and local. In a few years, it won't matter what machine is her desk, as long as I can provide the right local web apps. Back to work on those. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
