Diez B. Roggisch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I suspected. I've played with Linux distros, but never a Mac. That > > takes more $$ than M$,
Find me a 2-kg, 5+ battery hours, well-heeled laptop (with wifi, 801b, etc etc) below the $999 of the iBook G4... it's hard today, it was just imposible back when I bought mine in 2003. I intended to load Linux on it (i.e., I bought it strictly for the nonpareil HW price/performance), and I know a few people who do that, but that was before I found out how well MacOSX works. IOW, Apple is very price-competitive _in the niches it plays in_ -- it just doesn't play in many "cheap and nasty" niches (such as, 4-kg, hardly-any-battery-life laptops;-). > > and Apple is even more proprietary than MS, if > > you ask me. > > Depends. Sure, if you dive into Cocoa programming and stuff. But you have to ...which is hardly "more proprietary than MS", anyway, since OpenStep does live, btw;-). > keep in mind that under the hood it's BSD - and even runs a X-Server if you > want to. So I can use all my Linux staples + have a fancy OS for > multimedia-stuff. For me, just like for most people I've discussed it with, the reasoning is similar. For example, Chip Turner (once of RedHat, and a major contributor to RPM tools, now a colleague at Google) blogs at <http://other-eighty.blogspot.com/> and has a few notes on the matter (e.g. "there's nothing like sitting in the middle of a meeting and having the ONLY WORKING LAPTOP in the room. Wireless AND suspend, both working..." -- that's about his Powerbook;-). I'd say Chip mostly switched from Linux to Mac for the same reason he mostly switched from Perl to Python though he was a CPAN contributor too. Others feel even more strongly: e.g., Rob Pike, another colleague, apparently just dislikes Linux technically (mostly, I think, X11, but not just that) and that's why he uses Macs (Windows isn't even in the picture, of course). > > It interests me how many Open Source advocates and > > anti-Microsoft folks are willing to pay top dollar for Macs, which I > > guess means that, for them, it's less a Cathedral vs. Bazaar thing and > > more about It Works vs. It Doesn't? > > I can't comment on this in general, but on the CCC (Chaos Communication > Congress, a Hacker-con) last year the notebook-distribution was like this: > > 30% Macs > 30% ThinkPads > 40% rest Not too different from what you see, e.g., at OSCON, though there may be more Macs there. At Google meetings the distribution is more like 45-45-10, since Macs and Thinkpads are the laptop brands Google gives its employees for work use (and few bother to apply for a third alternative when they can just pick up either at a "tech stop"). But, sure, here we're talking about people who are primarily engineers, so the main ethos is indeed "it works/it doesn't". Opensource tends to work better (and indeed many of Mac's advantages come from its BSD underpinnings)... > So - it seems that quality is important, and of course any decent Hacker > will run a *nixish OS. Not necessarily: Tim Peters, among my top choices for "top Hacker in the PSF" Lifetime Award, prefers Windows. So, s/any/most/...!-) Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list