Linux on BBC?

wush said:
Don't be a gimp.
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How do you work that one out? You don't see people raving that Mercedes have to fix their problem... The problem being they make more expensive cars than Mazda.

I just love these bitter anti-mac types. I mean if you want to grow a beard, start buying star trek boxed sets and use an airfix operating system, you won't see many mac users launching vitriol at you
 
"andy" said:
they spend extra because its trendy.
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It's this assumption that irks me, I think.

I won't deny that that's part of the charm - it clearly is for a large proportion of Apple's market. To deny it would be daft.

But really, what makes up the price of Apple kit is the quality, the design, the style, the aftercare, the completeness, the reliability, the OS, a million things.

The print and design industry runs on these things. To dismiss them as trendy computers for people who live in studio flats in Islington is naive. Macs do serious business!

That the hardware itself encourages you to lick it is neither here nor there, but it certainly forms part of the appeal.

For people like you lot, i.e serious computer users, the proof is in using it to do something useful. When I was in newspapers and print, I abused my Macs terribly, and in some cases it was relatively ancient kit - but it did what it was told, faultlessly, despite putting up with hamfisted operators (me!) asking way too much of it, by yesterday.
 
Until recently I didn't rate Macs that highly. My wife has had a G5 for years and it didn't feel any more special than my PC. However, it broke recently and I took it apart. It was designed beautifully inside. No cables, no fuss. It just all plugged together.

Then I started looking at an iMac to replace it. They are gorgeous and very well designed again. Now I'm looking at a Macbook Pro as a possible replacement for my ageing laptop. The two killer features for me are the graphics output will drive a dual link DVI monitor (quite rare even in windows laptops) and that fantastic trackpad. I hate trackpads and far prefer my thinkpads nipple. But the apple trackpad (on the unibody macbooks and pro's) is a wonderful thing. It is HUGE. The buttons are hidden under the pad. It has multi touch and the tactile feel is exactly spot on.

Anyway, back to the original topic... The BBC (or others) should take the opportunity of the recent releases of Windows 7, Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 9.10 to do a comparison of each OS and highlight the strenghts and weaknesses of each. It is a fairly unique event for the big hitters to release an OS at similar times. While Red Hat and Novell/SuSE are clearly the big boys in Linux, I would argue that Ubuntu is probably one of the stronger consumer orientated distro's.
 
PardonTheWait said:
But really, what makes up the price of Apple kit is the quality, the design, the style, the aftercare, the completeness, the reliability, the OS, a million things.
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Quality: Well, my MacBook had problems with the palm rest and a stupidly placed wire that caused it to reboot (until Apple fixed it with a Firmware update). Quality my arse.

Design & Style: Good, yes. If you're that way inclined.

Aftercare: In my experience this has been great (well, in the Apple Stores...phone support was terrible). You need to be near enough to an Apple Store though.

Reliability & OS: You're kidding yourself. Really. Mac OS X has been no more reliable than Windows or Linux. Not only that but Apple, who create the OS for a small amount of specific computers seem totally useless when it comes to updates. The OS is good yes, but it's nothing you can't do on other operating systems.

I've been using a Mac for little over 3 years and will never spend the money again. They're good but certainly not for the price.

As for Ubuntu, i'm glad that it's getting way more recognition. 9.04 was an incredibly usable OS and 9.10 seems to build on that nicely :)
 
I haven't touched Linux for about four years when I played with Red Hat for a couple of weeks. In a couple of sentences, how have things changed with Ubuntu 9.10?
 
It feels like what you'd expect from a £60 mainstream OS and perhaps better in some areas considering all the easily installable software you can get within a few clicks, i think at this point it could well replace windows for most stuff the average person would want from a pc, obviously gaming and the occasional hardware issues or incompatibilities with linux has always been a problem but for most stuff it's great!
 
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