quote:
Originally posted by Adeptus
It's probably not the answer you were looking for, but seriously -- consider switching to Macintosh. With OS X, you will get a UNIX(FreeBSD) OS with an outstanding and consistent GUI on top, a good selection of apps, and all of it will just work.
The "just works" part and consistency have always been the weak spots for desktop Linux, mainly because there are competing solutions for everything (e.g. GNOME vs. KDE). When you start to mix and match, that's where maintaining a desktop Linux system becomes a full-time job.
Lol, mixing and matching bits of gnome and KDE is actually very simple, and requires no maintenance in
most Linux distributions [it's a little more difficult in those without a package manager, because installing from source is not trivial in most Linuxen].
OSX is not FreeBSD, although it contains a smidgin of its code [as does Windows, ironically]. OSX is more correctly Darwin, which more closely resembles the kernel of the Mach-based NeXTSTEP [though it is not a microkernel based OS itself]. IMHO they should have gone with a full FreeBSD kernel or better yet, written [a mk OS] from scratch.
Though you do get a Unix [workalike] in your mac, you don't get the benefits of an open source Unix. Essentially, they can always shaft you and force things upon you, you're open to undisclosed holes in the WM and other tools, and you're at the mercy of their release cycle and support team [or lack thereof]. You're also going to need to install an X server if you ever want to run any GUI Unix applications.
Don't get me wrong, OSX is a fantastic operating system. It's just no replacement for a real Free Unix.
I had [and continue to have] good experiences with Debian GNU/Linux. Not as much is hidden away from the user, it's much more powerful and fully featured [compared to Ubuntu], but it's no more difficult at all. It's got a much bigger sense of community about it, too. However, a word of warning, Debian Etch/Lenny is still using a 2.6.18 kernel AFAIK so you won't get complete access to your NTFS drives with ntfs-3g yet.
was put impeccably into words at DebianDay for me last Saturday, by Knut Yrvin of Trolltech - adults try something once, fail, and then are like "ffs this doesn't work". Children try, fail, and then try again, and succeed - maybe on the second, or even fifth retry. But the thing is that they keep at it and overcome the problems in the end.
-andrewdodd13
