Windows 8

[rstrong]

At least Macs only get infected with the hip and edgy viruses. Can't say the same about conformist PCs.

Conformist....? It's Macs where you have to run one specific OS, run it only on their hardware, upgrade when they tell you, and buy only approved licensed accessories.

iPhones and iMacs are even worse, with a long and constantly growing list of entire classes of apps that you're not allowed to have access too and reasons why you can't have them. (Is adopting the practice of adding 'i' to the front of product names, long after the practice became stale in the rest of the computer industry, conformist or nonconformist?)

The original 1984 Mac ad quickly turned into a joke for PC and Apple II users alike. It was the Mac where you were forced to conform to Big Brother's demands.

Mac users remind me of the reporter in the 1980s at a record company sponsored event, in a vast crowd of girls all dressed just like Madonna, asking one of them why they did so, and being told "Because we want to express our individuality!"

Mac: Crash Different!

[bannination]

At least Macs only get infected with the hip and edgy viruses. Can't say the same about conformist PCs.

Conformist....? It's Macs where you have to run one specific OS, run it only on their hardware, upgrade when they tell you, and buy only approved licensed accessories.

iPhones and iMacs are even worse, with a long and constantly growing list of entire classes of apps that you're not allowed to have access too and reasons why you can't have them. (Is adopting the practice of adding 'i' to the front of product names, long after the practice became stale in the rest of the computer industry, conformist or nonconformist?)

The original 1984 Mac ad quickly turned into a joke for PC and Apple II users alike. It was the Mac where you were forced to conform to Big Brother's demands.

Mac users remind me of the reporter in the 1980s at a record company sponsored event, in a vast crowd of girls all dressed just like Madonna, asking one of them why they did so, and being told "Because we want to express our individuality!"

Mac: Crash Different!

The bad thing is.... Microsoft is trying to head that direction with Windows 8, not any time soon of course, it's pretty obvious they are testing the waters.

That's ok though, I'm quite enjoying the latest Linux Mint Cinnamon. I'm not sure what Ubuntu is trying to do here lately, but I don't particularly like it.

[JTA]

At least Macs only get infected with the hip and edgy viruses. Can't say the same about conformist PCs.

Conformist....? It's Macs where you have to run one specific OS, run it only on their hardware, upgrade when they tell you, and buy only approved licensed accessories.

iPhones and iMacs are even worse, with a long and constantly growing list of entire classes of apps that you're not allowed to have access too and reasons why you can't have them. (Is adopting the practice of adding 'i' to the front of product names, long after the practice became stale in the rest of the computer industry, conformist or nonconformist?)

The original 1984 Mac ad quickly turned into a joke for PC and Apple II users alike. It was the Mac where you were forced to conform to Big Brother's demands.

Mac users remind me of the reporter in the 1980s at a record company sponsored event, in a vast crowd of girls all dressed just like Madonna, asking one of them why they did so, and being told "Because we want to express our individuality!"

Mac: Crash Different!

The bad thing is.... Microsoft is trying to head that direction with Windows 8, not any time soon of course, it's pretty obvious they are testing the waters.

That's ok though, I'm quite enjoying the latest Linux Mint Cinnamon. I'm not sure what Ubuntu is trying to do here lately, but I don't particularly like it.

A few years ago I installed Ubuntu on one of my machines, I can't remember what version it was, but the interface at the time was new and was geared toward touch screen devices. It was garbage. It still had quite a few bugs in it at the time and I spent like an hour trying to set up a static IP. Doing so through the GUI would not work. I said to myself this is BS and reinstalled with Windows XP.

[rstrong]

A few years ago I installed Ubuntu on one of my machines, I can't remember what version it was, but the interface at the time was new and was geared toward touch screen devices. It was garbage. It still had quite a few bugs in it at the time and I spent like an hour trying to set up a static IP. Doing so through the GUI would not work. I said to myself this is BS and reinstalled with Windows XP.

Back in the late 1980s the constant complaint about Unix - the reason it wasn't taking over the desktop - was that all the different versions were so incompatible with each other.

A couple years later I found myself supporting accounting software on various flavors of Unix from NCR, IBM, SCO and Microsoft. Compiling and supporting software across multiple Unix platforms was still a major pain.

When I was using with Linux a decade ago it had the same problem. Too many incompatibilities with other flavors of Linux, let alone other flavors of Unix.

This week:

Gnome co-founder explains why he dumped Linux for Mac

It started during a three-week vacation to Brazil in 2008, for which he took a Mac laptop instead of a Linux machine. The vacation turned out to be very relaxing, he wrote, because Mac OS proved far easier to use than Linux.

"I spent three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with the bizarre and random speed degradation," he wrote. "While I missed the comprehensive Linux toolchain and userland, I did not miss having to chase the proper package for my current version of Linux, or beg someone to package something. Binaries just worked."

That said, I have space set aside on my VMWare machine for a virtual machine running Linux. I'm going to give it another try. Probably the biggest roadblock has figuring out which distribution to go with.

Linux *is* user friendly. Its just picky about who its friends are!

[bannination]

If I may make a suggestion: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2271

Linux Mint KDE.... KDE has came a LONG LONG way..... I love it.

[rstrong]

That's how they keep the viruses out of them.

Other than the viruses that have been hitting the Mac platform lately.

That's probably just user error. Mac's don't get viruses.

Other than the viruses they've been getting lately.

At least Macs only get infected with the hip and edgy viruses. Can't say the same about conformist PCs.

Agreed. As with other software, PCs have a far greater variety to choose from.