The Macintosh through Linux Eyes

The Macintosh Through Linux Eyes is a long time linux user's first experience with a mac. He'd never owned a mac, but OSX and a cheap used mac-mini gave him the chance. He liked it, but I thought the review said more about a linux user.

"The first thing that struck me was that all the hardware worked." What struck me was that this would strike someone. "As a Linux user, I am used to spending time to get all my desktop hardware to work." I think that's pathetic. I understand that Apple has it easier controlling all it's own hardware, but when it comes to user experience, isn't this what you expect when you buy something? "The Mac seemed to work better with my PC hardware than Windows; without endless, conflicting drivers and reboots." This certainly matches my experiences.

"The second thing that struck me was that every Apple software application worked as advertised." Wow, we're just really pushing the bounds of expectations. "OSX ships with 50 or so applications that not only work, but are extensively documented. The help system was quite useful. Most Linux distributions ship with 1000+ applications, many with overlapping features, about half of which work as advertised, and about quarter of which are adequately documented."

He goes on to say the hardware not only worked, but was elegant and that printing worked out of the box which is so not the case with Linux. He described how OSX's default configuration is secure and how he felt at home with Terminal and the bash shell. In fact he says by using another OS he realized that 80% of his time is spent in either a Browser or a shell window. He installed Firefox, Gimp, GPG and a few others.

When I started with Windows 10 years ago I installed Emacs and Cygwin and tried to make the box as Unix-like as I could. With the mac I tried to avoid this (well, I needed Emacs) and use it as it was meant to be used. I wonder what this guy will start to think about Linux once he uses the iLife apps like iTunes, iPhoto, and Garage Band. I found his review really interesting, mostly because it describes how pathetically low our expectations of computers are.