What about Adobe Creative Suite Software?

TurboTax?

There are a whole lot of other reasons Linux has minimal mindshare. I'm not knocking it, just pointing out it's limited mindshare is due to the limited software available for it that fit the mainstream market. It's not going away, but will it ever get more than a few percentage points seeing that there is almost no commercial software for it?

one of my computers use it, and it's easy enough for my wife to use. The biggest pain with it was getting it to play mp3's because you have to find the right gstreamer plugin. It really isn't too bad though. Def. no mac though.

I agree on Ubuntu. It's really nice.

About nine months ago I nuked my PowerBook and rebuilt it from scratch. I decided to make it an M$ free system so I installed NeoOffice, a port of OpenOffice. I've never felt the need to go back. I do a lot of writing and it will do everything I've needed. Relatives have sent me PowerPoint files and NO opens them just fine. I don't play with Excel so I can't comment on that part , but what I've used is great. M$ can curl up and die as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, wait, cancel that last bit. They pay me to fix Windows problems. If the world switched to Mac/Ubuntu and OO I'd be out of a job.

Tiger: It is a problem, though it seems more likely to me that limited software is due to limited market share - and that is changing. Very slowly.


geoduck: OOo is nice; I use calc mostly, and it's great. Need to send a file to some poor schmuck who can't open real formats beacuse they're using MS office? Save a copy as .xls and it'll work just fine. Horay for drop-in replacements at no cost.

Coming from a windows background and having owned a Mac, I must say that OSX failed to impress me the way Ubuntu did (puts flame proof suit). It's not because I think it's pretty or a complete OSX/Windows replacement but because of how good it is considering it's free.
It may not have the ease of use of OSX or the software base of Windows but, damn, if you're on a limited budget the amount of free, useful features and applications is great.

We have this guy who insists on using Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, and all the other open source crapware rather than use commercial products that the rest of us use. Money isn't even an object. And I'm all for people choosing their own tools. But there isn't a week that goes by that someone doesn't have some kind of format problem sending him something or getting something from him. And then he gets all religious on us about how it's the commercial vendor's fault that there's an incompatibility. The funny thing is that none of the rest of us using a plethora of commercial products have 1/10 the trouble with anyone but him. The other funny thing is that when things have to get done, nobody wants to work with him. And it isn't just because he acts like a dickhead. We'd be fine with that if the tools he chose didn't introduce so much friction.

Well, I don't know why other readers insist about commercial software. Commercial software can be better than open source, but often it simply isn't better at all.
I am using Ubuntu since last November and I find the software palette on offer amazingly rich. I was amazed. Office applications, Internet applications, scientific software... even the Gimp gives me all what I need when I work with graphic.
Bye bye commercial operating systems: never again.
I discovered that I can have everything to the same leveles I had before (or, in some cases, even better) for free.
You know what? There's no need to advertise ubuntu: try it (it wont cost you a penny) and judge by yourself.

Ha. Why doesn't he go out and buy any old digital camera, try to plug it in, and then tell us how he feels about its usability.

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Bosco wrote:
We have this guy who insists on using Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, and all the other open source crapware rather than use commercial products that the rest of us use.

Where on earth could you be working where an coworker has free range to dick around w/ software that creates problems for everyone else?

And so are you.
It IS the fault of the commercial vendors who do indeed play games with format lock-in. And the friction that it causes is exactly what they hoped would happen.
The end result - you all keep paying and paying and paying in order to achieve what you could largely achieve without paying.
And it's just so much easier to pay and then to not have to think about the morality of the market place you visit or the consequences of such a highly priced, exclusive club that you belong to.
That said - OSS Evangelists, whilst usually right, can be a major PITA.

"What about Adobe Creative Suite Software?"
I don't even know what the heck that is, so I obviously don't need it.

Turbo Tax? don't need that either You can use turbo tax on the Web

Just as Mac users do not ever need to use windows (or linux), Linux users do not need to use Mac or Windows ever. Its just choice.

"Why doesn't he go out and buy any old digital camera, try to plug it in, and then tell us how he feels about its usability."

The other day I brought my work XP laptop home and needed to print a document. Fine I thought, I'll just plug the USB lead of my printer into the computer and it will recognise it, install and I'll be printing in 5 seconds. (At least that what happens on my Ubuntu machine at home).
XP refused to install the printer because I didn't have a driver disk. I need to put a driver disk in! Really I think the usability comment you made above is in favour of the Linux evangelists.

(PS my digital camera also 'just worked' plug in and go no driver disks needed.)

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Tiger wrote:
What about Adobe Creative Suite Software?

TurboTax?

Seriously, how many people really need Creative Suite? For the vast majority of us who aren't graphic artists, there are plenty of open-source alternatives to fill the bill... the KDE project has been exceptionally good at creating a wide suite of productivity apps. (I'd love to see Kivio, KDE's answer to Visio, get a Mac port.)

As a guest pointed out, TurboTax can be done online. I prefer to have the app myself, but most people with a return like mine would just take it to a tax preparer.

I use Macs. I also use open-source apps when I can find them. I maintain a large suite of documentation at work using the open-source tools found in the UNIX layer of any MacOS. It's much faster than FrameMaker was (when it ran on Macs) and provides niceties like source control.

I did my taxes using an online option this year as well. Cross-platform, and worked very well. Cheap too.

As for Adobe, linux has come a long way lately for graphics. GIMP is the classic of course, but there's also now programs for video editing, animation, audio and vector illustration.

While to my knowledge there's no package that offers the cross-discipline integration that Adobe CS3 does, all the pieces are available.

Adobe's dominance makes freelancing with Linux nearly impossible, but for an independant artist/video editor or animator looking to do work on the cheap, Linux would let you do it legally, without paying 2-3K for the software.

I love Linux, I used it for 6 years or so. I love the ethos behind Open Source, it's great - just what this sad old world needs.
That said...
In all honesty - since I got a couple of Macs I've barely looked back. It's only lack of current finances that stops me going 100% Mac.

Macs are beautiful.

Mac - if you can, do.

Now if they could just finish the OpenOffice Aqua port...

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Guest wrote:
I don't know why other readers insist about commercial software.

Probably because they haven't used anything else.

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Guest wrote:
try it (it wont cost you a penny) and judge by yourself.

Good point.

Firefox is a Web browser and perfectly compatible. The Internet uses HTML so that charge is nonsensical.

Thunderbird is an e-mail program and perfectly compatible. E-mail uses open standards defined by the body responsible for the Internet (IETF). So that charge is wrong as well.

OpenOffice is _not_ guaranteed compatible with Microsoft Word. That's because Microsoft doesn't believe in standards and has consistently tried to lock users into their software. In fact Microsofts new Word can't even pass their own tests for compatibility.

So this charge is correct. Open Office is not compatible, because there's no standard to be compatible with.

How can you get your co-worker to improve his compatibility with Open Office. You could ask him to change the preference so that he always saves his documents in Word format.

The other option is that he could buy CrossOver Office from Codeweavers. Then he can install Word/Excel etc in his Ubuntu installation and he'll be able to send you documents in the same way as everyone else.

Steve

I'm going to assume that when referring to macs' beauty, you're referring to the GUI, not the beautiful, beautiful, blank off-white cases.

As far as the GUI goes...I can see why so many find it attractive, though honestly it isn't my favorite look. Even if it was the only possible way a GUI could be beautiful, Ubuntu, other flavors of Linux, and any other open-source OS can easily imitate Mac:
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=140407135640c8970070189&p=screen
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rappiepappie/2149938491/
(instructions: http://www.taimila.com/?q=node/11 )
And surpass it. It may be possible to imitate Compiz' desktop cube on a mac; if so, I haven't seen it done.
Regardless of Linux's ability to easily replicate the Mac GUI, there's plenty of ways to make it beautiful on its own.
http://www.lynucs.org/index.php?screen_id=4456515154814b50050436&p=screen
You can combine all the best features of Mac's GUI and Vista's Aero, and add quite a few unique features.
And beauty aside, the Linux GUI is a lot more functional than Mac's, and the menus are easier to navigate and more customizable. This isn't just true for the GUI, though; at all layers of operability minus two Photoshop functions which haven't been replicated by open-source apps yet, Linux matches and surpasses the best that Mac or Windows can do, and does it with lower system requirements. And Photoshop? There's currently a concerted effort to make the Windows version work perfectly from within Linux.
Game over. Linux wins.

Oh, and if it IS the off-white cases you want? You can install Linux ON your Mac. And it'll work a lot better than your Mac ever did, too.

DISCLAIMER: I have only used OS X for roughly an hour of total operating time. One-button mice piss me off.

DISCLAIMER: I have only used OS X for roughly an hour of total operating time. One-button mice piss me off.

So plug a three button mouse in. All buttons work as you'd expect.

Yes, you can get any OS to look like any other OS but that's just not quite the same, as any one who's taken a cross dresser home by mistake will tell you (that's not a confession).

Linux has some advantages, the price, the ease of customization and the price. Windows doesn't have any advantages as far as I can see. In fact it's positively hobbled by it's development philosophy and total lack of security.
Then there's OSX which is where we came in...

I'd like to install a bootable Linux distribution on my external hard drive so I can familiarize myself with Linux. Can anyone recommend one? Ubuntu gets a lot of press, but they don't support PPC Macs any more. Ubuntu 7.10 seems to have a PPC version, but the latest is 8.04. SUSE 10.3 has a PPC version.

Any suggestions?

Because one person is smart and dicking around,
and the others are stupid dicks