OSX - the Revenge of the Apple

If you look at the 3 platforms that I've used, namely Windows, Mac and Linux, I have the least experience with Macs. With the advent of the Intel mac's and especially with the adoption of a Unix subsystem for OSX, Apple has really impressed me.

I am extremely frustrated by the closed nature of the systems and the way you get locked into their applications and hardware, but if you choose to run normal Open Source software on it, the Mac makes a decent platform. The hardware driver support for my printers, network hardware, tv cards, etc, has been awesome and the day to day reliability has been legendary.

On linux, I tend to have the odd hardware issue as I run close to the bleeding edge distros most of the time, so I've grown accustomed to the odd crashing application due to the unstable nature of the repo's I used, but on the mac, that's not an option. You are forced to use the software in a "stable" mode and guess what, its actually not that big a deal.

I am slowly finding alternative apps for the ones Apple defaults so on my taskbar, you'll find Thunderbird, Songbird, Firefox, Banshee, MuCommander, VLC and Skype.

Since this Mac came with iLife and iWork, they are still there and I will use them for the odd project. They're actually all fairly decent. They compare favourably with any app I've used on the Linux side and better than most. For the price, I think they're worth the money. I haven't bought software in years, but if I was faced with the choice, I could honestly say, I would be tempted.

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