PC vs MAC, TELL ME.! Options

[Jghelfi]

okay, i have always been wanting a mac since the first time i used the new Macbook in my 6th period at school, but i have a refurbished old 2001 PC desktop...

can somebody tell me what is good and bad between Macs and PCs..?!

i know that PCs Crash a lot
and that
Macs come with free software in the systems already..

so please somebody carify it for me!

[illriginal]

What more are you buying than just specs?... Mac has a well paid employment force. Linux devs don't. Mac is barely any better than Linux.

[mipadi]

Mac is barely any better than Linux.

I think you hold a minority opinion in that regard.

I've been involved with the computer science departments at both Bucknell University (where I did undergrad) and The College of William & Mary (where I did some graduate work). W&M uses OpenSUSE Linux on Dells for their lab machines; until 2005, Bucknell used Solaris and SPARCs in their labs, but they migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Dells in '05. Historically, most professors at Bucknell have used either a SPARCstation or a Linux workstation as their office machines, and most profs at W&M have used Linux workstations. But in the past 3-5 years, most professors at both schools have migrated to using Macs. I only know of 2 profs at Bucknell who still use Solaris/SPARCs, and W&M only has a couple profs who don't use Macs. Bucknell also had a pretty good legion of student Linux users, but I know a bunch of students who bought Macs to replace their Linux machines, and now the Linux Users Group at Bucknell is practically dead, whereas the Mac Users Group has a pretty strong following.

And that trend isn't unique to the comp sci departments. Math and physics professors generally have a strong affinity for Linux, but at W&M, almost all the math profs use Macs now, and most of the math dept. at Bucknell uses Macs, too. And I personally know of one chemistry professor at Bucknell who was a diehard Linux user for over a decade, until he learned about Fink; he's switched over to the Mac, too.

Even looking at more national trends, a lot of high-profile Linux users/developers have switched to Macs in the last couple of years (search Google, many of them have written blog posts about it). A few Mac users (notably Cory Doctorow) have switched over to Linux, but the migration from Mac to Linux is barely a trickle.

Of course, popularity means jack-shit anyway. Just because something is popular doesn't make it good.



To be clear, I'm not trying to make an argument that you or anyone else should like Macs, because I don't care what you use. You can use whatever you want. But if you phrase it as an absolute like "Mac is barely any better than Linux", rather than "I personally prefer Linux to a Mac because...", then you should at least try to support your assertion. I understand that personal preference isn't something you're really obligated to justify, but that goes back to my whole point that the real issue here is preference, not a matter of specs, capability, or whatever.



On a more personal note, I'm inclined to believe that you're making that assertion because you somehow think it gives you "geek cred" to prefer Linux. Seriously, the wanking over Linux in this forum is insane, esp. since most of the Linux wankers here probably have little personal experience with Linux (i.e., less than a year or two). I mean, Linux is cool, but to be honest, it's not that awesome. And using obscure or "complicated" OSes doesn't make a person "cool". I mean, even a 9-year-old can install Ubuntu on his PC. It's not that hard.