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by rbanffy·18y ago·view on hn ↗
Pierre... From what you say, it is glaringly obvious you never spent any time either with a Mac or with a modern Linux. True the monitors stuff is not mature, but multi-monitor machines are just now becoming more common. As for OSX being sluggish... What have you been using? a G3?

And I find that dropping to the command line is fairly common with me because I am a programmer. My son uses my computer from time to time and he has no idea there is such a thing as a command line. Maybe your sample is skewed by a number of programmers using Linux more than any limitation of the graphical environment.

I only agree with you about the Vista thing. It is the lousiest OS I have ever seen being pushed out the door. It's even worse than Windows Me.

1 comments
"it is glaringly obvious you never spent any time either with a Mac" Don't tell that to my boss - our company's IT system is all Mac :) Seriously, I've been a Mac user for 18 months, and now helping the company test Leopard for roll-out. I'm using a Macbook (the white variety) with a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Yes it's still sluggish and I don't have any background software running.

As for modern Linux, I follow the release cycle of the majors. Every six months, I download and test Mandriva and Ubuntu, and sometimes others like Fedora, PC-BSD, and Mint (my pile of test CDs is getting silly). This week, I want to play with SymphonyOne 2008.1 (just released) because the interface is intriguing me. Invariably, on my laptop which is 2+ years old, something is broken.

None of them ever figure out my screen res (1280x800) natively. It's an ATI card, so my hopes are high now that AMD has opensourced the drivers.

Vista vs ME. Hmm, never thought of that but I think I agree with you!

Your Macbook must have some serious problem. May be some overheat condition that clocks it down. My wife's Macbook (white, Core Duo) is not sluggish no matter what I throw at it.

The ATI thing may explain your driver problems, but on my last notebooks, Linux was even able to figure out my Broadcom wireless, which is quite an accomplishment. For the last two years, I have little to no driver problems, but, then, I won't buy a notebook with an ATI video subsystem and I do prefer units with hardware that is known to work under Linux (the Vaios are very compatible, as are most HPs and Dells).