It’s worth noting that there are some excellent and richly-featured audio programs for Linux, including Audacity - an excellent audio editing and mixing program (which is available for the other OSes too - so it’s not specifically a selling point for linux) and Rosegarden - a Cubase wannabe.
(And I don’t think we’re threadshitting here - I think this does legitimately fit within the category of ‘things to consider before making the switch from Windows to Mac’)
Another vote to at least take a good look at Ubuntu. At least from the pecuniary standpoint, it will cost you nothing and may be just what you need. Dual-booting, at least initially, means you have Windows as a standby if you run into difficulties.
I have had only two hardware issues, one an ancient Acer scanner that I never use anyway and the other an iRiver player that was bought specifically for use with Linux as it plays ogg files but is not recognised despite firmware upgrades.
Haven’t tried wifi but don’t need it for the desktop machines anyway.
On the other hand the laptops are running Vista and I haven’t encountered anything I would describe as a problem with that either.
Out of curiosity, does using the internet in a windows environment on an intel mac make it more susceptible to viruses?
Windows run natively on a Mac (i.e. with Bootcamp) will be pretty much as vulnerable to malware as it would be if you were running it on standard PC hardware - but I think anything that happens in the Windows session isn’t likely to affect the Mac side of things. If you’re running it in a virtualised environment inside MacOS, then this might provide some protection from some kinds of bad stuff (but probably not all), but again, I don’t think it would be likely to adversely affect the Mac OS itself and depending on how the virtual Windows is set up, sorting out any problems might be as simple as discarding the session and starting a new one.
My suggestion is:
Get a Mac. Forget Linux.
Find a local Users’ Group : User Groups - Apple
They will bend over backwards helping you. User’s Groups are the best support resource.
Correct. On the Mac, you only get to choose from a handful of really nice text editors, as opposed to the thousands of crappy text editors available for Windows. Man, that sucks. :rolleyes:
Why do PC users continue to spout this? It’s a complete and utter falsehood, unless you’re talking about the Mac Mini. It’s not 1995 any more.
Isn’t that pretty much what the Start menu is? The basic Start menu (on XP, anyway) has an MRU list of applications, and the “My Recent Documents” has an MRU list of files.
If I’m connecting to servers without mapping a drive to them, I do it using the “Run” dialog, which also has an MRU list.
I honestly don’t use Windows much these days, except when I’m fixing all the viruses on my roommate’s computer running XP. I just looked, and I’m not seeing this MRU you’re talking about. Is it an option somewhere you have to turn on or something?
Click the Start button. You see the list of applications above the “All Programs” item? That’s an MRU list, though admittedly I don’t know what the actual algorithm is for populating it. (For those just joining in, MRU = “most recently used”)
If you look toward the top right of the Start menu, you should see a “My Recent Documents” menu. Click that and you’ll get a menu with the most recently used documents.
There’s some configuration you can do. For example:
-Right-click the taskbar and click Properties. The “Taskbar and Start Menu Properties” dialog will appear. Click the “Start Menu” tab.
-Select the “Start menu” radio button and click “Customize”. The “Customize Start Menu” dialog will appear.
-On the “General” tab, you can select the icon size (I use small icons).
-In the “Programs” group box, you can specify the max number of items for the MRU list (I use 10).
-On the “Advanced” tab, you can turn a bunch of other stuff on or off, including the MRU list for documents.
If you click Start > Run (or type WinKey-R), the “Run” dialog appears. The “Open” control is a combo box; the content of the dropdown is an MRU list of whatever you have previously run via the dialog.
Thanks. Yeah, it required configuration. I’m not going to bother turning it on since it’s not my computer, but at least I know now how to turn it on.
No kidding. And Apple makes the MacPro particularly easy to upgrade. Everything is so neatly organized in there, the case pops open without use of screwdrivers, etc. I just bought a basic system and popped in 4GB of my own RAM (I’m not going to buy Apple’s overpriced RAM, no matter how good it is), my own SATA hard drives, etc. If I decide I want to upgrade my videocard, it’s easy peasy. Just slide it out, and slide the new one in.
I bought into Mac last year with the MacBook Pro. I love it so much, I trashed my Windows desktop and bought a MacPro to replace it. For what I do–photography–there simply is no better system. The color workflow of the Macs are superior to what I’ve been able to do with Windows PCs. Certain software I use is simply unavailable on Windows.
I’ve heard similar accounts from people in music and video industries.
Linux? No thanks. It’s nice, it’s pretty, it’s customizable, but it simply does not support any of the software I need (most importantly, the Adobe CS3 suite of programs.)
While Windows does have a list of recent documents, it does not, so far as I know, have a list of recent applications or servers. On the server issue, I can, for instance, within two clicks on my home computer connect to, mount, and open up a Finder window for my office computer (the equivalent of mapping a drive to it), and from there, drag-and-drop or open files or whatever just like in any other Finder window.
Now, it may be that Windows has this capability now, too. I have essentially no experience with any Windows system later than 2000, so they may have added this, too.
Maybe to sum up the obvious.
With a Mac, you can run Linux, Windows, the Mac OS, pretty much anything. On Windows or Linux, you can run VM’s as well, but not the Mac OS (well, without a pirate-hack).
You can buy non-upgradeable Mac or Windows hardware, or upgradeable. I usually flip-flop – Quadra - iMac - PowerMac - iMac again currently. Plus, they’re all really upgradeable for the basics. Both on my Macs have upgraded RAM, and the LittleMac has an upgraded drive that I did myself. My Linux box is the only thing I’d really want to upgrade right now, but that’s because I want it to have the three tuner cards and five hard drives that it has. It’s a special, purpose built machine, though, and that’s why it runs a special, purpose-built Linux operating system (I can VNC into it for a graphic desktop if I need to).
It is no longer true that there is nothing “quite like Access” for the MacOS. OpenOffice and NeoOffice (the Java incarnation of same) for MacOS both now sport “Base”, the database module which is an open-source clone of Access, can open and edit Access files, etc.
Disclaimer: I am not an Access user and cannot state from useful experience that every single function available in Access works just fine in Base, or that all visual components render the same way, etc
Your overall point, however, is still well-taken.
Yeah, pretty annoying, isn’t it? Kind of the way I feel about the *I’m a PC/I’m a Mac * ads that imply that all PCs are good for are spreadsheets, graphs and word processing.
Scott Finney, a well-known PC writer, has recently switched to a Mac. He comments extensively on that decision, comparison of hardware costs, available software, etc. in his recent columns.
You mean the “worthless animations” that Microsoft has spent the last five years trying to replicate? And far from not getting viruses and spyware from a protect system, our corporate IT-maintained systems are continually getting infected, and they have an almost weekly effort to “push” security patches onto systems and then automatically rebooting them, which is really not what one wants with a server. I don’t know what “royal pain in the ass” you’ve had with OSX, but you’re in the minority. Personally, I find the OS much easier to use, much more simple to maintain, and overall vastly more reliable.
Mac’s aren’t gaming platforms, to be sure, although with the Intel Macs you can dual boot and run Windows should you so choose. I’m not a big fan of the iMac for a number of reasons and wouldn’t recommend it (if you want to go on the cheap end you’re better off with a MacMini) but it’s simply not true that you can’t upgrade or work on the PowerMac/Mac Pro/PowerBook/MacBook Pro; in fact, these are some of the best laid out, easiest desktop and laptop systems I’ve ever worked on. It’s true that you’re limited in the components that are rated for it, but any OEM-authorized component will work without a bunch of gyrations.
Ubuntu is worth looking at just to see if it’ll do what the o.p. needs, but frankly it’s still not at production level for seamless desktop productivity applications, and while you can certainly do multimedia apps on it, it may be more of a pain to get things working and do the occasional time-consuming workaround than the o.p. desires. Fortuantely, multimedia production and desktop/web publishing is the niche market that Apple has always catered to since the inception of the Macintosh line, and their hardware and software perform admirably in this regard (as well as many scientific and programming applications). If you want to play Final Fantasy or BioShock, get a PSP or XBox. Gaming is not, despite the perception by many Microsoft advocates, the only or even best use of desktop computing.
Stranger
Have you tried this? It’s a program that will automatically configure your wireless if you have a Broadcom wireless card.
A lot of the problems people run into is because there are no Linux drivers for their hardware and their specifications aren’t open. That means the Linux guys have to try and reverse engineer the device and write a driver for you. The results of that effort vary wildly from perfectly working to not working at all depending on the specific piece of hardware. However, if you buy a system from Dell with Ubuntu installed on it you won’t run into this problems.
Wuh? Who on Earth said you can’t play games on Macs. That’s a bunch of malarky. I’ve got more games on my Mac then I’ll ever get around too. But I’m not a hardcore PC gamer. But even off the shelf Windows PCs aren’t sufficient for hardcore PC gamers. They typically get customized rigs, don’t they? You know, if they’re serious about gaming.