As the thread title implies, I’ve had enough of dealing with Windows-based computers and I’m planning on moving on. The two major alternatives that I’m considering are a Mac and some popular flavor of Linux. It seems to me that the major trade-off between the two is that a Mac would cost more money, but a Linux box would take a lot more time to set up and administer. Based on that alone, I’m leaning towards a Mac, but I want to solicit advice before I make the decision.
So here’s my situation: This will be a laptop that I’m mostly going to use for light programming, writing (mostly in LaTeX), and web browsing. All of the software that I need to do that sort of stuff is either cross-platform or has reasonable alternatives. If there’s anything that really is Windows-only, I’ll just run a virtual machine. I have some very basic Unix experience, but certainly not enough to be a sysadmin. I do occasionally use Word and Excel, and I have not been impressed by the open-source alternatives, so that’s another good reason for going with the Mac.
Are there other issues that I should be aware of? Are there any other reasonable alternatives out there?
ETA: Just for completeness, I have access to a Windows box at the office that I can use for any sort of moderately serious number-crunching, and a very nice grid for anything that that can’t handle. Processing power really isn’t an issue.
For the tasks you describe, the two environments will be largely identical. Both use the gcc suite for programming, although MacOS X has the excellent XCode IDE (but if you’re just writing commandline stuff in Emacs then that doesn’t really matter.) The OSX environment is built on BSD which has some differences from Linux but most open-source stuff can be made to compile easily enough on both.
Administration for basic things is pretty easy on Linux nowadays; the GUI admin tools have come a long way and common stuff (networking, USB, graphics and sound) is generally auto-detected and configured pretty well automatically. If you have some basic Unix know-how then you shouldn’t have any problems.
I’d recommend installing a distribution like Ubuntu (very popular these days) or Fedora Core (my current personal favorite) on an existing box that you have available and playing around with it. You could also burn a boot CD and experiment with an existing Windows machine, so you don’t have to repartition your HD. Obviously you wouldn’t be able to save anything.
Mac may be the easiest way, Parallels is pretty nifty software for running Windows software on a Mac (if required) and of course the office suite is available for Mac. Since you don’t need to worry about processing power you can afford to get the cheapest Mac going.
Of course you will get more bang for your buck going for a Linux PC and Ubuntu pretty much sets itself up these days but i’m not sure how easy it would be to get Office running in a Linux environment.
I was pretty seriously unimpressed with Open Office last time I tried it. Granted, that was a few years back, so it’s entirely possible that they’ve ironed out all of my issues, but I’m not optimistic.
If you’re really looking to dump Windows, then a Macbook would probably be best. Linux is (IME) close to feature-complete, but there’s always these little things here and there that can piss you off. I ran Ubuntu on my Sony netbook for about 6 months before going back to Win 7, and this is the kind of stuff I saw:
Suspend/wake generally worked fine, except every so often NetworkManager would shit itself and I’d have to reboot to get my wireless back
no driver for the Memory Stick port
Flash for Linux still sucks. I know the Atom is pretty limp, but Flash-contained video played horribly on Ubuntu compared to Windows on this system
Pulseaudio is still buggy, and would sometimes crash if I had the nerve to do something like adjust the main volume.
and the main kicker, I just could never get DVD playback to work. At all. I had all of the libraries installed, even tried VLC, and they just would not play.
I haven’t had any issues with Open Office but the OP said he wasn’t a fan so I disregarded it as an option. Serious users of the MS Office suite tend to complain a lot more about Open Office than people who just need to update their CV in my experience.
If you’re not a fan of Open Office, then you should know (and probably already do) that Apple has its own “Office suite” (iWork) and of course Microsoft Office has a native version for Macintosh OS X.
If you have time to try to get things to work, then Linux might be what you want. If you don’t want to spend time to get things to work, but just want a computer that you can immediately use without too much fuss, then a Macintosh is a good choice. If you decide to go with Linux, I would choose the hardware carefully and find out ahead of time if Linux supports it (meaning the wireless card in your laptop, the printer you plan to use, any other peripherals, etc.)
Honestly, for what you’ve listed, just about any Linux distro would be more than adequate. And you won’t have to pay for upgrades (either new OS release or new hardware to keep up with the OS releases, which happened to a person at work that had a 3-year old MacBook). But I’ll also say that Macs really are pleasant to use – although I’d personally rather write code on a Linux machine.
As a Debian user, it’s the distro that I’d recommend, but perhaps you’d prefer Ubuntu (Debian-based) or RedHat. IMHO, a Debian-based distro’s apt package management is a major plus (assuming RedHat still primarily relies on yum). Man, do I loves me having synaptic at my disposal.
Yes, [ Open | Libre ]Office has improved greatly in the past few years; it may not be up to an MSOffice power-user’s standards, but it’ll do all the standard stuff (and occasionally more – e.g., Excel will no longer SaveAs a dbf, while Calc will). Besides the aforementioned Flash issue, lately I’ve also been running into pdfs that I can’t readily read (produced by the latest versions of Adobe’s Acrobat, I think…so much for an open format).
If you’re going to run Linux, I’d suggest doing some research beforehand on hardware compatibility. It’s better than it ever has been, but I’d still suggest favouring nVidia graphics cards and Atheros wireless chipsets. Also, most ethernet controllers will work fine but some manufacturers still don’t release good Linux drivers(I ran into this problem with ethernet controllers from Marvell, for instance).
My company uses BSD as the base of their embedded systems, and Macs have become quite popular in the BSD community for development systems. If you’re willing to pay the Apple tax, Macs can work quite well for developing for Unix-like systems.
If you’re really nostalgic for the bad old days of spotty hardware compatibility, you can do what I do and run one of the BSDs on your machine.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a couple of years and I’ve never had any problems. Everything worked out the box, even network cards and graphics and so forth. Needed to install a DVB card driver, which won’t be an issue for most people, but the most recent version does that automatically.
Be careful to check that the Linux kernel supports whatever hardware you intend to use with it, though, especially graphics and wireless cards. Or just download an .iso, burn it to a CD (or make a bootable USB) and see if it works.
If you don’t like OpenOffice you can always try LibreOffice or some seperate programme like AbiWord for word processing, all of which are available in the repositories.
Which distro you do for shouldn’t matter that much, they should all be usable, but I recommend Ubuntu, widely used, helpful forums, Gnome desktop, debian package manager, easily installed, easily made into a bootable USB/LiveCD. Or Ubuntu-based distros like Mint or PinGuyOS is you want codecs and so forth pre-installed.
I absolutely adore linux for the things I use it for, but in your case I’d go Mac. You’ve still got your Unix under the hood, with a well-supported commercial desktop environment on top.
For people in general who are in this situation, either Mac or Linux is a good solution. Both will do general internet stuff just fine, and both are (mostly) equally easy to use, though each has its quirks (as does Windows, to be fair). Macs are better at basically having everything work right out of the box. Anything new just plugs in and works. That’s the benefit you get from having a closed system. Linux is notorious for being incredibly difficult to deal with when something goes wrong, like having to manually edit cryptic scripts and the like. However, Linux is a lot cheaper and has support for more things, since any idiot who feels like it can add a driver to Linux (which has both good and bad points to it, since sometimes the idiot really is an idiot and makes a fairly crappy driver).
Macs and Linux boxes both benefit from security through obscurity (there aren’t many VMS viruses out there either these days, for the same reason), but they also suffer from a lack of available software and supported hardware, since anyone with half a brain is going to develop their new whiz bang thing for Windows since it has by far the lion’s share of the market. Most common things have been ported to Mac and Linux by now though, except for games which are still almost exclusively Windows.
If you are like the OP and need to interact with other Microsoft Office users, Mac at least does have its own version of Office. Open Office has an excellent word processor, and its spreadsheet (Calc) isn’t bad either. Generally, Open Office is compatible with stuff made in older versions of Microsoft Office. You tend to run into problems with newer features. Most folks don’t do the complicated formatting that screws up Writer. Spreadsheet users tend to run into more problems though. For example, Calc and Excel both do macros in a different way, which means macros on one are not compatible with macros on the other. This sort of thing could be the decider for the OP.
Another option for the OP is to use Linux but use some sort of remote desktop access to the Windows box whenever Microsoft Office applications are needed. Otherwise, the OP may need to use a Mac just for the Microsoft Office option.
I personally run Ubuntu on a desktop and Fedora on a laptop, and I like Fedora more. This is one of those IMHO things though. When considering Linux on a laptop, make sure that Linux and the laptop in question are both compatible with each other. You often run into issues with the wireless adapter. Some wireless manufacturers won’t release details of their device without an NDA, and that goes against the Linux philosophy of open source. This prevents Linux users from making a driver for that device, unless someone manages to hack and reverse engineer the device. Even on laptops that are supported (like mine) the drivers aren’t always included in the distribution you choose and sometimes you have to do a fair amount of fiddling to get it to work. A Mac laptop, by comparison, just works. There’s no fiddling.
Personally, I’m quite well impressed by the Xubuntu variants that I’ve used on my eeepc, including openOffice, but I have to admit that they’re not quite up to MSoffice level, especially in the word processor. There’s also another free suite available - the one that includes abiword and gnumeric.
A vote for Mac. It is Unix (the BSD that friedo mentions being a major branch of Unix). It’s very robust and easy to work with. I bought an iMac and added iWork (which is a lite analog of MS Office, or maybe more like MsS Works, for $49). I think the Mac Mini sells for around $650 now.
Being rid of Windows, at least at home, is like losing a chronic illness.
If you can afford it, I’d go with the Mac. For all the reasons already stated, like Microsoft Office, and because a bottom of the line Mac isn’t that different from a similarly priced retail PC. Sure, you might be able to get a better PC if you were to customize on the manufacturer’s websites, but for buying from a shop, they’ll usually be equivalent.
So, if you don’t like the Mac OS, you can always use BootCamp and run a Linux variant, and thus have yourself a Linux PC.
If price is a concern, I’d see if you can get Office 2007 working well enough in Wine while using an Ubuntu Live CD on your current computer. This guide supposedly is sufficient. If everything works to your satisfaction, then go for a Linux PC.
The way they compare performance for computers is usually by choosing a reference task that all the computers can do, and timing them.
I think they should choose reference tasks on the basis that it is reasonable to try it based on what advertisements say, and time that. When you want to do the task, if the Mac does it in 1.3 seconds and the PC takes 4 hours of joining online troubleshooting forums and updating drivers and annoying your propellerhead friends, then for that task they should conclude the Mac runs 10,000 times faster. For that matter, they need to add those 4 hours of salary, plus that of the propellerheads, to the PC price.
I think price and performance look pretty appealing on the Mac side, that way.
