[wplug] Survey questions - Mac hardware/OS X/Linux??

[John Harrold]

Sometime in February Jennifer Landefeld assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| Now to the questions:
| 
| (1) How many folk in our group are Mac hardware & OS X users with a 
| partition for Linux?

I would but there are too many things with the new powerbooks which don't
work with Linux.

| (2) Do we have any users who bought new/used Mac equipment to load just 
| Linux by itself (as opposed to Intel/AMD)? What flavor?

I fully intended to primarily run Debian and to experiment with OSX on my
PB. After about a week of fighting with Linux I succumbed to OSX. It's
pretty impressive, but there are some things I'd like to change --- a
unified package manager would be nice.

| My initial response to them was that I'd venture most of use using 
| Linux were looking for the least expensive alternative for computing 
| and chose "cheap" hardware and didn't necessarily load purchased 
| flavors of Linux (though many of us do buy Redhat, SuSE, etc.)

While price is a concern, I definitely wouldn't buy the "cheapest"
hardware. I worked at a computer store for a while. One thing I learned is
that with cheap hardware you tend to get what you pay for. Sure you could
by a whole system on the cheap and the only thing wrong with it is the
flaky videocard. The problem is that if you don't have a lot of spare
hardware for testing purposes, it could take you a week or two to
troubleshoot that problem. Most peoples time is worth more than that ---
some people just don't realize it ;). Where I work, we get most of our
systems from penguin computing. We pay enough extra to probably cover
windows licenses for each machine, but they work and that's all I really
care about.

I think you should differentiate the people "using Linux" from people who
are experimenting and people who use Linux to perform work. People who are
experimenting probably don't want to invest a lot of money and will
probably use "cheap" hardware. It's sad really because Linux cannot
overcome "cheap" hardware any better than windows can. By running Linux on
"cheap" hardware it might give you the idea that Linux is "cheap" because
its crashing a lot. However, people who run their businesses off of Linux
are more likely to spend money on solid hardware --- otherwise IBM wouldn't
be selling these nice servers running Linux. 

One benefit of using Linux is that it runs on old hardware. While old
hardware can be inexpensive it's not necessarily "cheap". In fact you can
buy good used hardware now for a lot less that the original selling price.
While this might seem like a semantic argument, to me cheap implies lower
quality and inexpensive implies less cost. It frustrates me also when
"cheap" gets associated with Linux or any other free/opensource software. I
agree that Linux isn't the desktop OS that say OS X is, but as far as
servers go Linux is anything but cheap.

-- 
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                            | /"\                         
 john harrold               | \ / ASCII ribbon campaign   
 jmh at member.fsf.org      |  X  against HTML mail       
 the most useful idiot      | / \                         
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 What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, 
 and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is brought 
 under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of 
 liberty and democracy?
 --Gandhi
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