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

[Doug Green]

This brings up an interesting point- I wonder what the average cost ratio of
hardware:software is on a typical end user machine. Clearly, this group is
on one side of the spectrum, while non-linux using
biomedical/animation/creative arts people are probably on the other end. I'd
bet that (pure speculation) a standard office machine (running MS Office and
XP) could approach a 1:1 ratio, yet people rarely balk at paying for those
apps. Instead, they opt for a cheaper machine for cost savings... Kinda
weird consumer habits- it's like putting premium gas in a cheap car.


On 2/25/05 9:24 AM, "John Harrold" <jmh17 at pitt.edu> wrote:

> 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.