Sam said:
I'm thinking of any system. I'm not the casual user who is happy with the default settings. I bought a new mac about a month ago and spent several days just installing, configuring, testing etc. And Mac OS X is supposed to be one of the most user friendly systems! In fact: it's all installed and ready to go as you unbox the mac. But that assumes you are happy with having the factory defaults and all the trial software and shit like that. Which I am not. Installing any system is bound to take up considerable time - not because of the install itself but for all those small things you need to do after the install. Setting a system preference - say the default volume of your speakers - may be a matter of 3-4 clicks - but when you combine that with every other system and software setting and preference on your system it builds up to staggering proportions. Just calibrating my monitors took several hours even though I've done it many times in the past. Another perfect example of stuff that takes considerable amounts of time is setting up email accounts in Apples Mail.app. They've done a terific job at making it user friendly - but still I had to go thrue some pretty elaborate hoops just to get my email accounts working. "Getting used to" is neither the problem (for me) as I have logged several hundred hours on Solaris OS and I even installed and tried BSD back in the 90'es. |
Mac OS X is really not much more user freindly than Windows, in fact there are many elements that are less user friendly than both Linux and Windows(like why files do not maximize to full screen or trying to quit a program, Fitt's law etc). Also Macs require you to buy a new OS every 1 and a half years if you ever want to use the newest hardware. Buying a new printer in a year well good news you don't need drivers but you will more than lkely need to buy 10.5. Not too mention the poor memory management and performance issues that has dogged OS X intel since it came out.
Ubuntu is surprisingly easy to use for linux. On my home PC I have an 8800 GTX graphics card a card not supported in the current ISO for Ubuntu and amazingly Ubuntu recognized it and downloaded drivers for it off the net without me having to search. Something that neither XP nor OSX does. Vista does it though but vista is a noticeable slower OS than Ubuntu or XP. Also the ISO is a great too have since you can run the OS right off the CD and do not even have to install it if you so wish just don't expect full driver support when running for the CD.
Most of the stuff you mentioned their is nothing special. You can get PCs with Linux or Windows and they all come ready rigth out of the box. Many cheaper PCs have a bunch of trial software on them for the windows versions which is really annoying but not all do and as far as I am aware Linux has none. The rest of those adjusted settings well that is pretty much any system and I think you will find that even though OSX is based on FreeBSD it does not have the flexibility in setting that Linux does. Really the issues with setings is really more specific to how you use a machine however for most people Ubuntu especially a PC with it pre installed is more than suffice for use and not too mention much faster. Even for proffesionals Linux is a really great operating system, Dreamworks uses Red Hat Linux for many of their movies because the type of hardware it can run the stability and the speed just can't be matched.
