Steve Jobs -2011

On 10/08/2011 07:24 PM, Josh Dersch wrote: I don't like the direction in which OS X seems generally headed, while at the same time, Linux has grown up. I will tell you the story. Several months ago, I began construction of a "hackintosh" system to replace my old desktop OS X machine. I carefully selected all the parts to be OS X compatible, and built it up. I ended up with a truly glorious machine...the Intel "Core i" family FINALLY gets the level of performance that more modern architectures had ten years ago! Anyway, I had very poor bandwidth where I was staying at the time, so FTPing my OS X install DVD image from my home network would've taken days, and I wanted to see if my newly-built machine actually functioned. I had an Ubuntu 11.04 install CD in my laptop bag, so I quickly installed it, planning to just run it for a bit to exercise the hardware and then install OS X when the file transfer finished. I was so impressed with the 11.04 distribution as a whole, that it has stayed, and it has been my main desktop system ever since. Now, things are so much easier (like running USB JTAG dongles for Xilinx FPGAs and ARM MCUs, etc) that now I honestly don't know how I got along without it. My laptop, a Macbook Air which I absolutely adore, will stay on OS X for a while, but now, for main desktop system use, in my opinion, Linux (specifically the Ubuntu distribution) is now the best way to get a fast, flexible, modern UNIX desktop workstation. In case you're curious about the specifics, my new machine is a quad 3.2GHz Core i7 with 16GB of RAM, a 10K RPM 150GB SATA system disk, and an array of four 1TB 7200RPM drives managed by ZFS for everything non-OS related. An Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS drives an original-series 23" Apple Cinema Display, and a wired full-size Apple aluminum keyboard and an Apple Trackpad (the big bluetooth desktop version) are my input devices. Linux has good gesture support now, with two-finger scrolling in both horizontal and vertical being something I virtually depend on now. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA