Is OSS on OSX just plain wrong?

well, thanks to the beautiful mac os 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4, i have gotten curious about linux. so much so that my old pentium 2 shitbox is running suse 9.3 with bittorrent downloading tv shows (very slowly) all day. that's my contribution to anti-capitalism to balance my heinous use of mac os x and winxp64 every day :p

Hilarious. You put a ™ after "Good Thing". ^_^ Martha Steward would be proud. If anything, I think the Mac is good for OSS on unix-ish platforms: having BSD unix underneith the shiny Mac interface, I found it easy to explore unix programing and its associated tools (such as emacs, GCC, etc.) on my Mac while studying computer science in college. I would not have been able to do the same if I had been using a windows computer, at least not nearly as easily. I'd have to install Linux or Cygwin or something to even begin, and as a novice, I was not about to take on that risk, but on the Mac, I just open up the terminal, and I have an instant old-school command line interface.

As I was just installing Fink I was reading through the FAQ and it turns out that Apple sometimes even give out pre-release copies of OS X for projects to be ready for them: http://fink.sourceforge.net/faq/relations.php?phpLang=en#apple That sounds like they are giving something back to me. I also have to say OSS just looks so much nicer on OS X.

First of all, that Mac Mini "article" is pure humor. Beautiful sarcastic humor. Being a defensive former flag-bearing memeber of the windows-toting anti-mac club (face it, OS9 and earlier sucked), I can say without a doubt that that article is actually more offensive to Windows OEMs than it is to Apple- Making fun of their often bundled legacy hardware and vulnerable software. Anyway- all of the vitrolic commenters on that website are militant linux folk. Only a little worse to me than any other vitrolic platformist (and believe me, I hear comments from everyone being a "switcher"). Unfortunately, most of them are too entrenched in their own little world that they don't realize how difficult it is to build a custom computer and install linux for your average computer user who's just checking email, sharing photos, or looking up recipes on the web. For the money you pay for an Apple computer, you not only get a computer that has a ton of bells and whistles in a sleek package and runs it's apps well, you also get a year of support out of the box. The people writing the OSS versions for OSX (and I definitely applaud them) probably wouldn't be contributing to the community at all if it weren't for OSX. Most people are motivated by their own desires, and are certainly going to develop for the platform that they use themselves. I use GAIM on my linux box at work, GAIM on my windows machines at home, and Adium on my iBook... That said, Adium kicks so much ass over GAIM that it's not even funny. What's the difference? Passion!

This is classic: "By leaving out a USB keyboard and monitor, two things you may already have if you have an old Mac, Apple can shave some money off the price of its system components and the size and weight of its packaging. By using cheap Asian labor to assemble the units, costs have been reduced even further. I would like to see them continue this trend, possibly strike a deal with China to use inmates to assemble the Mini for even less, like Lenovo does. "

Wow, that review of the mac mini is so biassed... "Poor standards compliance: Apple's Safari web browser often fails to render MSN properly." Is msn would script their sites properly... it's like a OS X vs. Windows review on a windowssite

"There is no Mac version of WeatherBug to check the temperature anywhere in the world. Nor is there a Mac version of helpful web and email enhancers like Hotbar. Or any equivalent of the DealHelper software I use to keep track of my passwords." This is hilarious. The best part though: "Jorge Lopez is a DeVry graduate"

"Since we live in a capitalist country, it is fairly natural that a company founded by people who like to eat every day would attempt to create value and, gasp, profits for the company." Since when did we live in a capitalist country? Copyright is a government-imposed monopoly, which won't exist in a capitalist society.

how can you read this passage, twice: "So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time." ...and not see the absolute genius of the review! It's better than most stuff at The Onion.

That Mac mini review was a joke. If you look at the other articles on that site, you'll see things like this: http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/appleweek1.html