MACs Re: [Fsfe-uk] An ignorant question?

[Simon Waters]

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ian wrote:
>
>>(people still manage to use Macs, don't they?)
>
>
> That's an interesting point. "Going Linux" seems to be a lot more
> emotive than being an established Mac user. The only real rationale for
> that is fear of change. The Mac is familiar (ok reputation for
> user-friendly etc)

The old MAC user interface left me completely lost - I know what they
mean about nipples being the only intuitive user interface. Much of the
ease of use came from before plug and pray, when proprietary hardware
saved a lot of effort over cheaper generic components.

Not just fear of change, but potentially lost of productivity (short
term at least), and many owners are locked into specific graphic design
programs which might only be as good as GIMP (or other free
equivalents), but they are almost all "power users", picking obscure
options to complete their routine tasks without looking away from the
appearance of the product -- well those I know.

I think a significant difference from 99% of office staff who can
happily chug along with Open Office and Mozilla, hardly noticing someone
changed their office software.

> Another - proprietary hardware and software expense and tie in is not a
> disadvantage with GNU/Linux.

Although quite a lot of MACOS X is free software, so Apple are
contributing to things like the GCC PowerPC code.

They also contribute changes back to the projects under non-copyleft
free software licences to (hopefully) minimise their pain of supporting
parallel versions. Although I still prefer copyleft licences, as
otherwise that forking can still happen.

Perhaps they haven't bought the vision quite like Redhat, perhaps the
ownership isn't terribly attractive to the free software world, but
don't be too hard on them, and the users now have a gentle migration
path avaiable to them.

> Maybe we should be questioning why the Mac
> is catered for eg for cable ISP connection etc porting apps etc and not
> other systems given that rumour has it that there are now close to as
> many people using desktop GNU/Linux as Mac.

Name names.

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