[Melbourne-pm] Getting a Mac Power Book

[Shlomi Fish]

On Monday 28 May 2007, Kirrily Robert wrote:
> Alec, I moved to OSX for my home machines about 2 years ago.  I did it
> because I was moving countries and needed to put my entire digital
> life onto a laptop to take with me, and there was a dip in Linux
> laptops at the time.
>
> On 5/28/07, Alec Clews <alecclews at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The questions I have is as follows:
> >
> > * What can OS/X offer that Linux can't
>
> Smooth, sexy media handling.  I no longer have a TV, and do heaps of
> downloading and watching of media in all kinds of formats that
> would've been a PITA under Linux.  (It's probably better now, but
> still not up to Mac standards.)  

Really? There's no problem in downloading things under Linux: you have 
BitTorrent, eDonkey, g2p.org (Google hacking for finding media files), 
plain-ol'-HTTP (GarageBand.com, etc.), youtube-dl, etc. These are plain 
TCP/IP protocol which don't care what OS you run. Are you referring to iTunes 
and other DRM-encumbered services? Or buy-mp3s-for-pay services? iTunes 
cannot run on Linux without wine or VMware, but there's no way I'm going to 
use it to buy songs. As for buy-mp3s-for-pay services - they are usually a 
standard web store.

As for playing them - mplayer could play anything I've thrown at it. There's 
also xine and VLC. I once had some artificats while playing a QuickTime 
movie, which had an .mpg extension (the famous Peanuts + "Hey Ya!" cross), 
and it was solved after adding some obscure flags to mplayer, which I found 
out after talking with people on the IRC.

One thing to note is that the GUIs for the players still tend to suck pretty 
badly, but as far as displaying the raw video is concerned, it is very good.

> Since switching to OSX I've also 
> found myself doing video editing and stuff like that, and I'm really
> enjoying it.

You can do video editing in Linux. Holywood studios have recently switched to 
Linux wholesale, for both their front-ends, and back-end needs. Obviously, 
some of the software that they are using is commercial, non-free and very 
pricey, and they also have a lot of in-house, custom, software, which they 
depend on.

In any case, I'm aware of several open-source video-editing applications for 
Linux, and while I cannot compare them to their Mac equivalents, 
video-editing in Linux should be doable.

>
> > * What is the downside of migrating to OS/X?
>
> You'll need to mind-switch a bit.  Rather than thinking "how do I
> configure application X to have behaviour Y?" you need to think "I
> wonder if I can download an add-on to get me behaviour Y."
>

Hmmmpfff...

> > * Is OS/X as good as Linux for running and developing OSS software? Some
> > of the things that I particularly interested in are: GNU Cash (possible
> > to install I believe but not a supported platform); Apache, Perl and  all
> > that goes with it (i.e. CPAN), MYSql (I believe there is a port supported
> > by the vendor), svk.
>
> Personally and very much IMHO, no.  For me it's mostly just a matter
> of not having terminal emulators that work as I expect them to. (I've
> tried Terminal.app, iTerm, and xterm under X11, for those who are
> thinking of offering suggestions.)  I could probably retrain myself in
> time, but to be honest I haven't done so yet, and my productivity has
> dropped. I'm intending to get a Debian or Ubuntu box to actually do
> more serious development on.

Interesting.

>
> As for CPAN, MySQL, etc...  basically stuff will install in
> non-standard places and you'll spend a bit of time figuring it out,
> but once you've got used to it, it's fine.  For any particular app
> you're wondering about support for, a quick google should tell you
> whether it exists.  Most open source stuff is available, but you might
> have a bit of annoyance figuring out which of the various install
> mechanisms is right for any given package.
>

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

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