Windows or Mac?

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Mac, but I'm stuck with Window's XP until I graduate from high school or get a job.

But it's not an example of freedom with OS X.


It's a dead project, and it sucked when it was alive. They never managed to get an installer for it—you had to install it on top of OS X (in which you're already either running Apple, meaning you don't have the freedom, or you're running Hackintosh, violating the license) or on top of a Darwin system which you somehow had to figure out how to install yourself.


I've got one of those. It's a pain. I agree; for the time being we do need some proprietary stuff. But that wasn't my point exactly, it was that OS X is not really free. Just because you can get the source code for some parts of it doesn't make it a free system. Particularly given that no one has managed (despite several projects attempting it) to take the publicly available Darwin source and get a usable system out of it.

Regardless of whether you hate OS X because it's proprietary, the fact is that Apple is embracing Unix as well as (to a certain extent) open source, while Microsoft is essentially trying to make them illegal (and no, I don't think Codeplex was a genuine attempt to contribute to F/OSS, rather, it was an attempt to save face with the free software community and suck up to those they finally realized were winning). Ever heard of the SCO vs. IBM trial? MS actually sponsored SCO's lawsuit, at least partially. Which do you honestly believe is more of a threat? A Linux geek hating Apple but not Microsoft is like a black person hating Eminem because he's a white rapper but being perfectly fine with the Ku Klux Klan.

Last edited by LordoftheMonkeys on 30 Aug 2010, 6:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I concur that it is not free. More free and for many people free enough is all I am trying to state.

at any rate, there are more projects than gnu-darwin, one of which at least that I know of that does boot on its own, you are free to look up the details..

http://www.puredarwin.org/downloads

I think .Net will be the most involved Microsoft will get in open source, and that isnt even open itself. I just dont understand the animosity towards apple when they are participating a lot more with open source and open standards than Microsoft is. People complain about Apple locking you in to hardware but being locked into hardware is much worse than purposefully breaking open standards or working to destroy their prevalence every single day.

I mean .Net is a joke in a lot of ways, why would you create a language completely abstracted away from the operating system in a virtual machine only to give it all of these windows specific libraries that talk directly with the operating system anyways? Why does Microsoft call linux a cancer that steals their IP and threatens the software world yet so clearly benefits from things it is used in, though this is a statement Microsoft has been regretting ever since.

I've no problem with proprietary code as long as it is decent and performs nicely and doesnt inconvenience me too much, so as someone who has a desire to have proprietary multimedia codecs with no legal issues, who has a desire to on more than one or two occasions run proprietary software solutions like photoshop, office, or whatever I stumble across, I would like to use a system that is compatible, and if I can help it, one that is compatible natively. So to answer the question of the original poster once more, if I were to choose between one or the other as a supporter of open standards, Mac.

I haven't had that problem. YMMV, but for the record it's very unlikely that there are any bugs that are in Mint but not Ubuntu.

It means "Your Mileage May Vary"

At the moment, yes, I'm using Mint. YMMV=Your Mileage May Vary, ie you may have a different experience.


There isn't much point. I just installed Mint to see what it was about, and there wasn't enough difference between it and Ubuntu to make it worth the bother of reinstalling Ubuntu over it.

There are a few niceties about Mint over Ubuntu though, in regards to Ubuntu's crap Mac-clone interface. Mint doesn't use notify-osd or the silly Ubuntu themes with left-side icons. It's only a small nuisance to fix those things in Ubuntu, but in Mint they don't need to be fixed. Probably my preference would be for straight Debian in future installations, though.