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To give you a switch in the other direction story: I was a long time linux user, always very happy and quick to defend it. However, I found myself being ground
by micktwomey 18y ago
To give you a switch in the other direction story: I was a long time linux user, always very happy and quick to defend it. However, I found myself being ground down by hardware support and the pain it took to get basic things to work. I migrated from redhat to debian to gentoo and was always ultimately frustrated by the effort it took to get anything working. (Sound was always a big source of fun.)
So a friend got a mac, purely on the grounds it was less hassle than a linux pc, and frankly, after looking at all the amazing things he could do (wow, he can plug in a vga cable and have the monitor work without restarting X) I was seriously feeling won over. I finally bought a powerbook and was instantly chuffed by the fact I could do real work and not waste time mucking about with hardware. Honestly, my productivity increased by an order of magnitude. I realised how much it was really my ego vs the machine when it came to getting things working.
These days I don't faff about with macports or fink (they just don't work well enough) but instead I run ubuntu in a vmware instance. To top it off, my vmware ubuntu with 512MB of RAM runs faster than my dual core, 4GB ubuntu desktop. Go figure.
Putting aside hardware support, it's the software I love. Mac software authors have a wonderful sense of design and detail, which I always find lacking on linux or windows.
I develop using python and deploy on a combination of redhat, debian and windows boxes and the only real platform related pain I've experienced is the repeated stupidities redhat enterprise inflicts upon people. (You know it's enterprisey when they only give you five packages, forcing you to use random, untested rpm repositories around the world.)
Ok, maybe the hardware support is the biggest reason after all, just this week my linux co-workers were high-fiving over undocking their laptops without having to reboot them. Most of the time.