Thursday, May 2, 2013

OSX, Windows, Ubuntu?

I had been a long-time user of OSX for quite sometimes. (+- 4 years) I found its UNIX environment and super-friendly user interfaces to be very useful for especially programming. Macbook's trackpad and keyboard shortcuts have always been my personal favorite as well.
I've always thought that MacBook's so called over-price is actually worth every penny. It has SMS, light sensor, very decent LCD, etc etc.
I still have lots and lots of positive things I'd want to write about MacBook. Software like SizeUp, TextMate, SMC Fan Control, iTerm 2, etc have been easing my life as a programmer so much. Maybe I'll write some articles about how much I loved OSX sometimes.

However, as I am becoming more more into UNIX environment, I've found OSX to not be able to catch up with my needs. First and foremost is because many software applications simply aren't written to work well with OSX! It's inevitable that the main market consumer is still Windows and so many software industry simply writes crappy port of their software for OSX. What I mean by crappy here is lots of memory leaks, not optimized to work efficiently and so on. Sad to say this, but I have to admit that I found my MacBook 5,1 with 8GB of RAM and 2.1 core-2-duo processor to be considerably sluggish compared to a laptop with a similar spec with Windows on it. A very obvious example would be Flash player. Try running a Youtube video on a 5,1 MacBook. Notice how hot your MacBook is? I can't help but to also notice how sluggish it becomes. It's just very annoying sometimes..

On the other hand, since some Linux are open source, the software support is so amazing. For almost every single application that you're searching for, you'd almost always able to find a decent open-source version that substitutes it. It's just amazing to see how much Linux have been growing. Also the driver supports that let things work out-of-the-box is just so sweet... I guess I'll have to write another post dedicated for Linux at some point.

:D
Feel free to start a discussion within this thread. I'm no big fan of one single OS or biased towards any. I have so much positive things to say about Linux, Windows, or OSX. They're just great and bad in their own ways.

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