Why OS X user shouldn't switch to Linux?

Note: this is in response to Way of the Penguin

You can stop reading now if you're not interested in OS X. Disclaimer: I'm an anti-Windows/IE person (note: no mention of Office, Visual Studio, ASP.NET, etc., just Windows, just IE). I've used Linux for 5 years but found the one in Apple OS X Tiger/(Snow) Leopard.

Answer: Because there is no perfectly good reason to do that! This post will discuss why OS X is a better choice if you already have it (it might be useful for people considering to get one too). The reason why I write this post is because a lot of people have told me that Mac is a waste of money and I should just stick with Linux. There are reasons why OS X costs money. And they are pretty good reasons (unlike that other operating system that costs a lot more and cause much more pain).

If you already have a mac, you can do practically everything a Linux machine can do! Yes, that's right! And more. That's why you pay more for the OS, right? This article aims to bring those reasons out (wow! so high and mightly... what a typical OS X user! eh, what the heck did I just type).

Now the first thing I checked out when I consider buying a computer is, does it have a built-in ssh? (Ruiwen has explained what ssh is awhile ago, so I shall happily skip over it.) Does OS X has it built-in? Well, I ended up with 3 OS X computers now (a Macbook Pro and an iMac, and another Macbook Pro on loan from Google), so yes damnit, of course, it has ssh!

ssh in a mac, coupled with gorgeous ever-changing background display d:

Another benefit of having a mac, Adobe design software. Yes, it's a pain doing things with GIMP (mind you, I used Linux for five years now and still using it at work and virtualized in my mac sometime, and until now, GIMP is still a pain). And I do use Adobe software a lot. Photoshop for all my design needs and photo touch-up, Bridge to keep track of all of my photos, InDesign for pretty, pretty docs, and Dreamweaver (well, in the past at least, I no longer use Dreamweaver and prefer coding my HTML by hand, to keep the HTML, CSS file size to the minimum—notice, no mention of Javascript, Javascript deserves it's own post). If you're a graphic designer who have lived your entire life with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, you're better of sticking with what you have now; or, if you have a Windows machine, consider switching to a Mac and do away with monitor and colour calibration.

Great UI. Yes, the OS X UI is still unmatched (Vista even blatantly stole ideas from OS X UI and slap their dirty hands on them to form Aero). Not only is it pretty, it's very user-friendly. The amount of user experience research (usually referred to as UX research) that goes to OS X design is tremendous. And being directly involved with UI design several times, it is no easy task to make something that good. The thoughts they put into shortcut keys are amazing as well. I'm used to using keyboards to navigate and do stuffs, so good shortcut keys are a must.

(As a side, while talking about keyboard shortcut, for those emacs user, there is another advantage of using OS X. Now you emacs users would be very used to using C-something and M-something keyboard shortcuts, which are Ctrl- and Alt- button respectively. Now in Windows and Linux Ctrl- are being used for a lot of their shortcuts, making it difficult to utilize both in-application and out-application shortcut at the same time. In OS X, however, the most common shortcuts use Cmd- button, the little Apple button, so Ctrl- and Alt- can be freely used in emacs without causing confusion.)

Now the thing about OS X UI is that it is not limited to the operating system. A lot of third-party software for Mac, free or otherwise, have amazing UI too! OS X attracts many kinds of developers, but out of those, it attracts one kind the most out of any other, programmers with great UI and design taste. Look at Adium X (compare it with Pidgin), look at the powerful TextMate text editor's soft-looking UI (and great choice of fonts btw: Monaco). Or Keynote FTW (strictly speaking, Keynote is not third-party).

By the way, to balance it out, while OS X UI is amazing, I'm not saying that it is perfect. There are stuffs I wish they would have put more thoughts into, such as allowing right-clicking in grid-viewed stack, easy way to modify Dock and Desktop icons, allowing switching of spaces when having 'show desktop' on, or some other minor details that bothers me (those are rare moments, mind you).

Now for me, the deal was sealed when a friend showed my the Terminal (look at the ssh picture above, that black window is the unfathomable, fluffy world of the command line terminal). Yes OS X is BSD-based. It has all of the standard BSD command-line tools (from the tired old cp, mv, rm, ls, to the venerable find, xargs, and sed. Top that with terminal-based emacs text editor (I have never, ever use emacs out of terminal, even in Linux, I'll run (x)emacs with -nw switch, which means, no X GUI). With the terminal, all the reason I have chosen Linux over Windows broke down, and I started saving money like hell to get my first mac. So from an OS X perspective, we have just eliminated one reason to switch to Linux, the ease of the command-line. Now, for those of you still stuck in GUI world, yes, command-line does increase your productivity by a lot, even when you only apply that to doing day to day stuffs. Moving/copying/deleting files from subdirectories several level deep in your home directory can be done easily with tab-autocompletion. The more daunting tasks, such as mass renaming, can be done in command-line much faster than renaming each files one by one (hint: combination of find, xargs, and sed).

What else? Oh yeah, the built-in Apache2, FTP server, and Bonjour. With Apache2 and FTP server built-in, you've almost everything you'd possibly want to serve web pages and files (to yourself or to the world). I've recently set up TWiki on my own computer for my private usage, and the experience was a bliss. Take a look:

This webpage is accessible in my computer by simply typing http://wiki (and don't try to access wiki.chrishenry.com from your own computer, that page doesn't exist outside my computer, in fact, it will bring you to some weird website asking you to register the domain)

All that was done in about half an hour; and that's the first time I was setting up a Perl-based CMS ever (why Perl, you ask? Simply because anything other than PHP-based is fine by me: Perl, Python, C++, Java, ASP.NET). Oh and did I mention that TWiki is awesome? (No, I didn't mention, in case you're wondering, but now I do.)

Now Bonjour is arguably the strongest plug-and-play networking daemon ever written for home network (and office network, when administered properly). Ever wondering how your iTunes can detect other iTunes in the network (yes, even in Windows, Bonjour has been ported for Windows by Apple), or how your computers can easily detect Bonjour-enabled network printer, Time Machine, and other Mac in the vicinity? That's all Bonjour for you. (On the flip side, Bonjour can be a network security nightmare in corporate networks if it is not administered correctly.)

Let's put it in context more familiar to most SoC students, programming. For very basic text editor with syntax highlighting, TextWrangler is a viable free alternative to TextMate. After using different text editors though, I've settled with emacs. It is powerful and fully customizable once you learn the shortcut (oh, and CS1101S students rejoice! You can customize emacs easily using LISP programming language, the more complex alternative to MIT/Scheme). Eclipse is also available for Mac for those Java programmers out there. In addition, there is this one language that you can only code in a Mac, Objective-C. Objective-C is a very pretty object-oriented programming language with dynamic type system. By very pretty, I mean the code looks pretty and highly readable.

id person = [[Person alloc] init];
[person setFirstName:@"Chris" lastName:@"Henry"];

In Java, the equivalent of the above code is:

Person person = new Person();
person.setFirstName("Chris");
person.setLastName("Henry");

Objective-C is used everywhere in OS X. iPhone developers should also be familiar with Objective-C. So Mac opens up one avenue of programming that you can't do in other platforms.

Now, what about C#!? ASP.NET? There's no Visual Studio 2008 for Mac, is there? No. There isn't. Chotto matte kudasai! There is Parallel or Fusion! Both of them are virtualization software that enables you to run other operating system on top of OS X! Recent multi-core CPUs also contain this technology that allows hypervisor to perform much better to run multiple OSes at the same time (Intel's VT or AMD-V technology). You can virtually run Windows XP/Vista or any flavour of Linux on your Mac! They run pretty fast and you can literally sleep the guest operating system and wakes them up in seconds. If you maxed out your Mac's RAM to 4GB, running two guest operating systems is no longer a dream. (Recently, I ran Windows XP quite a bit to try out Chrome and it runs faster than my Firefox 3 running natively in Mac; it's an unfair comparison though, since I usually opened 50-100 tabs in FF3 while I only opened 3-4 Javascript heavy website on Chrome, but still, virtualization is a very real alternatives).

Google Chrome running on Windows XP 64, which in turns ran on VMWare Fusion, on a Mac!

The last thing I want to bring up is darwinports, a package manager for OS X. Quite frankly, the one thing I do miss moving to OS X from Linux is package manager. I came from Debian camp, so I'm used to typing apt-get install firefox3 xemacs21 nmap apache2 to download and install stuffs automatically (Linux software dependencies are a b*tch in itself! A piece of software you want may depend on x number of libraries and other software, each in turn may depend on more; without package manager, they are just too hard to install manually, or . . maybe we are just too pampered with these package manager, I mean, people used to live without them, though then, the world was so much simpler). Luckily in Mac, most software comes with installer. But, if you want to use Linux tools in Mac, that's gonna be a different story. What? Linux tools on a Mac? How? Well, most open source tools available for Linux are made to be portable across operating system. You just need to have the dependency installed, gcc (available in OS X), and the source code. Run configure script, compile, run make install, and bam! It's installed. Sounds easy. But how the heck do I get all the dependencies installed? Manually? Right. That's how DarwinPorts fit in. It is a FreeBSD-like package manager for OS X with quite a huge library of packages (not as huge as Debian repository though, Debian repo easily has 13,000+ packages).

Well, so are there reasons for OS X users to switch to Linux? Almost none. But sure, even for a die-hard OS X user like me, there are perks in using Linux too:

• Linux has this awesome feature where you can just hover your mouse over to another window for it to gain focus, instead of clicking. This feature is awesome if you can touch type and your screen is small. The benefit is that while the window gains focus, it's not brought up to the top. So I could hover over to a half-visible text editor and type what I saw in my webcast while still having the webcast covering almost the entire screen. Now that's one bad-ass feature.


• Compiz Fusion is really pretty. Compiz basically uses your usually unused 3D graphic card to do cool stuffs with your Desktop, e.g. wobbly windows when you drag them, accelerated window transparency, and a lot of other effects.


• Speed: Linux is fast. Period. If it's not fast enough, recompile your kernel and removes all the useless modules (compile as many parts of the kernel as built-in and not as modules). Recompile everything! You can literally recompile everything optimized to your CPU, thus squeezing every ounce of performance you can get from your PC. (Or use Gentoo Linux, whose emerge tool will automatically compile whatever package you're installing; alternatively Debian-based distros can use apt to compile from source, Arch has Arch Build System—pretty similar to FreeBSD ports.)


• It's free and free. Yeah sure. I know the pain of saving enough money to actually get a Mac. Free is good. (Quiz: why did I say "free and free", isn't it redundant?)

Al'right. Now we have one post for Linux and another for OS X. Now who will be the one coming up with a post for Windows? (smirk d: oops)

Well, all right, I have to work tomorrow, so I shall end here. This post is by no means comprehensive, there is no mention of Spotlight, or Expose, or XCode, or Cover Flow, or . . . (ellipsis indicating I'm running out of idea but refusing to admit)

Btw, in case you are wondering what are those (:, ):, d:, etc, they are reverse emoticons. I don't like MSN and GTalk trying to convert every smileys I type into pictures, so I started reversing them. I'm so used to reversing them that I just use it all the time now.

For reading 'til the end, doomo arigato gozaimasu. Ja mata ne.

- Chris