That is very strange. You say you are a Linux nerd yet you prefer Win7 over OSX. Most Linux users I know prefer OSX over W7.
Every Unix (old school BSD/Solaris/AIX/Irix) system admins I know all use Macbook Pros.
You have the ability to run Photoshop/Office and for power users, they can drop into a terminal and run Python, SSH, do X11 forwarding, compile GNU and have mac ports. Mac Ports is the equivalent of using Ubuntu's apt-get.
There is zero learning curve between Ubuntu 10.10 and Snow Leopard especially for people who grew up and live/breath UNIX.
If Ubuntu had Photoshop, Office, Dreamweaver, Final Cut Pro, etc, more people would be using it. I use all the OSes but OSX is the perfect balance. I run 3 Ubuntu boxes at home and even my wife uses Ubuntu on her laptop 100% fulltime but the Macs always get more attention. My son runs QITMO and LinuxKidx (custom Linux distro for children under 5).
I have faster quad core boxes with 24GB of RAM running Ubuntu in my living room but my choice will always be a Core Duo MacBook w/ 4GB RAM.
Do you know Ubuntu has more in common with OSX than Windows 7? Do you know OSX is 100% Unix 03 certified from the opengroup (
Register of Open Branded Products).
It isn't a "unix-like", *nix derive OSX. It is the real deal with posix and the ability to compile any Unix Apps. Installing mac-ports is like running apt-get install on Ubuntu.
I find Windows 7 very frustrating because I *do come from a UNIX background*.
I like the fact I can run OSX headless with just the terminal. You can SSH in, SCP your files, compile, restart dameon processes, make cron jobs, analyze logs,etc..
Like UBUNTU, you can drop into a shell, run scp, mount a NFS volume, do X11 forwarding all natively straight out of the box.
No need to install Cygwin, Putty or any other 3rd party hacks like you do on Windows 7 to talk to other Unix machines.
You can compile every one of your fav Ubuntu apps or use a port repository. Heck, you can launch full GNOME with Nautilus on OSX natively (without virtualization or dual booting).
I use Ubuntu quiet a bit so I speak from experience. We run customized tweaked 2.6 kernel from the Canonical source tree. Our servers run heavily modified Ubuntu and a custom Apache builds.
I manage a farm about 40 Linux/Unix servers from a Mac.
When I first started my UNIX career, I was an NT adminstrator. I had install a bunch of ported apps to Windows and they didn't work. I remember paying $600 for an X11 client and another $300 for a NFS client to talk to a Solaris box. Sure, it has changed now but with OSX, you don't have any of that nonsense. Many of the open-source stuff comes out of the box. You can even kill the OSX gui/Aqua and run GNOME/Nautiliys natively without reboot or virtualization on a mac.
There were custom shell scripts and you can't really run them on Windows. For example, there are ports like ImageMagick, Nmap, ethereal,etc but many of them wrap them around a Windows GUI. Then whatever scripts you wrote for Windows had to be re-written for other OSes.
Like today, I needed a script to search the contents of a hundred PDF files and import the text into mySQL. I also used Ghostscript and PHP to make jpeg thumbnails over 1200 pdf files.
With the mac, I compiled a xpdf, ghostscript and wrote a Python script to handle the import. I had a batch job that then rsynched the files to a Linux server.
I could not every imagine using Windows for it. My shell scripts on the mac transfers over to Linux with a few environment variable changes like /opt/bin to /usr/bin and thats about it.
You are entitled to your OS preference but I just find it odd that you claim to be a Linux nerd yet prefer Win7 over OSX.
. And since i only play OpenArena and it's opensource and runs on Linux, windows, and mac i really have no need for windows.
