Linux Fans Embrace MacBooks
Whether you attended this weekend’s Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) or another recent open source event, one trend is clear: Linux advocates certainly love their Apple MacBooks.
The VAR Guy noticed a ton of Apple MacBooks during last year’s UbuntuLive in Portland, Oregon (here are 50 observations from that event). And this past weekend, a few sharp-eyed bloggers mentioned that there was a preponderance of MacBooks at the Southern California Linux Expo.
So what’s happening here? Conventional wisdom — suggesting that open source advocates are cheap geeks who don’t want to pay for technology — is just plain wrong. On the contrary, it seems as if the open source movement is more about quality than price. And Apple’s commitment to quality, it seems, is enough for open source folks to overlook Steve Jobs’ penchant for building closed, proprietary systems.
Yes, even The VAR Guy has a mix of proprietary systems (MacBook, Mac OS X, Windows XP) and open source (specifically, Ubuntu Linux).
Elsewhere at SCALE, Mozilla evangelist and board member Chris Blizzard gave a presentation on the future of Firefox. You can find a recap at Ars Technica.
Other coverage from the SCALE event:
I would venture a guess that the open source movement is about choice and alternatives. Even though the Mac is a closed proprietary system, ironically it still represents a choice to the Microsoft platform and mentality.
If you have already made a decision to abandon the mainstream Windows world and look for alternatives, choosing a Mac in addition to your favorite flavor of Linux seems a natural result.
Most people don’t eat banana peels, apple cores, or watermelon rinds or seeds.
The Macs are very nice machines. And there doesn’t appear to be much of a premium for the spotty preinstalled OS and stuff.
So just dump the software you find hard to swallow, but keep the well engineered hardware.
That said, I still run Tiger, and the main thing preventing me from just putting Debian or Ubuntu are a few apps where I would like to keep it active, but haven’t been able to get the repartitoner to work, and haven’t had time to do a comprehensive backup.
Multibooting MacOS X and Linux is well worth the effort. We’ve set up our Macs here (back to the G4 Macs) dual-booting with Ubuntu.
Be sure to check http://www.opensourcemag.org
“… more about quality than price.”
If that was the case, they’d all be using Thinkpads. To me it indicates that Geeks are just as vain as the rest of the population.
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Roger: Funny you should mention ThinkPads. I respect them. But I just heard from a major VAR that’s moving from ThinkPads to MacBooks because they were tired of Windows Vista and XP slowing down their hardware.
I sold my MacBook. The hardware is great. I was real excite when Jobs cam back and revitalized the company but it’s true that Mac products have the worse security of any computer on the planet… period. After poking around a bit, I discovered that the hardware (well the iSight and the graphic card and network card) can be accessed transparently thorough Open Firmware. Buy a mac if you support domestic spying.
[…] many of the Linux expos/conventions/meetings/whatever people point out that there seem to be a lot of Macs. So the first question is why do Linux people buy Macs? While, I think few people would dispute […]
Dirk Gentely: All Macs arrive with their hardware and software unprotected by a password. Of course, just like Linux, when you install or first get a new machine you are prompted to set up a user for yourself as well as a (secure) password.
Most new users know nothing about open firmware. That comes with no password as expected. However, you should note that you can password protect your open firmware. Some experts say its a necessity. So, if you want, please set an Open Firmware pass word. Use google and search parameters “set open firmware password” and you will get 186,000 possible links. Most of the top 10 give accurate information.
I found something unexpected to! Apple provides a utility application to help users set a password, this link is :
For those who do not know this, setting an open firmware password enables you to prevent evil people from using a Mac Startup CD to start your machine and bypass your own security measures.
Apple products are not quite as insecure as you think they are. Apple is by not means perfect. However, they made the right choice when they chose UNIX and FreeBSD as the starting point for the Open Source kernel.
Hope this helps!
Davidf
Dirk Gentely: All Macs arrive with their hardware and software unprotected by a password. Of course, just like Linux, when you install or first get a new machine you are prompted to set up a user for yourself as well as a (secure) password.
Most new users know nothing about open firmware. That comes with no password as expected. However, you should note that you can password protect your open firmware. Some experts say its a necessity. So, if you want, please set an Open Firmware pass word. Use google and search parameters “set open firmware password” and you will get 186,000 possible links. Most of the top 10 give accurate information.
I found something unexpected to! Apple provides a utility application to help users set a password, this link is : http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/openfirmwarepassword.html
For those who do not know this, setting an open firmware password enables you to prevent evil people from using a Mac Startup CD to start your machine and bypass your own security measures.
Apple products are not quite as insecure as you think they are. Apple is by not means perfect. However, they made the right choice when they chose UNIX and FreeBSD as the starting point for the Open Source kernel.
Hope this helps!
Davidf
“…moving from ThinkPads to MacBooks because they were tired of Windows Vista and XP slowing down their hardware.”
They’re getting rid of the wrong thing 😉 Throw some form of Linux on there and they’ll be good to go. Thinkpads were meant for Linux. They don’t even have a “Windows” key 😉
[…] Linux Fans Embrace MacBooks at SCALE 6x Linux Fans Embrace MacBooks at SCALE 6x (tags: scale6x macbook OSX) […]
re: Open Firmware
Sorry to throw a spanner in the works – but MacBooks don’t have Open Firmware. OF was a Power PC technology. The Macintels use EFI.
Just thought I’d add that into the mix!
RB
at ubuntu live? no surprise, ubuntu folks don’t seem to care a whole lot about non-free proprietary codecs so why would they be any different about their choice of hardware?
at SCALE? i don’t know why. the FOSS conferences i attend tend to have a majority of dell / ibm with a macbook here and there but not dominating.
Regarding Macs versus Thinkpads, at my previous job I had the opportunity to use five successive generations of Thinkpads (replaced for improved performance, not failure; I considered turning the old ones into a cluster :-). I ran Linux on all of them, corporate standard was Win2K and it sucked too much on laptops. Generally speaking I found the hardware quite solid, with one exception. They burned through batteries. 12 months, tops, before the battery was going from full charge to dead in 5 minutes. That’s the worst I ever saw; even my Dells went 18 months.
Now, back with the early Thinkpads and LiIon batteries I could blame that on the new battery technology. But, you know, by the fifth generation it was clear that they weren’t even trying to fix this. I haven’t had a new Thinkpad in a few years now, but the people at work tell me they still chew up batteries. That’s really too bad, because otherwise they’re terrific.
In 2001 I bought my wife a Ti Powerbook. She used it for 4 years and the battery was still working reasonably well (about 2 hours at a charge). At 6 years, now used by a relative, it’s dead. In 2002 I bought a 12″ Powerbook. I used it for 4 years without ever replacing the battery and it still worked pretty well. (Still being used by a relative, battery life is much reduced.) It’s too soon to tell how the new laptop batteries will fare, but the oldest is just under 2 years and still pulling almost 3 hours of DVD playing at a time.
Regarding overall hardware reliability, the older G4 series laptops were great. 7 years of daily use without a failure on the Ti Powerbook. 5 years on the 12″ Powerbook, at which point the drive died, but otherwise still going strong. But the newer ones….
The 15″ Powerbook (Nov 2005) has been back for significant service twice — once it got a new mainboard, the other time a new top deck. The Macbook (Apr 2006) has been back for significant service three times. Once for a new top deck, once for a new Airport, and once for a new mainboard. I have a G5 Quad (Nov 2005), too, which lost its optical drive and is under recall for its power supply. Apple has been excellent at honoring their warrantee, and their turnaround times have never exceeded 5 days (real days, not business days). Still, sure wish I didn’t have to do the whole “Genius” Bar thing quite so often. On the upside, the Macbook is a hell of a lot more serviceable than were the G4s and the Quad is a work of art in so many ways, particularly the ease at which you can goof with its insides. (And FAST. OMG fast, it took the 8-core Mac Pro to beat it in compute-intensive tasks.)
So: I’d give the Thinkpads the nod in terms of quality today, but I sure as hell wish they’d work on battery longevity. They’re the worst in the business.
In terms of overall value, though, it’s no contest. The less said about Windows software reliability the better; it is a bear to keep it running between malware, the idiot registry, and disk fragmentation issues (the latter is ridiculous, the technology to avoid that problem has existed since 1985 and has been mainstream for around fifteen years). Data and app migration between hardware is effectively nonexistent. Gah!
If you’re an alternative kind of person Linux — just about any variant — is a huge improvement in basic maintenance. No malware, no fragmentation, easy updates, and while there’s manual effort necessary to migrate data (all the apps being part of the install of course) it’s really trivial (I usually do “(cd ~ ; tar czf – .) | rsh newhost tar -xzf -” or something to that effect). Nice, although there are so many quirks with Linux applications that it places a solid third in terms of usability in my mind.
But the Mac. The software really sets it apart.
It takes second place to Linux in out-of-the-box application support. It’s useful right out of the box for a lot of things but you’ll be hunting down a bunch of add-on applications for sure. Windows is a distant third; out of the box it is pretty much an e-mail and web machine, with moderately decent audio-visual media support. The other bundled apps are pathetic. The Mac’s bundled app mix varies by hardware level; interestingly, the top-end desktops don’t ship with productivity software (I can’t recall if the Macbook Pros do). Consumer-level stuff has them, and they’re pretty darn useful, although they don’t interoperate all that well with Microsoft Office. Audio/Visual support ranges from really good (Garageband!), to good-enough (it’s kind of criminal what they did to iMovie in ’08, it used to be remarkable and now it’s only ok, although that’s still a lot better than either Linux or Windows manages).
Core OS, though, that’s where Apple really nails it. The out-of-the-box security model, even in the default “user is an administrator” mode, is excellent. The root/user separation is always maintained and the management features integrate well with it without undue password prompting (Vista UAC is a huge step forward but it sure does nag the hell out of you) or the need for UNIX/Linux arcanity. The only “urp” out of the box is that administrator accounts can modify the Applications directory. Malware is effectively nonexistent (as it is with Linux). Software update is trivial. Migration between hardware is so good that I almost cried the first time I did it; hook up firewire between the old and new, put the old into target (disk) mode, and the set-up program clones the whole shebang. It’s so seamless that it made me angry with how badly Microsoft botched the job.
Apple nails disk search — it’s blazingly fast (FSEvents is the single best OS enhancement I have seen since the 80s). And while there are some nits with Time Machine (sure would like some more knobs) nobody else is even close out-of-the-box. Apple leveraged the heck out of FSEvents here, too, and made the most transparent incremental backup system EVER. Leopard is worth buying just to get Time Machine. Even major OS upgrades are almost always trivial (my wife does hers, usually, and geek stuff is not her domain).
Generally speaking I don’t care who makes it and I don’t care what other people think about the products I buy. If it gets the job done with a minimum of hassles I’ll use it. On the desktop and laptop Apple’s products are second to none in overall quality. I’ve used Windows, Linux, and Mac OS on my laptop and I’ll take Mac OS thank-you-very-much, even if their hardware is not up to the quality standards of the past. I’ve used all three on the desktop and I’ll take Mac OS there too. On the server I prefer Linux (superb bang-for-the-buck, especially given the application set; very good remote administration as long as you are familiar with UNIX arcana).
For UI development Windows really takes the cake now that they’ve abandoned MFC (gah) in favor of .NET, and that makes it a huge (HUGE) win in business desktop scenarios (a lot less so on the server unfortunately, and God Help You if you use it for anything but web applications). It is also the only real choice in gaming and you just can’t beat the depth of the available software. It’s nice that I no longer have to buy separate systems to get both Mac OS and Windows.
Well, that went pretty much afar from what I intended, and is way longer, but there you have it.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
gt; For UI development Windows really takes the cake
Simply not true. You should try Cocoa and Interface Builder on the Mac. The best designed user-interface developing solution on any platform. That’s why all the applications in Mac OS X look so nice.
Eric
[…] continue to transform open source from a fringe solution into a mainstream option. Heck, even some Mac users are making the Linux move. In the ultimate irony, Windows may reach the masses, but Linux may be more inclusive when it comes […]
[…] continue to transform open source from a fringe solution into a mainstream option. Heck, even some Mac users are making the Linux move. In the ultimate irony, Windows may reach the masses, but Linux may be more inclusive when it comes […]
Thanks for the tip Davidf, now my mac is secure.