Re: [ccp4bb]: OSX: A great Linux alternative. But Stereo?

[Kevin Cowtan <cowtan@ysbl.york.ac.uk>]

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On Friday 26 Apr 2002 7:59 pm, DeLano, Warren wrote:
>    - full desktop environment (Office, IE, & other key apps)

Only one? KDE and Gnome are both so good I waver between them. Office and IE 
under Wine/codeweavers, but I never need it: Konqueror and Mozilla both offer 
better configurability in terms of turning off web features you don't want. 
In Konqueror I can translate web pages, validate web pages, change my browser 
ID, switch rendering engines, zoom, and control cookies and pop-up windows on 
a per-site basis. Mozilla does much of this and tabbed browsing.

OpenOffice or Office - I use the former, but Crossover or Win4Lin can run the 
latter.

>    - full unix environment (trivial porting)

More linux than BSD apps. I install everything when installing RedHat, and I 
only need to add 2 things: tkdiff and OpenOffice. Who needs upgrades or 
system backups? If my HD were wiped, it would take me <60mins to rebuild from 
scratch. (I actually do this in preference to upgrading the OS, since it is 
so easy.)

Plus you get software raid, and ext3 simulates full data+metadata journalling 
without the overhead. (Or reiserfs has other benefits).

>    - defined/homogenous platform (less diversity/less hassles)

Less choice, higher prices. I can keep my home machine cutting edge for 
$300/yr.

>    - almost no driver/hardware issues (the plague of Linux)

Because I buy the latest motherboards, I generally don't get sound until the 
next RH release, unless I go and grab the driver off the web. Apart from 
sound, everything has been automatically configured on every Linux box I've 
had for the last 2 years...

>    - fast & reliable accelerated graphics (OpenGL)

..... including OpenGL.

>    - good number crunching performance on recent G4s

2xAthlonMP 1600, 2GB ram, RAID, under $1500, beat all comers up to an 8 node 
cluster in every price range here for the CHARM benchmarks a few months back. 
I'm still waiting to try the SMT on the new P4 Xeon.

And most importantly of all, it is a wholely non-proprietary solution. I 
don't trust Microsoft with a single bit of my data, and Apple is still over 
BillG's barrel for office.

-- 
Department of Chemistry, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD