OS X vs Linux article

[cwwgateway]

I was reading the weekly distrowatch letter, and one of the articles was http://batsov.com/articles/2012/09/09/f ... ear-later/. It talked about his experience coming from linux to os x (and then using os x for a year). I give the author credit because he didn't say linux was dead, he gave both pros and cons of mac os x, and he included the epilogue which basically says that he's not trying to force his opinion on you. Many of the points he made were interesting, and here are my thoughts on what he said (since I was actually using a mac a lot this weekend):

The Desktop - The Mac OS X desktop is extremely polished, although I have problems with the window buttons (maximize doesn't maximize, the x kind of closes it but not quite - to do it completely you need command+q). While I think linux is improving, OS X is much more user friendly and its default is much more polished. I think that the customization feature of linux desktops shouldn't be overlooked, though (if you tinker enough, you can have a very beautiful desktop under linux that easily beets os x).

OS X apps - It has office apps, which are probably fairly superior to libreoffice (although they aren't free), and apple media apps are very high quality, and there are probably other apps that are important that linux doesn't have (although they can be both proprietary and expensive).

Hardware Compatibility - I think that this isn't really a good example, because apple designs its own hardware (try running os x on a random pc and see how well it's supported). If you compare linux pre-installed computers to mac pre-installed computers, hardware compatibility is comparable.

Stability - I agree to an extent, but linux pcs are very stable if you don't change too much and your hardware's compatible.

Default apps - I think os x is still pretty good (besides maybe safari) when it comes to default apps. The one shorfall is it doesn't come with any real office apps by default.

Mac App Store - "The Linux distro package management is definitely infinitely better"

The special keys - I strongly agree with the author - the changing of the keys is just very annoying.

Other thoughts:
Upgrading Hardware - OS X forces you to upgrade your hardware every few years (whereas 12 year old computers can run linux fairly well). Even the Mid 2010 Macbook I was working on this weekend was kind of sluggish on Lion (when running multiple programs and launching programs).

Cost - Macintosh computers aren't cheap, and the base configurations are often very bad for the price. On top of this, iWork or Office for Mac are very expensive compared to LibreOffice.

User Friendliness - I honestly think that Linux (especially with a traditional DE) is easier to go to from Windows that OS X is. The basics are still the same - a taskbar, a menu (if you use MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce, or LXDE). If you install an LTS version, there aren't many more problems than OS X has.

I'd like to hear other people's thoughts, as this was (at least to me) thought provoking.