[lbo-talk] Desktop Publishing for people who don't know what they are doing

[Fernando Cassia]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Andy <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Macs are taking over the scientific desktop market, and now that I
> have one it's easy to see why -- it's a decent gui that works pretty
> seamlessly with the unix backend, and you have all your favorite unix
> tools with 40 years of development behind them available.  Linux still
> is the choice for heavy lifting, though.

I like your choice of words... "Linux still is". Yeah right, and will
continue to be.

If you want Unix why not go FreeBSD or NetBSD?. FreeBSD and NetBSD, as
far as I know, have both KDE and Gnome, both very mature and
user-friendly desktop environments which have evolved and were
perfected over the last 14+ years on all *x platforms (BSD, Linux,
Solaris Unix), plus all the usual open source applicatons we´ve come
to rely on: Firefox web browser, Thunderbird e-mail, OpenOffice, K3B
for CD/DVD burning, VLC as media player, etc.

Plus it comes without the attached strings that hook you up to the
Apple money-sucking machine.

Oh, wait, there´s more:

------
Mach, which Apple has adopted for Mac OS X, puts anything that
accesses hardware into the microkernel. Under Mach's philosophy,
XFree86 still shouldn't be a user process. (...). This arrangement is
a good business argument for Apple funding mkLinux: all the drivers
for their proprietary hardware, thus much of the code they funded,
stays inside Mach, where it's covered by a more favorable (to them)
license.
------
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6105

Or, you could also go "where the action is at" and run a bleeding-edge
Linux like RedHat´s Fedora.

http://fedoraproject.org/en/features/

Or Ubuntu, for that matter, if you prefer the dumbed-down,
hand-holding experience. There´s no shortage of scientific software on
Linux... including Maple.

Just my $0.02
FC