the way I read this is that it is less about not having control over your data (pictures and music?) less about freedom and software and more about just wanting a piece of portable hardware that works for simple tasks. I can sympathize with you if that's the case; It seems like every laptop I've bought for the purpose of running Linux has been a hassle and I don't enjoy the tinkering as much as I used to. I haven't given in yet though.
I mortgaged my future with a Mac
31–40 of 131 posts
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#32Sitting here, still using a Mac as a dev/everything machine. I know Lion is supposed to suck and all, but my 2010 MBA still gets insane battery life under OS X, the tool chain is top-notch (Clang, LLVM, etc), there have been a ton of improvements under the hood (TLS support being a big one), and I actually appreciate full-screen XCode or Emacs given the 13" screen. Even Xcode seems to, in 4.6, be getting back to the…
"Apple doesn't care about the Mac"
There are two different arguments here:
1) Apple axed xserve and basically made it a risk to depend on osx servers (they may decide to axe the mac pro without warning). This is a legitimate argument.
2) The OS feels more consumer based and buggy. I think osx coasted on the lack of popularity for years (if you are writing malware, are you going to target a small mac population or the wide windows population?) and the market penetration is improving. So what we are seeing now is the world adjusting to the idea that osx is a more popular OS.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS: sell your soul to Apple. Android: sell your soul to Google. The thing is, I already did the second one to a far greater degree than most people ever do. I'm not about to repeat it.
> Android: sell your soul to Google. Nobody is forcing you to use Google apps on an Android device. If the market decides that the Google experience is subpar, they will be replaced. This has already sort of happened with the Kindle Fire. It forced Google to respond with a better device (the Nexus 7).
> If the market decides that the Google experience is subpar, they will be replaced.
"The market" has done no such thing (the atrocious Kindle Fires excepted) so if you have a beef with the "Google experience" (I personally don't) you're pretty much screwed.
There are no good, Google-free options for Android. I don't find that to be a problem but I can understand why others would.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#34I'm not sure I understand the specific complaints in the post. The metadata in iTunes is stored in a standard way, attached to the audio files themselves. All the playlists, repeated track infromation, etc, is stored in an XML file with simple structure. This should be as easy to convert as if the music database had been stored anywhere else. Similarly, for iPhoto, much of the metadata is attached to the photos thems…
"Storing data in any application results in some restrictions [...]"
- I think you understand her point pretty well.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#35Given the choice between having all my files stolen and my credit destroyed by russian hackers and having to eventually figure out how to get my photos out from iPhoto, I'll choose the latter any day.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#36But, I'm stuck. All of my music is in iTunes, having been re-imported from the original CDs over a period of time. I can just re-rip all of it on my Linux box, but that's going to suck. Or, I can try to grovel around in their grungy database and try to make sense of it and "export" things, but I'm sure that will be even worse.
You'll find all of your music neatly organized here: /Users/username/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Music
Another problem is going to be iPhoto. I've cropped, rotated, geotagged, sharpened, level-adjusted, and done countless other things to my thousands of pictures. They all also live in some database which is effectively opaque. While there's probably some way to get it out, it will be far from trivial.
It's pretty trivial:
http://macs.about.com/od/appleconsumersoftware/ss/Iphoto-Lib...
You can export the original or current versions, as well as converting to JPEG, TIFF, or PNG, retaining location info, metadata, etc (depending on the chosen format). Exported photos can be assigned filenames by title, original filename, sequence, or album name with number.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#37Sometimes when you're down everything looks like a huge mountain to climb. I'm all for relinuxing! The itunes is just a tree of mp3's now, so it'll be super easy to import into whatever. Best way to take control of your phone (no mater the brand) is to jailbreak it. Poof, your mortgage is paid off.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#38I am at a point where a computer is an appliance to me. The requirements while I develop a workflow try to keep it that way. There is of course some limit to this, but given the options I try my best.
The often discussed but rarely given the credit it deserves in such discussions value in linux/open source software is the, well, openness.
As I just mentioned in one other post, I loved Ubuntu until 10.10. With Unity, they pulled the rug from under me. It became buggy even after choosing Gnome-Classic etc to be used with latter versions.
But I had tens of options to choose from without affecting my workflow too much. Colleagues have since moved to Linux Mint without as much as a 'I miss this from Ubuntu..' and I have moved to Lubuntu.
There's Arch and Slackware if you know what you're doing.
None of these make you wonder what tomorrow will bring and if it does bring something you don't like, you're not cornered. You can choose what to do.
I mean this is the simplest most obvious advantage of choosing Linux. Some people choose to give in to the walled garden for the seamless experience, but you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
And that's really okay, just choose what works for you best.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#39I'm not sure I understand the specific complaints in the post. The metadata in iTunes is stored in a standard way, attached to the audio files themselves. All the playlists, repeated track infromation, etc, is stored in an XML file with simple structure. This should be as easy to convert as if the music database had been stored anywhere else. Similarly, for iPhoto, much of the metadata is attached to the photos thems…
"Storing data in any application results in some restrictions [...]" - I think you understand her point pretty well.
No, because the author mentioned that it's some kind of Mac problem. You'd have the exact same problems switching from "free" software running on Linux.
Really, I think the article should have been titled: I am Now Dependent on Modern Technology and Don't Like the Alternative
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#40Sitting here, still using a Mac as a dev/everything machine. I know Lion is supposed to suck and all, but my 2010 MBA still gets insane battery life under OS X, the tool chain is top-notch (Clang, LLVM, etc), there have been a ton of improvements under the hood (TLS support being a big one), and I actually appreciate full-screen XCode or Emacs given the 13" screen. Even Xcode seems to, in 4.6, be getting back to the…
I've never managed to get the advertised battery life out of an MBA, even when straight out of the box. What kind of battery life are you getting? What is your battery cycle count?