[Gametes]

OS X (the most modern, powerful, beautiful, easy to use OS ever developed): 129$ (129 if upgrading)

Windows 98 (a performance-permanently-degrades-over-time so-called-multitasking totally idosyncratic schizophrenic OS that no one enjoys using, but even if all this were false it still doesn't touch Darwin or Aqua): 209$ (109 if upgrading)
Windows 2000 (a pretty good OS. Basically the mediocre stuff that ms puts out to directly compete with great products like X. We've seen it a billion times.): 319$ (as low as 219 if upgrading)
Windows ME (the most blatant non-upgrade just-for-getting-some-dough crappy (has anyone gotten this to work yet? not according to c-net.) OS ever): 209$ (109 if upgrading)

And mind you, for those upgrade prices you'd have had to have already bought at least 1 prior 200$ TOTAL RIPOFF from MS.

200 or 300 dollars for that crap! Jesus!
OS X is a steal! It's 200 dollars less than its actual competitor! I think Apple ought to charge 400 dollars for X, except then I wouldn't buy it.
I never want to read another complaint about the oh-so-high price tag of OS X like I did here.

[mitchell_pgh]

I'm rather sure you aren't going to hear all that many Mac users complain... This is especially true considering upgrading from 9.02 to 9.1 is 100 bucks <that's what I consider the rip-off!!!>

[mindwaves]

Umm, its 19.99 for the CD or free if you want to download.

[Gametes]

Actually, upgrading to 9.1 is free. Buying the cd is 20$.

[spicyjeff]

This is especially true considering upgrading from 9.02 to 9.1 is 100 bucks <that's what I consider the rip-off!!!>

What?!? You can download the 9.1 updater for free. Sure its big but it can be done, I have done so on a T1, cable and even over a 56k line. And if you own any version of 9.0.x you can get the CD for $19.95. Of course if you are upgrading from an 8.x version of course it is going to be $99 since you are getting the full upgrade and about 2-3 years worth of Apple software development.

[Misha]

Agreed, Gametes... from the MacCentral article:

All customers interviewed by MacCentral were pleased with the pricing of the new products, based on their features, but some balked at the $129 price tag for Mac OS X, which will be released in its final form on Sat., March 24.

"I was hoping it was going to be closer to $100," said Pamela Hatcher of Las Vegas. "But maybe I'm just cheaper than some. I'm trying to remember that it's completely new and featured packed."

Obviously Pamela doesn't remember than Mac OS 8.5 was $120 or $130 at launch (though it came with a $20 rebate)... She is cheaper than some, or rather, most everyone. To be happy with spending $1700-$3500 on a new system but then angry over $20 is just plain stupid.

[Gametes]

Well, what I'm implicitly reeling about is the cost of windows.

Why do poeple shell over that kind of cash for a crappy product? 200$ for a peice of crap? Why hasn't ms gone under?

[Misha]

I believe the answer to your question lies in a concept known as "monopoly"...

[mindwaves]

Originally posted by Gametes:
Actually, upgrading to 9.1 is free. Buying the cd is 20$.

Sorry, that is what I meant.

[Gametes]

no mindwaves, I am sorry: I knew what you meant, but my post was in reply to the same one as yours; we were writing simultaneously .

[mr_sonicblue]

Posted by Misha:
I believe the answer to your question lies in a concept known as "monopoly"...

Exactly right. I personally use a raster edit that has always had more features than Photoshop, but costs 1/6 as much. Why do people pay so much for Photoshop?

1) Because it has more of the market (monopoly)
2) It costs more, so it must be better (same with Mhz on processors)
3) (The only valid point) It is on the Mac and PC platforms.

I personally thought OS X would cost less than $129 ($99?) but that wasn't taking anything into consideration except what I'd *like* to pay. $129 is a *great* price.

------------------
-Eric Schneider (SonicBlue)

[This message has been edited by mr_sonicblue (edited 01-15-2001).]

[NeoMac]

Come Saturday, March 24th, 12:00am...

I will GLADLY give Apple $129 for OS X

..and $10.32 to the State of New York.

$10?! Forget it, I'll get it from Outpost.com.

[Sven G]

Actually, Linux has a "price" of $/�/�/... 0.00!

When will Mac OS and Windows have such an advanced feature? In year 3000...?!?

[rm-rf /etc]

quote:
Actually, Linux has a "price" of $/�/�/... 0.00!
------
Of course, the usual caveat applies: 'Linux is free only if your time is worth nothing' ... Repeat after me,' Linux is free only if...'

[Sven G]

Of course, if you think that "time is money" there is something right in that - Linux requires quite a lot of time and - even more! - of interest...

But in the 21. century, time just shouldn't be money any more - it should just be the *pleasure* of actively discovering new things, etc. etc.

Were it for me, everything would be free - of course, if people were responsible enough to be able to self-manage such a freedom in a technologically *and* humanistically advanced society (regrettably, somewhat an utopia in today's context, I'm afraid, unless people consciously adopt a kind of "libertarian municipalism" federalism - see some modern anarchist tendencies, for example Goodman, Bookchin and Chomsky).

Sofar, UNIX (and then Linux, of course) appears to be the most collaborative and freedom-oriented OS: Mac OS X, being based on UNIX-BSD, will - sooner or later - be fully open source, and, I hope, also free software (even if this perhaps requires that also Windows will have to go in the same direction).

[crayz]

Frankly, and I'll duck after saying this, I think OS X *is* too expensive. First of all, Apple should give a rebate to anyone who's bought a computer since Fall '99, the time when OS X was supposed to be out(I know this wouldn't really be possible, but they could just lower the price instead). Secondly, the more people Apple can convince to upgrade, the more people there are demanding Carbon and Cocoa apps, which is good for Mac users in general and good for Apple. Thirdly: it's just too much. Most people(including me) would find that to be a lot of money to pay, even for such a significant upgrade.

Hopefully being a student dev I won't have to pay a dime. Still, I wish Apple would lower the price to $99 or even $89.

[mr_sonicblue]

Posted by crayz:
Still, I wish Apple would lower the price to $99 or even $89.

What about $50.....$40.....$20.........$0.....NO, I GOT IT! Apple will *pay* you $999 just to use it! I can live with that.

Seriously, though. If I remember right, a license of Sharity costs $99. $99! All it does is mount CIFS shares! All software is overinflated if you think $129 is too much for a very advanced OS.

------------------
-Eric Schneider (SonicBlue)

[mindwaves]

I truthfully do not mind paying $129 for such a radical upgrade that is sure to create a revolution in the world(not just the computing world) but since I am a studnt I get about half off or about $65 which makes it even better.

[Spheric Harlot]

I have no gripes with OS X's $129 price tag - plus ten or fifteen percent Apple Europe Bonus Price Increase, plus the sixteen percent sales tax we get on everything over here that'll be about $160.

I would like to see some sort of a rebate or discount for PB customers, though - after all, Apple themselves will have us believe we've made a significant difference to the quality of the final product. (Anybody count how many times Steve Jobs thanked us in his Keynote?)

In addition, Apple has sold about ten times the number of Public Beta copies than they were expecting, which the original price of $29.95 was geared towards. They could (and probably would) have made it cheaper had they known they'd sell so many.

So it'd be a nice gesture if there were some sort of rebate.

On the other hand, $129 *is* a steal considering what we're getting, so I wouldn't be too miffed.

But it would certainly help convince a few more Linux-heads to try it out.

-chris.

I was hoping for $99, but considering what the public beta cost I'm not surprised at OS X's cost...nor am I going to "balk" at paying that much for it! It's the best consumer OS EVER, I'll be damned if I'm going to go cheap and whine about $130. Although since I'm a student I'm hoping for a student discount (Apple needs to get education sales back, right? What better way than by giving ME a huge discount on OS X!)

I feel bad for the public beta owners, I think they should get a $30 rebate on OS X. Aside from that, its a steal compared to windows crap. I knew windows was overpriced, but damn, those prices at the top of this thread are insane! People willingly pay that much for CRAP and they like it!

BTW, does anyone have a link that explains why Windows disintigrates over time and loses performance? I think I remember it having something to do with a system registry, nothing more. I need the info so I can rag on some windows dorks at work. Some idiot was blabbering on about "why would anyone buy a powerbook!", because its $700 more than a PC laptop that's "200MHz faster" (her words, not mine).

[Geobunny]

In the UK, �89 + VAT @ 17.5% = �104.58! Umm, students definitely don't have that sort of money just lying around, take 30 quid off or make it �89 incl. VAT and I'll buy it. I know it's revolutionary and all, but...

Anyway, I may not even do that, I'm thinking about getting a new computer soon so maybe I'll just have to wait 'til I've got enough money to buy a laptop before getting OSX. By which time they'll be preloading it anyway!

The reason windoze is so expensive I think, has something to do with piracy. Unfortunately, it's a chicken and egg situation which very quickly gets out of control: software is too expensive for some people, so they pirate it. Piracy costs software houses money, so they raise software prices which puts it out of reach of some other people....etc.etc.etc.

Let's hope Apple doesn't fall into this nasty spiral.

------------------
Shh! Be vewy, vewy qwiewet! I'm hunting wuntime ewwors

[strobe]

Originally posted by Sven G:
Actually, Linux has a "price" of $/�/�/... 0.00!

When will Mac OS and Windows have such an advanced feature? In year 3000...?!?

Linux is worth less than $0

[strobe]

I was expecting OS X to cost $300.

You people are unrealistic, $99? sheesh

Apple has hired expensive software engineers for YEARS to get OS X on the shelf.

Fact is OS development is always subsidized so you're fooled into thinking $100 covers the cost of development. Soplaris and IRIX are subsidized by hardware sales while Windows is subsidized by Office and tech support sales (and licensing). Apple is betting the farm that OS X = hardware sales.

Personally I would rather pay $500 and have my choice of hardware, but you people are too brainwashed for that marketing strategy to work (that and piracy).

[Spheric Harlot]

strobe,

Get a grip on yourself! I have no idea what your last two posts add to this thread other than the valid point that OS sales are subsidized.

Everything else is just a barrage of inanity and insult. If you have so much anger on your mind, get rid of it elsewhere. Go pound a mattress.

Jerk.

-chris.

[Spheric Harlot]

[This message has been edited by Spheric Harlot (edited 01-16-2001).]

[crayz]

Yeah strobe, Apple can sell it for whatever they want, but if they priced it at $300 no one would buy it. I doubt most users have done the *free* upgrade Apple offers(8.5-8.6, 9-9.1, etc.). They are not going to care what it costs Apple to develop this, $300 is way too much.

I mean, there's obviously no way Apple can sell this for a price that will make up for the R&D. But so what? They make their money on hardware anyway. And if they price this too high and not enough people buy it and key apps don't get carbonized, Apple is screwed. So really Apple should focus on making sure that every single person with a G3/G4 gets this upgrade. Frankly if I ran Apple I'd charge only enough to cover the costs of the CD burning and packaging. Maybe since the PB was $30 I'd charge $30, but I think $10 or whatever they can get it to would be better.

When OS X 2.0 comes out with cool new interface features and speed upgrades that people want, fine, charge $100 or $130. But it is in Apple's best interest to have the most pressure possible on devs to carbonize, and that means having all G3/G4 Macs running OS X.

Again, I'll probably get this for free either way, so it's not like I'm overly biased.

[Sven G]

Originally posted by strobe:
Linux is worth less than $0

If that were true, then the same would apply also to Mac OS X, as it shares some major UNIX foundations with Linux: one then comes to the conclusion that you don't like OS X, as you don't like Linux...

Here we are again: Apple is God, the others are poor idiots, if not worse.

Being "too addicted"(way too frequent in all Mac forums I've seen!) is a rather enormous contradiction for a "Think Different" platform - thinking different should mean first of all to be tolerant and open-minded!!!

[mr_sonicblue]

Posted by strobe:
Linux is worth less than $0

Linux is the greatest tool I've ever used in my days of computing. For those willing to learn, it is a remarkably powerful and easy to use OS. I do all my web development on a Linux box from my Windows machine or my PowerBook over a Samba share. It's great!

I'm not *stuck* to my applications, like most people, so I was amazed how much of my normal computing could be done from Linux.

And don't say it's worthless when you *know* it's used on a great many internet servers in the world.

Too bad OS X smokes all of it (Not really, I'll probably always keep around a Linux box to work on)

------------------
-Eric Schneider (SonicBlue)

[mitchell_pgh]

Apple has to be REALLY smart about this. They ARE betting the farm on it, but it's very much a sure thing (unless they blow it by not listening to it's community of end users). OSX is going to legitimize Unix as a viable mainstream operating system! Nice and simple user interface, mainstream applications (Office, Photoshop, etc.), stable, robust, secure, scalable, open source foundation.

$129 is a joke, but:

- if it was $200, just think about how many 9600 users would wait to buy hardware and the OS until Service Pack 1 came out...

- if it was $300, just think about how many people would download it and burn a copy (people were doing it with the PB)

- if it was $400+ just think about how many people would start using Windows! (The traders!)

Anything over a few hundred dollars, and you start to think about buying an eMachine... I always do, minus my PHAT Duel 500!

I THINK THIS IS BOGUS, but could someone check this out... http://www.powermax.com/product/appl...macg4_733.html

They didn't come with a second socket did they???
I can't wait to grab a duel 733Mhz :-P

[QUOTE]Originally posted by mr_sonicblue:
Linux is the greatest tool I've ever used in my days of computing. For those willing to learn, it is a remarkably powerful and easy to use OS.

I want to believe in Linux, I really do. I'm interested in Nautilus and what those guys at Eazel can do to it.

I'm interested enough that I've had 2 goes at installing Linux on my 600 Mhz vanilla box PC.

The first time I tried to do an online install, which got me into a graphical installer and then stalled after half an hour of downloading.

The second time I got each of the Red Hat CDs and sat down one Sunday morning to install it on a freshly formatted hard drive. I had everything I needed: CDs, 110 page install manual, 300 page getting started guide to Linux, a PC with recognizable components. I couldn't possibly fail this time!

1 hour of install time later - the Red Hat installer said it had done everything necessary,including configuring my 2 button mouse as a 3 button mouse because apparently that is what Gnome / KDE likes, and I was ready to re-boot and join the free software revolution.

Only... Nada. Nothing. Zip.

The system just wouldn't boot. It was as if the hard drive hadn't been touched, despite Red Hat having gone through all its processes without an error.

I gave it an hour of tinkering, pdisk, etc and still nothing. I suspect somewhere along the line I need to write some boot blocks to the hard drive.

I'm going to have a third go some time...

Don't get too excited about Linux. Seriously - the only thing it had over the other *nix's out there is that it was free. FreeBSD (which Darwins BSD layer is primarly based on) is a far superior option.

If OS X was based on Linux that would be a backwards step.

[Milio]

I was pleasantly suprised at the $129 price. I thought it would be more.

There's a rule of thumb in business that if people aren't complaining about the price of something, then it's not expensive enough. Finding this threshold is the very key of business practice. Where is the cutoff where people will complain but still buy the product? That is where the maximum profit is.

(Personally I think that Linux is overpriced. )

[waffffffle]

I would just like to join with the other people who believe that Public Beta owners should get a $30 rebate. I mean, if you bought it from the Apple Store, and then buy the final release from the Apple Store that shouldn't be a problem. Plus I'm sure Apple would be very happy to only offer the rebate if you buy the final version from the Apple Store (they make more money.) The Public Beta owners who need the OS right away will wait on line all night at CompUSA. Those of us who can wait will save $30 (a little less w/ shipping) and order it from the Apple Store. I haven't decided if I'm willing to camp out at CompUSA, but I might. It'll be fun ;-).

[mr_sonicblue]

Posted by Mr Scruff:
Don't get too excited about Linux. Seriously - the only thing it had over the other *nix's out there is that it was free. FreeBSD (which Darwins BSD layer is primarly based on) is a far superior option.

If OS X was based on Linux that would be a backwards step.

Gimme some facts other than the price (because Open-Source has proved, if anything, the price isn't everything) before I allow such a judgment to pass.

And to make at least a minute effort to keep things on-topic: OS X RULES!


------------------
-Eric Schneider (SonicBlue)

I was a little disappointed the PB users got no discount =( Oh well 130$ is a steal either way I guess.

[MikeM32]

I don't see the $30.00 difference as meaning a hell of a lot. I'd like to think PB users (like myself) would get a discount or that it would be bundled with a full OS 9.1 for that price.

But if it's not so what? I'll still get it

Mike

I mean, there's obviously no way Apple can sell this for a price that will make up for the R&D. But so what? They make their money on hardware anyway. And if they price this too high and not enough people buy it and key apps don't get carbonized, Apple is screwed. So really Apple should focus on making sure that every single person with a G3/G4 gets this upgrade. Frankly if I ran Apple I'd charge only enough to cover the costs of the CD burning and packaging. Maybe since the PB was $30 I'd charge $30, but I think $10 or whatever they can get it to would be better.

I think that this captures the real point of a Mac OS...Apple does not invest R&D money with the intent that someday the OS will "pay off" with OS sales. The OS isn't a standalone product, it's designed to work as part of the entire mac system. The ultimate goal of OS X, from a business perspective, is to sell as many Macs as possible.

For OS X to sell macs, it must attract new customers. It's fine if someone on a beige G3 decides to plunk down $130 for OS X and upgrade, Apple needs those profits. But the primary revenue generated by OS X will hopefully be SYSTEM sales...hardware sales either to Mac users who are upgrading, or better yet to wintel users unfamiliar with Macs.

Perhaps a good analogy is college tuition. A person doesn't pay for a university degree with the hope that they will get a job and pay for the degree....they get the degree so that they will have more opportunities for employment, and so that they will have greater earning potential. Their hopes are that the college degree will lead to a more prosperous life, with an income many, many times that of the degree.

In the same sense, for Apple's sake and for the sake of Mac OS, I'm hopeful that OS X leads to a more prosperous future for Apple, one with greater market share.

To realize the full potential of OS X, Apple needs to get as many people as possible to use OSX...because ultimately an OS spreads by word of mouth. Commercials get the information out there that its available, but few wintel users will spend thousands of dollars to switch to Apple without talking to many OS X users first.

For these reasons, I believe it is in Apple's interest to initially sell OS X for as little as possible, so that X gets as much market penetration as possible. This will help in creating a "buzz" for OS X that will incite wintel users to make the switch. It will also create more demand for quality cocoa applications.

In this sense, a $30 OS X will be more profitable for Apple than a $130 OS X. Apple's future isn't dependent on the immediate sales revenue of OS X v1.0, but on OS X's market penetration and user satisfaction.

Just my 2 cents and all...I'll pay $130 because I think its worth it...although I might be getting it preinstalled if Apollo actually makes it by MWNY!

I'm sure their marketing people did studies to try to resolve the price.

If you make pies at the local store that cost $1 to make, and sell them for $2, you would pay off the cost for making them and make a profit but volume might be lower than you hoped. If you charge $1.50 you would sell more and still make money, but would you sell twice as many to make the same profit? Add in the fact that you invested $100 to ship the first batch, you have to make up that much beofre you make a net profit. The $2 pies might make up the cost faster per pie, but overall volume might take longer. The low price/higher volume scheme would move more pies, so you would make less back on each pie but overall might make up the cost faster.

The main variable is volume, and predicting volume is what Apple's marketing tems did. The $129 price is the sweetspot where they could make up more moeny per item and get high enough volume to make up the cost faster as well. Less would mean more volume, but not enough to make it up in a reasonable time. More would mean slower sales, so again, the cost would not be made up as fast.

I'm hungry.

[Milio]

Mmmmmmm.......pie.......

[mitchell_pgh]

Actually, the pie scenario doesn't apply. Apple is trying to make money (no news there), but at the same time, they want a large user base so when the next round of revisions come "Service Pace 1" a larger user base will upgrade. Plus, they want everyone that can to migrate...

Thepoint of the pie analogy is that they are balancing getting money back and increasing the user base. They could just just give away the OS, but that would put them further in the hole.

[crayz]

Pies are a bad analogy. A better one might be movie theaters, who might try to keep their costs down, because even though say $7 is the sweet spot on tickets, the more people who come in the theaters, the more people they have buying $3 drinks and popcorn.

Even that analogy isn't right though. The point is, Apple should be trying to get all G3/G4 users to upgrade. It's a chicken or the egg sort of problem. Either a lot of devs have to release great new OS X apps to encourage users to upgrade, or users have to upgrade to encourage devs to make OS X apps. The more likely scenario is the users as the carrot, therefore Apple has to get the users on board.

[Petrie]

Originally posted by Misha:
I believe the answer to your question lies in a concept known as "monopoly"...

...or in the definition for 'lemming.'

Petrie

------------------
The bad new is I have MS. The good news is I don't mean Microsoft.

[me]

>Linux is ... a remarkably powerful and easy to use OS.

I guess I'm a bit late to the thread, but I really must know what drugs Sven and the other Linux user are taking (wow, two actual linux users - a very hard thing to find!) On a side note, while Linux may claim more installs than the Mac OS, the truth is few keep the install or use it. Most of those installs are fed up windows users who fall for the hype, install Linux, try to use it for a week, and couldn't be to return to Windows afterwards.

Lets get a few things straight. Linux is an antiquated OS (compared to Be or OS X) designed by a democracy of hackers in their spare time. I know democracies SOUND good, but lets get real. What we're really talking about is a pure communist ethic, which just won't work in an unideal world. Linux can't innovate, they will only follow others - innovation requires a vision from a leader and people who will follow him (ie Steve Jobs). Just look at their desktops and you'll see for yourself. The GUIs (KDE, Gnome, Afterstep, etc) are all just rip offs of other OSes UIs. The apps try to look as much like their commercial counterparts as possible (because they can't come up with anything better). Ask a Linux user what the last great innovation on the linux platform was...there isn't one.

Free is not a very good price when you spent your time trying to make the machine work rather than getting work (or play) done. Apple is delivering the most robust, stable, feature rich, and flexible OS for desktops, notebooks, and workstations. Put that in perspective of Win2k's retail price of $200 (it can be had OEM for $140) and Mac OS X is quite cheap.

[This message has been edited by me (edited 01-18-2001).]

[mr_sonicblue]

Posted by me:
Lets get a few things straight.

Whomever told you Linux was competing as a home-user OS was pulling your leg. It is meant as one of three things:

1) Enterprise. Even IBM has a lot of resources going into the enterprise side of Linux. Do features like "64GB memory support" or "Multithreaded network layer" make Linux sound like a home-user OS?
2) Hackers / "Power Users". People who love to do lots of code-hacking (the legal kind) and an OS that can take a beat without crashing love Linux. Linux *is* powerful and it *is* stable.
3) Serious Unix-based web developers. Using Windows installs of things like Apache, PHP, and MySQL just aren't as good as under Unix. When I can take an old PC, install RedHat on it, and have my fav web dev tools running on my home network in 15 minutes, I am impressed. I'm sorry that you are not.

Linux would *not* have grown as far as it has if there was not something worthwhile about it.

------------------
-Eric Schneider (SonicBlue)

[Sven G]

Drugs? Only *BSD*!

Well, your vision of leaders - and people rather passively following after - is regrettably true, today - that doesn't, however mean it's right...

I must say that I'm rather astonished at how "conservative" many of you are regarding OS development! (Shouldn't the Mac be *the* "revolutionary" platform?)

Linux is certainly not the most easy to use OS, but it's getting better and better and more usable year after year (see, for example, LinuxPPC and Eazel; I'm also sure that GNOME and KDE will evolve into something more personalized, in the future). An "old" OS?!? Why?

And it's not a matter of "communistic" ethics, here - actually, politics has a great responsibility in the failure of Berkeley-like "hippyism" worldwide (from which many of the early Apple guys presumably grew up; even Microsoft's founders had a hippy look, as I recently saw in a group photo from the late '70s ). If it hadn't been contaminated by stupid political ideologies, the world would be very different, today - and open source/free software tendencies would have been well established since the '70s. Perhaps, the "conservative '80s" "PC revolution" could even have been totally skipped, passing directly from the mainframe computer to the terminal appliance devices which are becoming increasingly important today - who knows?

As always... if people prefer the "ease" of conformism, the world will always need geniuses like Steve and "Woz" - but wouldn't it be better if *everyone* could be such a genius, eventually...?

(As for using Linux, personally I installed it because I was curious about the interface, etc. - not by necessity. But it's indeed a great satisfaction to be successful in installing Linux, even if I had to try about 10 (!) times the first time (Red Hat 6.2 on VPC 3: however it failed because of an extension conflict, so, ironically, it was the *classic* Mac OS being the culprit!) - here, Mac OS X will certainly give the Linux community an illuminating "lesson" as regards increasing the ease of install of Linux distributions!)

[This message has been edited by Sven G (edited 01-19-2001).]

[Gametes]

Ya my roomate has been trying to install linux. Actually, I should say "was", because after about 10 tries it still wouldn't work, and then he'd discover that Linux had raped his windows so that wouldn't boot. Reformat the whole drive, forget about it for a month, then find the linux box again and go "this time it'll work". Repeat.

The reason linux has more installs is because each person tries about a dozen times.

(And don't get me wrong: I totally agree that Linux is usefull. I have on prior occasions argued for the strengths of Linux as a server environment. But still, its UI is gay and weak and using it is a beotch the likes of which no sane person would willingly submit themselves to. I love using Unix on MacOS X, it's fun to play with the CLI and etc, but dicking around trying to get the OS to WORK is not fun: Linux DOES NOT WORK unless you spend days and says messing with the intestines of that cow. I mean, the installer makes you configure your harddrive sectors!! I'm not kidding! It asks you where to put your boot sector and other MUCH MORE CRYPTIC names for like 8 items, and how big each shouold be, and you're sitting there going "I don't even know what this does, much less how big it should be" and then the install doesn't work, and you wonder why.
If you aren't running a server, and you don't enjoy trying to simply get the PC to turn ON, stay away from linux like the plague)

[mitchell_pgh]

Gametes, Now your going to get all these Linux people saying "Mine worked the first time... bla bla bla..."

If you can't instiall the OS, what good is it... It's a hack OS for hackers... Very few companies are seriously going to use Linux...

OSX on the other hand...

[mr_sonicblue]

Posted by Gametes:
If you aren't running a server, and you don't enjoy trying to simply get the PC to turn ON, stay away from linux like the plague)

Funny you should mention that. My friend comes over to use my PC a lot. It still confuses him as to why, when you turn on the monitor, nothing happens.

"No, Darin, you have to push the power button on the tower.....that thing under the desk......no, on your right...........no, that's the CD-ROM eject......down........more.......yes, that's the one.........."

------------------
-Eric Schneider (SonicBlue)