I have a confession. Even after discovering the joys of Unix, open source and the free software movement ala Richard Stallman, I still hanker after owning yet another Apple Macintosh.
I already have two Apples, as well as a range of Apple peripherals, not to mention the two laptops (both Linux), one Widows machine (for my better half) and a FreeBSD server. Frankly there isn`t really any room left to accommodate another piece of computing history but I find myself increasingly having to fight off the demon urging me to buy another, brand new Mac OSX machine.
For a long time the urge to buy a new Mac was based on my previous experience with Apple`s fine machines and operating system. They were, and still are, the simplest of computers to use while still being the hands-down leaders in the desktop publishing (DTP) and graphics market. Nothing in the world would convince me to produce a magazine on anything less than a Mac. It simply doesn`t make sense.
Apple`s underlying Unix base makes it very attractive to technical users.
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
My hankering is increasingly being led by the fact that a substantial part of the new Mac OSX operating system is on a Unix base and a fair portion of the development has been done in a manner akin to open source, although I doubt Free Software Foundation founder and hardliner Richard Stallman would have approved.
Nevertheless, what Apple has done with OSX is nothing short of fantastic. Working with a high-end Unix base, Apple planned to create the prettiest face possible for the system and, by all accounts, succeeded.
Yet underneath the pretty mask, the new Mac OS is Unix. It has the features of a Unix box and in command line mode can be controlled exactly like one. Which raises an interesting possibility. If Mac OSX is Unix then there is no reason that, with a little tweaking, most Unix and Linux applications couldn`t be run on an OSX box. In fact, there are already a number of projects looking at doing exactly this.
The moment this is achieved a world of applications never before seen on an Apple opens up. Not one or two news applications but literally tens of thousands. The open source world has been growing quickly in the past few years and today the Internet is filled with applications just waiting to be ported to OSX.
It is highly likely that by year-end I`ll be running my Evolution mail and calendaring client on a Mac OSX box along with the likes of OpenOffice, AbiWord and Mozilla. I`ll still be able to run Photoshop, the likes of which the open source world has not been able to replicate to date (Gimp is a good start but still has a way to go).
So, as I move out into the freelancer world in the coming months, I confess that my heart is set on finding a lot of DTP jobs so that I can justify buying myself a brand new Mac.
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