OK, Explain This to me...

[maflynn]

I am all but done with Apple. Seriously. You pay $2000 for a computer and get something that lasts a year or two?

I'm going to sound like a fanboy, but I have to disagree. I have had Macs since system 7 and I've not found any marked decline in quality. My unibody MBP has rock solid and I've not had a problem with it, even though it either stays on days on end, or is used every day.

[tgpuckett]

Maflynn:

I respect your opinion, but I don't see how normal anomalies could strike two people a total of three times.

Is it normal for a MacBook Pro's battery to have lost 35% of it's charge in a year and a half? I suppose so, because right before my warranty expired I had Apple look at the battery and they said it was normal. I don't think a battery that lasted for a little over 3 hours now lasts for about 2 if I'm lucky.

The only things that keep me from moving to Ubuntu over OS X are my iTouch and applications I use for photography. Lightroom, Photoshop, etc aren't replaceable on Linux. Sure, the GIMP is there, but there's nothing as good as Lightroom in terms of cataloging photos and handling RAW images, unless there's something I'm unaware of. Added to the fact that the colors on Ubuntu are very cool compared to my calibrated Mac install, and there's no way to calibrate on Linux that I'm aware of.

[maflynn]

Well, my battery in my current MBP is only a few months but my older laptop the battery was much older and easily held a charge. I also know of a number of people who have not had any problems with batteries.

I've been very happy with the quality of apple products which is why I buy them.

I have also been very impressed with Ubuntu, and like you I've used OSX for photography. I use aperture and right now there's nothing in the linux land that seems to compare to the functionality, and power of that app so I boot into OSX for that. I also like to use some iLife apps (iweb) and also rapidweaver - I have a couple of websites I update from time to time.

Overall though I spend most of my time in ubuntu

[tgpuckett]

I'm not sure I could do that---dual-boot, I mean. I have Ubuntu and OS X installed on my MBP, and although Ubuntu has everything I need except for my photography software and iTunes, I find myself in the OS X side more often than not. I guess it's just force of habit.

[cyberdork33]

Added to the fact that the colors on Ubuntu are very cool compared to my calibrated Mac install, and there's no way to calibrate on Linux that I'm aware of.

There are some very old threads here (or in the archived section of the forum) that showed how to get the calibration profiles from OSX and use them in Ubuntu.

[UbuntnSkor]

Maflynn:

I respect your opinion, but I don't see how normal anomalies could strike two people a total of three times.

Is it normal for a MacBook Pro's battery to have lost 35% of it's charge in a year and a half? I suppose so, because right before my warranty expired I had Apple look at the battery and they said it was normal. I don't think a battery that lasted for a little over 3 hours now lasts for about 2 if I'm lucky.

The only things that keep me from moving to Ubuntu over OS X are my iTouch and applications I use for photography. Lightroom, Photoshop, etc aren't replaceable on Linux. Sure, the GIMP is there, but there's nothing as good as Lightroom in terms of cataloging photos and handling RAW images, unless there's something I'm unaware of. Added to the fact that the colors on Ubuntu are very cool compared to my calibrated Mac install, and there's no way to calibrate on Linux that I'm aware of.

I don't know about a replacement for Lightroom (I've never used it), but for raw handling there is UFRaw (Unidentified Flying Raw) which works kinda like camera raw, but with maybe a few less features. It can be used as a Gimp plugin so that when you open a raw file in Gimp it automatically brings up the UFRaw window or as a stand alone gnome program. It can even be used on the command line for batch processing. It can use profiles output from LittleCMS (Little Colour Management System) to embed colour profiles into the output files.

I believe (if I remember correctly) that LittleCMS can also be used to manually calibrate your monitor and create a profile (*.icc file) which can be used to adjust your screen at startup.

There are also some commonly used colour profile files (rgb and cmyk) that can be downloaded and put in a certain folder and they will work with Scribus (a Layout program like InDesign), LittleCMS, Gimp, etc.

I've used Ubuntu and (other Linux flavours) on PCs before and just recently started dual booting Jaunty on my MacBook (4,1). Your post reminded me to install UFRaw. It's available in the Synaptic Package Manager or can be downloaded from the programmer's website.

[skullmunky]

UFRaw is great. I just used it for the first time today, preparing images to go into Gimp for a kind of HDR type setup combining multiple exposure settings for this kind of tricky lighting situation. Fast and clean app. Nice.

On the performance-difference topic: I also just installed Maya on a 2x2 core Mac Pro, and then on an Ubuntu partition as well, to compare. Maybe just a fluke, but the Linux version of Maya had both a more responsive interface (for example, better framerate in heavy scenes and faster switching between panels), as well as better scores on render benchmarks of the same mental ray scene. I'm going to try tomorrow with the 64 bit version of Maya and see how that compares. Long story short, I don't feel so crazy for wanting to run Ubuntu on my Mac

Now if I could only match OSX's incredible boot speed. There's got to be some kind of trick, it's just not natural.

[hanzomon4]

Wow.. you sir have a jacked up computer. I go to a school where everyone has a mac (required purchase) and with over one hundred iMacs and at least 50 power macs and mac pros. I've seen people using old g4 powerbooks with leopard and it's smooth as butter. I think you should demand a refund (if you don't need a mac) or a new machine.

[wsonar]

macs aren't flawless I've seen macs lock up for no reason I've seen ipods lock up for no reason

back in the day when they had proprietary hardware they could have been arguably better now there just intel pc's

you can put winxp on a mac you can put leopard on a pc and lnux on both

[skullmunky]

more maya benchmarking fun. I compared Maya 2009 running on a Mac Pro (1,1), 4 core, 2GB, with Ubunut 9.04 64 bit vs OSX 10.4.

Test 1: Mental Ray test scene from ZooRender. Personally I don't believe most of the numbers on their site, but I don't have a better benchmark to offer, so I used this. Ubuntu came out ahead by about 20 seconds, close to a 1/3 speed increase.

Test 2: stormy ocean animation. I rendered an animation using the stormy ocean example. Both came out exactly the same, around 3 hours. Interesting, I thought 64 bit Maya would have an edge there.

Test 3: heavy polygon scenes. I started duplicating a lot of high-poly spheres, to see what would happen. Viewport framerate goes down pretty equivalently, though worse in OSX. Around 1 million polys, OSX felt like around 1 fps, while Ubuntu was still getting 2 or 3 fps.

In high poly renders, Ubuntu gained more of a significant edge than with the mental ray render. I did renders in increments of around 1,000,000 polys up to about 10,000,000. Over about 3 million, OSX just hard froze after starting the render.

How much does 64 bit have to do with it? I have no idea. With only 2GB of memory anyway, the advantage of 64 bit addressing shouldn't matter. Perhaps performance is better in Leopard, too. I don't think I can conclude that Maya runs better in Linux than OSX just from this, but what it does say is that it is possible for the OS to make a difference on the same hardware.