Transition from mac to linux user

[zircon_34]

Hey guys I'm a newbie ubuntu user,

I was a win user, now converted to mac but always wanted to work using linux. Anyways, I already tried to install several distros (OpenSuse and Fedora) on my old dell latitude and actually my favorite and the one running most smoothly was ubuntu so I guess I should stick to it

The thing is, work is great on the mac (compared to win), and therefore I only tried occasionally Ubuntu for fun using a virtual machine, till now...

I was wondering if its worth to install a dual boot on the mac, anyone some positive experience to share? Did someone switch from mac to linux? Do you use both for work (e.g. office, scientific plotting)?

thanks for sharing

[emilio.godoyalamos]

I would recommend that the mac you leave it that way (because a mac is the only one that will have that operative system). If you don´t use windows anymore, you could use your other computer to install linux Operative Systems.

[dennis13]

IMHO it depends on your views. For me, I wouldn't bother with Mac OS because I don't care about a non-free OS. Your view will of course be different.

Mac hardware is usually highly regarded as being very stable and reliant. But than it may be that hardware support from Linux might be lacking. Esp. in the now old PowerPC days this has been quite a problem. I'm not sure how much of a problem it still is.

If I were you I'd just give it a try with dual boot. I'm sure you'll soon find yourself booting more often to Linux instead of Mac OS.

[zemega]

The latest OS X is free, though it takes up a lot of work to install it at other machine beside Apple. If I ever got a Mac for a present, I would try me very best erasing the OS and install Ubuntu exclusively. Rather than dual boot, you should first list up all the program and tools that you want to use and see if there are counterparts in Ubuntu. Then you will know whether you can switch completely from Mac to Ubuntu. Dual boot case, Wont really be problem, cause both OS X and Ubuntu boots and shutdown pretty fast (Windows is slow).

[zircon_34]

Still have some nifty software on the mac I will need (and already invested in) that are to my knowledge currently not available or in development mode in Ubuntu.. particularly graphic (adobe) and office software (excel).

Open office and inkscape/Gimp are the alternatives here, but tried those 2 years ago and was not yet convinced. Maybe they have much improved, have to test it.

I like the open/free software philosophy, am downloading the ubuntu.iso right now to make a live-usb... would like to try the the dual boot though.

[zemega]

I would like to suggest Kingsoft Office. Really similar to Microsoft Office. No macro support yet, its still in alpha, but good enough that I don't use LibreOffice or OpenOffice. There's lot of tutorial on dual-booting OS X with Ubuntu, just be prepared that lots of steps are taken as Apple really make it hard to do so.

http://wps-community.org/

[zircon_34]

thanks for the link, never heard of Kingsoft before, screenshots look good... as I take from their homepage this works only for 32bit system?

[zemega]

I installed it in 12.04 64 bit, its still 32 bit but you just need to install 32 bit libraries. They are planning 64 bit release, so the 64 bit version should show up later on.

Edit: A project aim to let OS X programs run inside Linux:

http://www.darlinghq.org/

[3rdalbum]

Darling is in incredibly early stages so far. I think it can only run a few command-line Mac programs.

I switched from Mac to Ubuntu. My Mac was obsolete, basically the last version of Mac OS it could run was OS 9.1, and if I had upgraded the RAM I might have been able to force OS 10.1 onto it. Not that it would have helped, few Mac programs were still compatible with 10.1.

I had no money for a new computer and old Mac OS 9's browser was increasingly unable to surf major websites. So I installed Ubuntu... it was slow on such an old computer, no Flash and no 3D acceleration, but it did work and I liked the new system.

Later I bought a cheap PC which ran Ubuntu like a dream and I've stayed with it since.

Install Ubuntu if you want to learn Linux and try something different, if you like Ubuntu it'll be worth it. Or even just install Ubuntu to get more use out of an obsolete computer. Apple obsoletes its machines quite quickly and you news to be wealthy to keep up.

[Impavidus]

I've never used a Mac myself. My only experience with a Mac was fixing someone else's, which I managed to do using just my Linux knowledge. This already tells you something: Mac and Linux are somewhat similar. That's because both are based on Unix, and therefore they are cousins, so to speak. On my astronomy department, half the scientists (and students) use Mac, the other half prefers Linux and only the secretaries use Windows. Either of the two systems is perfectly capable of producing scientific plots or office work. Of course, there is a lot of scientific software around that requires the OS is POSIX-compliant, which means it runs on a dozen different operating system including Linux and OS X, but not Windows, which explains why nobody uses Windows (apart from attitude and group pressure).

Closed-source software, including drivers, is often not made available for Linux. This is to the advantage of OS X.

I don't really know about office software. Apart from Gnumeric for the occasional spreadsheet I prefer editing source code in vim. I never liked MS Office back in my Windows days and I never liked any package that tries to be similar.