Good Bye Linux

[Kurt Granroth]

On Monday 16 June 2003 09:24 am, R Melder at SPiN Internet Media wrote:
> If you want an out-of-the-box MS alternative that makes a solid work
> station and has a community of support... Just go buy a Mac with OS X.

I'll agree that a Mac with OS X is a sweet piece of work (I'm a recent convert 
myself with a new 17" iMac).  However, I've noticed that for some specific 
purposes, Linux is actually easier to setup.

Specifically, server related apps that aren't included with OS X can be a pain 
to install.  I wanted to run exim and courier IMAP on my OS X machine since I 
had had so good luck with both on Linux.  On Linux, installing the two 
entailed a few simple clicks in YaST (SuSE) and voila!  It just worked.  And 
even if I wasn't using SuSE, I could have just downloaded the source and 
compiled and installed with all the default settings.

Things aren't quite so easy with OS X.  It took me a solid weekend of messing 
with configure switches and editing header files to get exim and courier to 
compile.  And even then, they didn't work the same way under OS X that they 
did under Linux.  It took a another few days of tweaking to get it up and 
working.

I'm not holding a grudge or anything, though.  Linux has been used as an email 
server by a lot of people for a long time so it stands to reason that 
installing and configuring it would be so streamlined.  Since OS X is just 
now inching into the server area, it's bound to take more work.

But I did find it ironic that working with OS X when I first got it was 
significantly harder than working with Linux :-)