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 :-)
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