Monday, October 25, 2004

Macs v. Linux v. PCs

Gary North has an article on LewRockwell discussing what he refers to as the "Apple cult" and the "Linux cult."

Well, as a dedicated Mac-ker, here's my feeling: As a Steve Sailer reader has said (scroll down about 1/6 of the page and look for the quotes in blue AND green highlights), Apple has a superior product but has inferior market share. Mr.North is essentially correct hat Apple will never seriously challenge Microsoft, but I think that it will still be around for a long time for those people who are willing to trade sheer volume of available programs for not having to deal with computer viruses and worms all the time.
As for Linux, I don't think that Linux is necessarily based on the presumption that "everyone should be a priest" (i.e. that everyone should be able to understand source code). I think it is based on the presumption that there are people who don't work for software companies who would like to "be priests." In other words, Linux provides a useful alternative to Mac or PC for the people who use it, and so it is a good thing for the world to have, particularly since a lot of internet infrastructure runs on it (see third message down, by Brad R). Having said that, it is also fairly obvious that Linux will never be the operating system for the masses, but it really wasn't intended to be, as far as I can tell.
In short, while Mr. North is right that Mac and even moreso Linux are marginal systems, I think that they are still important and that they fill an important niche.

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