[Cialug] distro for ibook

[Matt Stanton]

Arguing the merits of Apple's products on this list is a hard sell.  
Obviously, anyone on this list who is comfortable with linux is going to 
be a person who knows how to tinker with a computer.  Telling me I have 
to shell out an extra $1000 to get a computer that 'just works' is kinda 
laughable, since I have no problem making a computer do exactly what I 
want it to do.  I, like many other people on this list probably are, am 
a computer hobbyist.  If it doesn't work, I'll bust out google and mess 
with it until I figure out why it doesn't, and feel better for having 
learned something about it while getting it to work.  Over the weekend, 
I had two PCs gutted, taking parts from each of them and throwing in a 
new motherboard, RAM, and PSU to come up with a refreshed gaming machine 
that is an absolute beast compared to what it was before.  Last night I 
dedicated my time to upgrading from Vista Ultimate x64 to Windows 7 
Ultimate x64, then spent the rest of the night tweaking things with the 
OS and the games I play to get all the performance I can out of the 
hardware.

Apple's market is the people with no time or patience to do that sort of 
fiddling with their computers who also have the money to spend to make 
those problems go away before they happen.  They aren't the computer 
enthusiasts, the gamers, or the people who dabble in programming just 
because it's fun.  They are the business people whose time is worth a 
lot of money, the people who need a computer to just be there and work 
as expected when they need it to.  That isn't to say they aren't all 
about open-source software, programming, or dabbling, but that when they 
want to get down to business, they want to get directly to work, leaving 
that hobby to manifest in their personal time.

It's also not to say that Apple computers are infallible workhorses, 
either.  Apple has made its mistakes with hardware and software.  They 
have, however, managed to convince the public that those issues are 
easily resolved and very few and far between.  They have an outstanding 
record of taking the money that customers throw at them to make any 
problems that do pop up go away in a fast and convenient manner.  If I 
had a lot of money, and I could just throw it at a problem when it pops 
its head up, I'm sure I'd be very happy with any product Apple comes up 
with.  As it stands, though, I am almost masochisticly drawn to the 
challenge of forcing an otherwise unruly computer to bow its head in 
defeat.  Now that I'm done fiddling with the spawn of M$, I can get back 
to the real challenge and joy of messing with Ubuntu, Apache, etc, etc, 
etc... on this poweredge server in the next room...  >:D