News Rumour: Apple preps Air 'netbook'

Sorry, but that's a rather sweeping generalisation. It applies to a default Gnome installation but not KDE, which has a settings window rather like the one in OSX. Also, Mint which uses Gnome has been customised to include a control panel.

The main thing with either is that you can do whatever the hell you want with it quite easily.

You don't actually need the command line that much anymore. My mother uses Ubuntu and has never seen the command line. I use it out of choice though.

 

Face it as much as people want to use another OS they will all realize that Windows 7 is the best option.

 

Now that's funny.

 

Firstly you have either the dot files in your home dir or /etc/ for config, no need for a control panel. \Secondly the terminal is a must, way better than forms (try designing them..) give me text files anyday!

 

But you only use one distro, not all of them at the same time! Many have specific purposes, but the mainstream distros could easily be likened to OS X - improving with each release.

Ubuntu 10.04 easily looks as good, in my opinion. Actually, I'd say it looks better. It's also really really easy to use out of the box - my mother uses it.

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There is a control panel option, but the "list of options" is just the control panel items in an easily-accessible menu - you don't have to open a window to get to something.

That depends on what you call advanced. If you exclude all the stuff you can't do on windows or OS X, there's not a lot that you have to use the terminal for if you don't want to. Installations can be done through the software centre or with .deb files in ubuntu, and stuff like adding repositories can be done via the "software sources" section of the system menu. It's faster to use the terminal in a lot of cases, if you know what you're doing, but it's not actually necessary. If you actually are someone who needs to use it, you presumably understand computers and won't find it difficult.

As for the badly organised menus, I don't find them too bad at all, and you can reorganise them. Of course, there's no point, because it's much quicker to use gnome-do and/or put your commonly used apps on one of the many docks available for ubuntu.

Obviously I've only talked about the OS I'm familiar with here, but I think one decent OS X contender is enough to be getting on with.

Oh, and it shuts down it 4 seconds, on my mum's 3 year old celeron-powered Acer laptop. So yes, it's fast. I'd love to see this thing running on an i7 with an SSD... <drools>

 

Haha, linux mums Cheesecake! But yes, exactly, my mother has no idea how to use a terminal (or even how to open one) but doesn't need to either.