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Comment by acous | Hacker News Reader

OS X runs on multiple architectures with a wide variety of hardware. You can build a PC out of parts and run OS X on it. Just because the drivers are limited doesn't mean it isn't portable. The thing about OS X is that when the drivers are there, it works reliably and with a minimum of fuss. You can't say that about Linux.

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> when the drivers are there...

That's a big qualification.

You'd be surprised at the variety of hardware that's supported. Loads of graphics cards, many sound devices, nearly anything USB, lots of chipsets and CPUs.

Hey, what's a good laptop to use, now that the Dell Mini 9 is so old?

How's CIFS/SambaFS or NFS support these days? I remember people spouting how Mac 'just works' when I could easily cause a kernel panic if the mount started timing out (or if I put the machine to sleep without unmounting it).

It seems better :) I think the finder was rewritten for snow leopard and I haven't noticed the same horrible clunkiness in relation to slow/unreliable network shares. That said, I nearly always use AFP or SFTP for moving stuff around so those protocols could still be dodgy.

"The thing about OS X is that when the drivers are there, it works reliably and with a minimum of fuss. You can't say that about Linux."

I think you're either trolling or are genuinely misinformed. If it's the latter, please accept my apologies.

My relevant experience is with my htpc running linux and my linux/hackintosh dual boot machine.

Both machines are fully supported by Linux and the hackintosh is supported by community kernel extensions. Getting linux up and running for the htpc required a lot of fiddling with config files... adding refresh rates to X manually, custom ALSA configs to enable the audio device to show up correctly, accept the correct sample rates and stream 5.1 properly, adding extra PPAs to get video drivers that support one of the various forms of accelerated video decoding, scripts to shut down gnome when xbmc is running because it interferes with rendering for some unknown reason, messing with launchd because it launched programs that rely on all filesystems being mounted before they were mounted... that's just off the top of my head.

The hackintosh required a boot cd and a package for drivers that weren't natively supported. Once the drivers were installed, it worked. That's it. Everything that took days of tinkering and forum searching on linux just worked.

I have years of experience with linux and this was my first time trying OS X on an unsupported machine. So no, I'm not misinformed and no I'm not trolling, I thought HN was supposed to be civilized :/

"[..]You can't say that about Linux"

I don't see how you can make a categorical statement declaring that as long as drivers are written for OS X, OS X is more reliable than Linux.

Hackintosh != most people's experience of OS X.

Your experience will be particular to the hardware you chose, and the implementations you chose to follow.

In the same sense, I wouldn't declare that Linux is more reliable than 'X' because again, there are far too may variables involved to make a fair comparison.

I think a far more pragmatic approach is to accept that Linux can provide a very robust desktop solution - if the necessary investment in time and research is carried out. Largely, imo OS X is successful because this research has already been carried out on the users' behalf.

Yeah, maybe "reliably" was a bad choice of words, reliability has little to do with it. I agree that Linux on the desktop can be fine if you have the time to set it up for your needs. I just think that setup time is not much fun after a while and not strictly necessary when you look at how the competition does it.

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