In my (admittedly limited) experience of Adobe's products, they have all been trash. All machine's i've come across take ages to run the damn thing.

I personally find that GIMP is best, if only because I've had the most experience with it (biased, I know) It gives me more then enough tools to 'Photoshop' things, which is what I mostly do for a giggle.

Dante Ashton wrote:In my (admittedly limited) experience of Adobe's products, they have all been trash. All machine's i've come across take ages to run the damn thing.

I don't know what computer you tried it on, but netbook performance tests usually include Photoshop CS4. The user interface works fine, without any problem (doesn't need any hardware acceleration). Of course calculations are slower. Adobe Photoshop were always sensitive to the available RAM and not CPU. If you can feed it 1 Gb RAM, you are OK on any machine.
Adobe Lightroom is beating PS in some areas, but Adobe can't properly position this product. While they want to sell a gazillion unit, they don't want to cannibalize Photoshop, and this effort created some fancy, but useless feature in LR.

I'm a KDE user but I've used OS X a little. Here are some observations.

1. If you do any LaTeX editing then Kile on KDE is far better than TeXShop on Mac. It's better than anything on Mac. The only thing better on Mac is that synctex takes you to not just the line in the tex file, but the very word. Unfortunately Kile + Okular only does line, where a line can be a whole paragraph.

2. Amarok is arguably better than iTunes and OS X native music apps. That's debatable. I honestly prefer the playlist handling of iTuens and like media players over Amarok's clumsy method.

3. Clipboard managers. Yes, something so simple, but I couldn't find any decent *free* managers for OS X comparable to Klipper for KDE. A real shame.

4. Window management. KWin is arguably better than OS X's window manager. More + tweakable compositing effects, advanced tiling, advanced window management settings, customizable decoration/shadows, etc. I'm not sure how OS X fairs, but one thing I HATE about KWin is lack of partial struts. If you have a panel in the top right *half* (not fully extended horizontally) then it will be treated, in terms of vertical maximization, as stretching across the whole screen! Lame. (Openbox doesn't do this.)

5. Mac has arguably better pdf tools. This one is tough. Okular is really nice, but some people just hate the fact that annotations are not embedded in the pdf. Sometimes I prefer that, and other times I don't. If everyone used Okular it wouldn't be a problem since other Okular users can see the markup (when you export as "Document archive").

6. Strigi is a piece of broken ****! Spotlight destroys it. That's really all I should say. Thank god for Recoll on KDE.

7. Mac has way better photo management and word processing software. Openoffice works well enough but it's nasty-looking. KOffice just doesn't work. (This is 2.3 Final RC. I know 2.3 Final is out but I haven't tried it. I mean, it even has trouble with .odt files!!!) I like Gwenview but it's no match for iPhoto, nor is it intended to be. I'm not a big fan of digiKam.

8. KMail is garbage, at least if you use it with (non-disconnected) IMAP. It never resumes gracefully from suspend. It needs to be restarted. Awful if you're on a laptop.

9. Dolphin's much better than Finder if you ask me. Looks better, more configurable, better view options, etc.

10. KDE has a WAY better notification system. You may not think it's much, but it is.

Of course, if you HAVE to work with commercial software then Mac is really the only way to go (besides Windows) unless you can get OS X working in as a virtual machine in KDE. Also, OS X does way better in terms of JUST WORKING, power management (!), switchable graphics, and all sorts of other good stuff missing in linux. If you can live without this stuff, then no problem. But switchable graphics and power management are huge for laptop owners that need discrete graphics but good battery life.

Is one prettier than the other? Hard to say. I really like the default Oxygen + Air. I also like a lot of the dark color schemes for KDE (though the damn things never quite work correctly because FOOLS hard code colors into their programs, even Qt/KDE ones! Websites are another story...) OS X is nice, but nothing one can't replicate on KDE. However, consistency IS an issue on KDE since one is always going to be mixing up GTK, Qt, KDE, java, etc. apps.

In the end, I'd probably roll with Mac if I had money to throw around. Switchable graphics and sweet power management seal the deal for me. Plus it does look SLICK and one can always run KDE in in virtualbox!

I have the mac OS X at home and the KDE at the office and I prefer to use the KDE it easier for me and has more features. Mark

molecule-eye wrote:4. Window management. KWin is arguably better than OS X's window manager. More + tweakable compositing effects, advanced tiling, advanced window management settings, customizable decoration/shadows, etc. I'm not sure how OS X fairs, but one thing I HATE about KWin is lack of partial struts. If you have a panel in the top right *half* (not fully extended horizontally) then it will be treated, in terms of vertical maximization, as stretching across the whole screen! Lame. (Openbox doesn't do this.)

You must be kidding! What for all these tweakable compositing effects, when KWin is so fu**ing slow and buggy? OSX works awesome on **** Intel 950, when KWin is imho unusable on GTX 275.

molecule-eye wrote:10. KDE has a WAY better notification system. You may not think it's much, but it is.

Again, it's buggy and annoying. I can't even imagine how it could be "WAY better" than NO notification system

Compositing is running faithly smoothly on my **** **** integrated mobile Intel 945GM and Intel Core Solo 1Ghz, so I'm not sure why it would be running so slow for you on better hardware unless you've got the blur effect enabled or something else is wrong.

In any case, it's not fair to compare a buggy KDE install with a perfectly fine OS X install. Take a smoothly running KDE install (they exist!) and likewise for OS X and compare those.

This is a great forum. I'm thinking about switching to Mac OS X. Talk me out of it in a reasonable way. I'll consider..

Skylark wrote:This is a great forum. I'm thinking about switching to Mac OS X. Talk me out of it in a reasonable way. I'll consider..

When a newcomer comes to Linux and asks about which distro and DE to use, the best answer is usually to try them all out and decide what suits you the best.

I can't really recommend that in this case because you'd probably have to buy Mac hardware and if you decided you didn't want, like, or need OS X, that'd be a pretty expensive recommendation.

molecule-eye wrote:In any case, it's not fair to compare a buggy KDE install with a perfectly fine OS X install. Take a smoothly running KDE install (they exist!) and likewise for OS X and compare those.

Ahahah, my setup is perfectly fine, all problems/bugs are reproducible on any distribution.

molecule-eye wrote:[...]unless you've got the blur effect enabled or something else is wrong.

Nah, I'm not talking about stupid eye candy (well, some are totally broken, like shadows). Blur works fine.

Comparing OS X to KDE is tough... the dissimilarities are just so many. For example, OS X is designed to be uncustomisable and is simplified to the point of unusability, whereas KDE is the exact opposite.

I myself personally would take KDE over OS X any day. First of all, the generic flexibility and easy customisability of KDE is a winner for me. Secondly, once KDE is setup to my liking, it takes much less screen space than OS X. Thirdly, KDE is more uniform in looks. Finally, KDE allows usage of dark theming with a click of a button. Last time I used OS X was 10.5, but I doubt Apple has managed to get rid of the beach ball, either.

The native KDE applications are generally well-designed and most importantly have much better functionality in comparison to Apple stuff: Amarok > iTunes, KMail > Apple Mail, Dolphin > Finder, Konversation > Colloquy, Kdenlive > iMovie, digiKam > iPhoto...

The main attraction of OS X over KDE would be stability and consistency over releases. KDE is changing almost too rapidly: each time a new 4.x release rolls out, there's something that has been moved to a new place, something missing, something added and so on.

daedaluz wrote:Comparing OS X to KDE is tough... the dissimilarities are just so many. For example, OS X is designed to be uncustomisable and is simplified to the point of unusability, whereas KDE is the exact opposite.

I myself personally would take KDE over OS X any day. First of all, the generic flexibility and easy customisability of KDE is a winner for me. Secondly, once KDE is setup to my liking, it takes much less screen space than OS X. Thirdly, KDE is more uniform in looks. Finally, KDE allows usage of dark theming with a click of a button. Last time I used OS X was 10.5, but I doubt Apple has managed to get rid of the beach ball, either.

The native KDE applications are generally well-designed and most importantly have much better functionality in comparison to Apple stuff: Amarok > iTunes, KMail > Apple Mail, Dolphin > Finder, Konversation > Colloquy, Kdenlive > iMovie, digiKam > iPhoto...

The main attraction of OS X over KDE would be stability and consistency over releases. KDE is changing almost too rapidly: each time a new 4.x release rolls out, there's something that has been moved to a new place, something missing, something added and so on.

I don't think you've really used OS X given what you've said which is all false regarding OS X. I'm a KDE user who recently moved to OS X since my work uses Macs. There are a few things I miss (e.g. Kile and Okular), but they have nothing to do with customizability. OS X is highly customizable, from the window decoration to dark theming. It's not as EASY to customize certain things, but that's another matter.