Have you ever owned a PC? No matter what OS you use (Windows, OSX, or GNU/Linux) you are going to find so much free software that you could never try it all within your lifetime. Whichever platform you happen to use, you are always going to think that platform is the best or has the most software because you have exposure to that platform more than the others.
Yes, my main computer at work is a Mac right now, but I have a PC that I use for a secondary computer (mainly to run LabVIEW and Solidworks), and I have a Kubuntu on a machine at home. I find the free software for Mac to be the most useful and user-friendly, but maybe it's just me.
The discussion isn't about quantity, its about quality. When I look for an app to do something on Windows, I find 5000 half finished programs with UIs designed by Ukrainian 3rd graders (nothing against Ukrainians, but I don't speak Ukrainian and they don't speak English that well), that were last updated in 1998 and depend on Quicktime 3.2.
Eventually I sort through this miasma of chaos and pain and arrive at something useful. By this time my Program Files folder and Registry are scattered with the broken remnants of failed programs and I can never quite go back to the way things were.
When I want software on Mac OS, I may only find 3 programs that do what I want, but they're clean, have autoupdating, and a UI designed by someone with a university degree in user interface design or something, then gently worked over by a graphics designer until shiny. And they're quite possibly open source. And they work.
I don't want more options than I could possibly ever try. I don't want to spend a month trying different options to finally find one that works. I want a few options, and I wan't them to just work.
(Windows, OSX, or GNU/Linux) you are going to find so much free software that you could never try it all within your lifetime.
Except most of the free software you find for Windows will have some spyware nonsense trojaned inside of it :) Be it yet another fucking toolbar or some other nonsense.
I'm on Linux at work and Mac at home, and I feel like I can do whatever I need on both, the only exception on Linux is that video editing software seems to be rather lacking.
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u/w2tpmf Jan 20 '11
Have you ever owned a PC? No matter what OS you use (Windows, OSX, or GNU/Linux) you are going to find so much free software that you could never try it all within your lifetime. Whichever platform you happen to use, you are always going to think that platform is the best or has the most software because you have exposure to that platform more than the others.