Apple Says there are Only Two OS's - OS X and Windows 7

[mikehoward]

I've gotten tired of watching the spinning beachball, so I decided to switch back to Linux. A friend has a dual boot set up on his mac - OS X and Linux, so I bought a little macbook pro and . . .

Bootcamp Assistant only supports Windows 7

After updating the OS X on the system, my arch linux boot disk cannot find the disks - which it could prior to the update - so I can't even flush the hd and make a single boot machine.

Looks like apple is now an entertainment company.

Does anybody know of a nice laptop that I can use - preferably Arch (Ubuntu seems to be going (or have gone) the way of bloat and slow

[maxharris]

There's no need to change your OS (especially because the OS really doesn't matter anymore). If you're tired of the beachball, get a RAM upgrade. I can upgrade my machine (which has 8 GB) to 16 GB for about a day's pay (or two). And I don't make very much money right now. Changing the OS usually takes an entire weekend (tweaking things and moving stuff takes longer than many of us think). So by the time you get it done, you've probably broken even.

Unless you like doing this sort of pain, in which case you can't be helped :)

[mikehoward]

my main machine is an mbp - which is maxed at 8 Gig. Every day it starts paging under at most a modest load. This is an artifact of the operating system and Safari (which leaks memory)

I had the same issues with uSoft windows which led me to switching to Mac's. Early macbooks and mbp's did not do this, but have been getting progressively worse since Snow Leopard. Lion has a very nice interface and a lot of convenience, but, for me, it's getting intolerable.

I'm reverting to Linux for development work. I'll probably keep the mac for graphics

[blario]

If you get a early 2011 MBP you might be about to install linux on it. The models afterward have a new UEFI that does not allow OS's that aren't "allowed".

Lookup the new UEFI to get more information about it.

[batista]

Looks like apple is now an entertainment company.

Looks like a non sequitur to me.

Apple was never in the business of selling general purpose hardware.

Running Windows via Bootcamp is just a courtesy for the multitude of switches from Windows.

Why should they bother supporting an OS that has extremely few desktop users, and dozens of variations?

[mikehoward]

These are strange ideas.

Apple was a computer company until they brought out the iPod. I believe that about 80% of their income now comes from non-computer products - with an emphasis on entertainment.

Running windows was critical to Apple's acceptance at the time they switch from power pc to intel processors because of Microsoft's dominance of the computer market. Bootcamp allowed Apple to sell into the PC space - without which they would not have been able to overshadow Microsoft.

Just think back about 5 years.

And why should they bother supporting Linux? Read Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham