Comments on: Mac vs PC in the Office

By: TomQ

TomQ — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:10:56 +0000

I’ve got Kubuntu (Ubuntu distro with the KDE desktop) running on one of my older Dell laptops. Overall, it works great. Firefox browser and Open Office. That being said, getting wireless working was a pain. After trying forever to get my older Linksys 54g wireless card to work in Linux using NDISWrapper, I gave up and purchased a Linux friendly Belkin wireless card for $30. Works great now.

Overall, I really enjoy using Linux. Gnome, KDE and my new personal favorite Enlightenment (OpenGEU) desktops are all really good and have come a long way since the mid to late 90′s. There are still some hardware issue, especially with wireless cards. But overall it’s a great OS.

If you want to just dabble with a few distro’s, try Virtual Box and run them as virtual machines under Windows.

By: Lux

Lux — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:24:22 +0000

Apple is a high-tech consumer products company, not a computer company. Don’t expect them to act like other computer companies.

That said, I work in an office that’s about 50/50 Mac and Windows. We all connect to Exchange, office shares, etc just fine. Personally, I use Thunderbird on my Mac and like it much better than Entourage.

By: Glen Lipka

Glen Lipka — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 04:19:38 +0000

I was just pricing out laptops for a friend. Dell Outlet has laptops that are SO inexpensive. $500 for a really nice laptop. $1000 for something top of the line and huge. The macs are really nice, but they are typically twice as much. I just can’t deal with that.

Maybe I should try linux on a cheap dell.

By: TomQ

TomQ — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 04:14:52 +0000

I realized that you mentioned Exchange, but using Exchange with Outlook for email and calendar is a huge reason that Windows will continue to dominate the workplace. Also, consider the cost of desktops and laptops. Corporations can purchase Dell or HP desktops and laptops in bulk at the fraction of the cost of Macs, no matter how much better the Mac OS maybe.