I have always despised with a passion the "auto-hide" feature for task bars that depends on recognition of moving the mouse in the right position in order to display, with a built in delay timer. It slows me down at best and at worst buggy recognition routines means I end up waiting and moving the mouse around repeatedly for a task bar that doesn't appear. Or when I am actually needing to click something at the bottom of a window I have open the dumbass task bar pops up at the last second and gets in my way. Hate hate hate.

And unity forces this model by making auto-hide a part of the UI. It's auto-hide is worse than Windows' ever was. Never pops up when I want it to, but just wait until I need to click something at the far left of a window (where 99% of web sites put their sidebar navigation). At least I could disable the "feature" in Windows.

It is the reason I am back to using Windows 7 at the moment.


I will have to check it out.

For video editing, I vote mac. I'm not a big fan of either company really. But for laptops I'd definitely go with a mac. I haven't used windows much since xp and when I sit down at a computer running 7 I'm totally lost.
Mac is just so incredibly easy to use. Setting up wireless, installing software, all that. I took it for granted and then I tried to hook up my parents windows laptops to our wireless. Pain in the ass.

My favorite thing about my mac is the trackpad. Any time I use a different pad I think it's horrible compared to these godly things mac has created.

Second favorite is the complete and utter lack of problems I have had with it. 3 years on this machine and it's never given me a moment of grief. The biggest problem I've had with it is safari quitting on me which doesn't matter to me because I never used it anyway. That being said, I have no idea how to fix it because the more complicated aspects of macs are a lot more complicated than they are on windows.

Okay, so I put my question to another forum of photography enthusiasts full of professionals, semi professionals and serious amateurs and I'm waiting to see what they say about the subject. But, from what I've heard, I may go for the Macbook. I may be a little biased as I've always wanted one simply because I've never had one and they look quite good (rather superficial I know), but I'm afraid it could cloud my reasoning. From what I see though, there isn't really a reason I shouldn't buy one aside from cost. We'll see what the pros say first though.

Both of them suck. Ubuntu can eat Mac OSX or Windows 8 for breakfast in terms of speed and stability.

Well, the pros have had their say, and the vote was unanimously mac. So, looks like I'm getting a Macbook. And along with a 60D and Photoshop, those will be my most expensive things to buy. Then a couple of lenses and flash. And a few other things and I'll be sorted. I'm seriously looking forward to this. Haven't had a chance to do professional looking photography ever. Well, except for that time I borrowed my dad's SLR , but most of the shots were crap and, due to the limitations of film, I was unable to experiment.

I could never understand why Macs are so expensive considering the hardware inside is almost exactly the same as what you'll get in a Windows machine. The only difference of course is that one can run OSX and the other can't (without a lot of creativity). It does beggar the question why the Apple machine has a price tag of over twice what an equivalent Windows machine will have. Plus Apple is a lover of proprietry lockdown, much much more than Microsoft.

I too would go with a standard Windows machine. Anyway good luck with the Mac if that's what you get.

I have a dual boot system on my PC. I run XP Pro alongside Ubuntu 10.04. Guess which one boots faster, has a much better interface, and is less problematic eh?

Yep. It's Ubuntu. Were it not for the fact of running Photoshop, I would give XP Pro the boot. I have no particlar axe to grind here. I like things that work. And Ubuntu works, and it works bloody well.

ubuntu on the family computer just runs and runs and runs, windows 7 bsods atleast once every 2 weeks. I usually use FreeBSD in a vm myself, I like its simplicity and elegance of design.

All i want to say is that Mac is a pile of crap, thank you.

And all I want to say is to reiterate my earlier statement of no fanboys spouting useless stuff like that.

Seems like Ubuntu has improved a lot since the last time I tried. I think the last time I installed it was version 6 or 7; it was slower and bulkier than any other distro, it came with a lot of useless stuff in an attempt to make it more newbie-friendly, and the package repositories were full of inconsistencies that made it easy to break if you tweaked it enough. I was always jealous of its popularity because I knew so many better distros. Now I'm not so sure. My favorite ones haven't been updated in a while or have stupid hardware compatibility issues. I might give Ubuntu another try.

Ubuntu can run Photoshop pretty well using Wine, at least up until version CS3 if I remember right... I still use Photoshop 7 from 10 years ago and don't really see the value of the improvements to the 5 or so versions since then.... I'm sure there probably are some, but I highly doubt they are worth the $3000 or more it would have cost to stay up to date all those years. Not to mention it runs flawlessly on Ubuntu with Wine as well as on my netbook.

Ubuntu 10.04 had some issues but was still solid. The latest version 11.11 abandoned the old Gnome GUI in favor of Unity, which though open source, came from Canonical rather than the wider open source community. I'm not a fan.

I haven't used Ubuntu since 9.04, I had a huge truck-load of issues back then, I remember re-compiling the kernel to get alsa up and running. Not a good sign for a so-called mainstream and user-friendly distro I thought at the time. I may give one of the newer versions a whirl in a VM sometime, it would be interesting to see Unity and/or Gnome Shell for myself sometime.

These days I don't really have the energy for Linux anymore, I find myself just using Windows 7 mostly. However I still have a nice slimmed down minimal install of Debian Stable (6.0) with Openbox and pretty much all of the newer applications compiled and packaged from source, I just don't use it nearly as much as I used to. That's on my own machines as I do use Linux everyday at work though, Red Hat being the distro there.

EDIT: Apologies to the Doctor for participating in the de-railment of your thread, but it looks like you've got your answer already.

Well I can only speak as I find. Ubuntu 10.04 is a simply great OS. And Eeebuntu NBR on my Asus Eee PC 900A kicks major arse.