Microsoft Vista and Operating Systems

I have never used a mac.  In fact, I’m the person who once sat in front of a mac and couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing on.  (I was in college at the time and wound up typing my paper on an electric typewriter).  But I work at an art school and there are lots of people who use macs.  In our technology office we have dedicated pc  and mac technicians and there has always been a (mostly) friendly debate over which system is best.  I’ve never concerned myself too much with the dialog since many of the administrative applications that I work with don’t run (or don’t run well) on macs.

Now that the hoopla around the Windows Vista Beta 2 has died down, I've been thinking about the comparisons between Vista and Dapper (the latest version of Ubuntu).

For those of you who have heard Linux advocacy before, I can assure you that Dapper will not do everything your current desktop does, in 1/10th of the memory at twice the speed while bringing peace to the Middle East. What it will do is install easily, give you real choice about how your desktop looks (gnome (default) or kde (via the "kde" metapackage)), a choice of office suites (OpenOffice AbiWord or the commercial StarOffice (from Sun)). Dapper comes with astounding minimum hardware specs, but if you don't see a link between hardware and performance, I've got a bridge you may be interested in.