http://www.linksandlaw.com/linkingcases-other.htm#British Telecom v. Prodigy

Ubuntu Linux is definitely the best of desktop Linux experience. It’s also free of usability standards. Just the inconsistency of c’n'p between apps in Linux can drive one to madness.

However for those that grind code for a living, osx or Linux are really the only viable choices in my opinion.

While I don’t mind iOS on the phone for the extra security it affords in it’s locked down nature, having it on the iPad has been a mixed experience. I really had hoped I could use the iPad as a extremely portable replacement for the laptop, but with out filesystem access and the ability to install alternative software outside of the App store it is limited. I don’t need a full blown laptop/desktop for the work I do and the iPad would have been awesome. I do love using it to the extent that I do for communication, media, and surfing everywhere and anywhere, but it could have been much more.

If you are familiar with the terminal, you can actually use it within Lion to REMOVE that recovery partition, and then install lion from boot up using your thumb drive from your last MacBook Air.

The OS is not locked down in any way, and other than interface changes it works the same way all OS X versions have.

Please respond if you’d like further info.

What you want to do is entirely possible…just requires some unconventional means.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389334,00.asp

Windows 7 is actually not bad in comparison to earlier versions and I might eventually go back to that — I love and use Linux on the server, but on the client it’s always been a fight for me and I just don’t have the patience and time anymore.

You say you upgrade your computer every year, but using a brand new os is too risky–even though you keep your old machine as a backup? I would think that its riskier to hack an old os onto new hardware, than to simply move to the pre-installed Lion, but that’s just been my experience. When would you feel better about moving to Lion, 3 months, 6 months, a year? If you encounter an unacceptable issue with the new machine, could you not use your backup machine until a fix/workaround is available?

You’ve had good results from Macs so far with presumably little hacking effort on your part. You’ve taken reasonable steps to mitigate the risk and protect yourself–again with minimal effort. Yet you’re willing to throw all that away, because of fear of issues that haven’t even occurred? If you’re that risk-averse, and you feel so screwed that Apple has removed some kind of illusion of safety that you won’t trust them ever, then you probably won’t be happy with anything other than Linux, where you can control everything to your heart’s content. The downside of course is that you’re not getting as much of your real work done while you’re controlling and administering Linux, working around all of its quirks, building and troubleshooting broken open-source software, libraries, etc. Good luck with that.

Also, Apple’s ‘proud history’ is not creating user-hackable computers. It is instead creating solutions that work with minimal fuss and effort on the part of the user. They’ve done this better than Windows, and much, much, MUCH better than Linux.

It appears that Apple will eventually switch all of its business to iThingies running on ARM processors, making the Mac OS X versus iOS controversy moot. If Apple sells high-end systems, rather than ones that run chimeras like the new Final Cut Pro but not serious professional applications, they would continue to use Mac OS X… but perhaps Apple will stop selling their high-end systems too. They can’t be making too much money for them.

as a developer working on multiple platforms including iOS, I find Lion to be like iOS only if you want it to be. What I do find is that 10.7 certainly is thinking about the future and not dwelling on the past.

Google’s Chrome OS is a vague and amorphous attempt at marrying the desktop and mobile and it has arrived DOA.
as I read over at macworld; operating systems are a matter of choice. But your reasons for leaving are just not true at all.