![]() Need something to open and edit Office files? Spreadsheets, documents, and so on? OpenOffice, or Libre Office. ![]() So fire up that shiny new computer, and immediately go find a free web browser, like Chrome or Firefox. Did you know that there are thousands of perfectly usable programs out there, that work just as well as the Microsoft stuff, that you can download, legally, for free? Who wants to spend an extra $300 on software to use on a $400-$800 computer? I sure don’t. Wouldn’t it be nice to just buy a computer, and then be able to use it? Man. ![]() And you need other stuff to go with it, of course. CD burning software? It doesn’t come with that? Another $20. And antivirus, of course, need that, so that’s another $60. When you buy a new computer, you’re paying for the hardware, plus a license to use some version of Windows, but to get Microsoft Office, you have to dish out another few hundred bucks. One of the ways I’ve been able to save money over the years is to not buy new computers, or software for my older computers. Which of course meant that it was stable, fast, and easily extended. And then of course, Apple took the very best things about Unix, locked them down, and made it into a proprietary platform that was (in some ways) worse than Microsoft Windows. It was a huge slap in the face of Microsoft at the time, because it signaled a transition to a “real” operating system, based on Unix. Time warp: I remember, back in the late 90’s, when they first introduced Mac OS X. And what I found kind of both disgusted me, and confirmed what I knew about Apple all along. If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you’d know that I’m a proponent of Linux, and I knew Ubuntu at one point had a distro made for PowerPC-based computers, so I started digging. I recently picked up a vintage Power Mac G4 (a Graphite G4 AGP, for those wondering), and the first thing I thought of was “what OS should I put on it?” As usual when I discuss Apple, it reminded me of how much control companies have over our overall technological experience. ![]() I recently had a discussion about Apple products with a friend.
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