Fedora Linux "just works" for me on my laptop (a 2 year old Toshiba Satellite), and I don't necessarily fall into the "fiddling with stuff and rebuilding stuff for grins and giggles" routine, FWIW. I will concede, however, that I am one of those people to whom F/OSS is an ideology, and I strive to avoid using any proprietary software as a matter of principle. Hence my refusal to own or use anything put out by Apple. :-)
So, can you, say, connect your mobile phone or your digital camcorder and view and edit the files to send an edited version to your grandmother in a Fedora Linux without fiddling?
If not, then "FWIW" should have been rewritten as "YMMV".
FWIW, using only ubuntu, I did both of these things last month to create a Christmas DVD of home movies and cell phone video clips.
Without much fuss, I transfered the video files via ssh from my jail-broken iphone, then edited, mastered and burned the DVDs using kdenlive. It was much easier than I expected.
Since I don't consider using SSH "fiddling", I don't know what you mean, and I'd guess that most developers don't think twice about how to use SSH. (If they did, they're not much of a developer in my book).
It's ironic to me that the most difficult part was having to jail-break my iphone. Apple certainly doesn't make my life any easier.
I disagree. To me, the jail-break is just a default, one-time requirement to gain control over a device I own. It's actually not too difficult, so I don't consider it fiddling.
My couple-of-years-old Dell laptop running vanilla Ubuntu controls my camcorder (over firewire, no less) just fine. I used kino or one of the other non-linear editors to cut the files up and add music. Pretty simple with no fiddling actually.
I don't exactly get the people who advocate that everyone should use Linux, but I especially don't get the people who have stuck their head in the sand about the fact that the Linux Desktop is quite usable these days with no extra configuration. It's not worthy of argument and a misdirection at best.
Not tried with a digital camcorder, but I can do all that with my phone using Ubuntu on my four-year-old desktop, so can my mother on her two-year-old Dell laptop. It isn't as smooth as on OS X, but it's definitely possible.
Yes. I've done both (on Ubuntu) without ever having to do anything but parouse the package manager (which is the easist way to install software of any of the 3 major OSes). And they were pretty easy.
Now can you open Solidworks files on OS X? No? Well then obviously Mac OS X is a horrible choice for everyone, because it certainly doesn't work for me.
Pick any random use case and you can single out any one of Windows, Linux, or OS X as being inferior to your choice. I miss Textmate on Linux and I miss the command line on Windows and I miss some of the professional applications I use on Linux and Mac.
> So, can you, say, connect your mobile phone or your digital camcorder and view and edit the files to send an edited version to your grandmother in a Fedora Linux without fiddling?
I have no idea; as that's not a use-case I care about. I don't claim that Fedora Linux is suitable for everybody or every use-case, mind you. But as a developer, who spends most of his time writing code, listening to music, watching stuff on Youtube, random net surfing, or editing documents of some sort, it does "just work."
It's certainly easy to connect up an Android phone to by Fedora desktop.
As for compiling iPhone apps, I agree that OSS sucks. But that doesn't really commend OSX as a platform : It's just something that's being forced on me by Apple.
