It's not re­al­ly a com­par­i­son be­tween Lin­ux and OS X, be­cause my iBook 1.33GHz is much faster than the 700MHz PIII I run De­bian GNU/Lin­ux on, and since I in­stalled Screen Span­ning Doc­tor the iBook on 1600x1200 also out­per­forms my Lin­ux hard­ware at that point. So why do I even both­er with Lin­ux on an old PIII when I've got a faster iBook?

My Lin­ux box has a TV-card, my iBook hasn't. Maybe it's a plan to hook the lin­ux box up to the oth­er 19" so I can use the iBook and watch TV at the same time. Best of both worlds...

But on the Lin­ux box I also use KDE with mul­ti­ple desk­tops and OS X doesn't have that out of the box. I got as far as chang­ing the win­dow­man­ag­er of Ap­ple's X11 to En­light­en­ment, but that didn't re­al­ly walk with the dual head set­up and con­fus­es Ex­po­sure and stuff like that. It's nice that it's all pos­si­ble, like a PPC Lin­ux Live CD, but it just doesn't cut it as a se­ri­ous desk­top en­vi­ron­ment. So the main thing I miss in OS X is mul­ti­ple desk­tops. And the Lin­ux box is sta­ble in more ways: it's also my serv­er so on mul­ti­ple desk­tops mul­ti­ple ap­pli­ca­tions are open and they stay open un­til I have com­piled an­oth­er ker­nel, which leads to an­oth­er en­vi­ron­ment than a lap­top that switch­es be­tween dual- and mono-head, goes of­fline, roams on sev­er­al net­works and doesn't have pri­vate keys stored on it. Even a 'fink in­stall kde' won't change that...