University of Melbourne’s Trinity college replaces Linux penguins with Apple Mac Tigers

21 years ago

“Hope of Linux tackling the desktop market has suffered a reality check with the University of Melbourne’s Trinity College dumping the penguin in favour of Unix cousin Mac OS X, not x86-based rival, Windows,” Rodney Gedda reports for Computerworld. “A lab of 20 PCs running Debian GNU/Linux will be replaced by G5 iMacs with the compelling reasons for the migration being a ‘slick user interface’ and ease of use, according to Trinity College systems administrator Tim Bell.”

“‘Looking at the maturity of Debian as a desktop and it’s not quite there, particularly compared with Mac OS X, which has come a long way,’ Bell said. ‘It has a good user experience and is reliable [so] Mac OS X wins. Debian is still a good platform and is maintainable with minimal updates compared with Windows.’ Bell said OS X supports all the required applications, including Microsoft Office,” Gedda reports. ‘Under Linux we have been using OpenOffice which is great, but the interoperability is not quite there. The labs are not just used by students, so we need to provide labs for people without the time to learn Linux,’ he said. ‘Macs are simple to use and Linux still has a few rough edges.'”

“An additional 33 eMacs are being purchased for the library and administration along with Xserve RAID storage systems for server backups. All up the deal is worth around $90,000,” Gedda reports. “The new computers will ship with the just-released Mac OS X version 10.4 ‘Tiger,’ making the college one of the first in the country to deploy it for business.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Looks like Tigers will eat swimming birds if they must, but they still greatly prefer consuming imaginary beef.