I understand that for most people user friendly simply means “the same thing I’ve been using for the past 10 years”. Hence the success of Windows.

@Ankur: I don’t know how you rate Linux distributions but I know you will like some distribution more than the others. Ubuntu is a choice. Mandriva is a choice. You cannot go around calling any of them the best because everyone has different needs. You may like KDE even if I write a really bad review of 4.1

@Apoorv: Congratulations on your purchase. Hope this is the first of many Macs to come.

@Uncool Shitty: User friendliness isn’t something that can be defined easily. I use Mac OS X but my family doesn’t. Just because I find it user-friendly and simply, everyone else wont. If I did not have the option to buy a Mac, I would have either waited till I got that option or bought a computer with Windows Vista(more likely, since I don’t wait usually).

I find Compiz to be just a toy. I’m not into eye candy, and even on the Mac I’ve disabled most of the annoying GUI effects that come enabled by default. On Linux, I find plain old GNOME to be good enough.

PackageKit is a nice idea, but it doesn’t really affect me. I spend most of my time inside the command line and I barely touch Synaptic except when I need to look for a program I don’t know by name. A sidenote : check out Fink.

Before anyone labels me a fanboy, let me remind everyone that I still stand for open source. If ever I develop something that is worth releasing to the public, it will be under the GPL..

Apple is just a company. Let’s leave it at that. They make computers. I just purchased one and I liked it.

THAT’s a relief. Good thing that you’re still sane. Maddox was totally right about one thing – how Apple hypes Mac to be more than a computer, and into an ‘experience’ – which is just that, hype.

Thank you, and I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying the experience of using my Macbook.

@AnkurB

Well, I still love using PCLinuxOS on my home PC. I may be using a Mac right now, and really love its simplicity and usability, but that doesn’t mean that I have changed my ideology and that I am a closed-source-swearing-by-Apple-fanatic. We all love reading what Maddox writes, and I had a good laugh when I read the article quoted by you, over an year ago. Things haven’t changed much since then, and I still chuckled while reading the article again. But now we both know what the truth is and what is exaggerated.

And I believe that PCLOS is the most usable system in the world and the three words – “It just works.” are better suited to PCLOS system than a Mac.

@Uncool

I use this is turning out to be quite a nice source for a beginner. Its just like our old Digg, except for Applications rather than news.

CUPS was ‘mainly developed’ by an independent group before Apple bought it a few years back.

I haven’t used Chrome, but I think it’s too early to call it badass.

(I hate being a language Nazi.)

Anyway, my reason for getting a Mac was it’s UNIX roots. It’s a lightweight, stable, safe and solid OS. Apple’s display server (Quartz) is much faster than Xorg (let’s not talk about Windows here), I’ve got Mac versions of all my favorite tools (Ruby, Python, GCC) and I never have to do any maintainence at all. On my PC, I still run Linux (a new distro every few months).

Apple has contributed a lot to open source. CUPS is mainly developed by Apple. WebKit was forked from KHTML by Apple, and now it’s the fastest web engine out there. Even Google Chrome is using WebKit (but they use their own VM for JavaScript called V8, which kicks the balls off any other virtual machine out there).

I’m no fanboy. I just chose the most user friendly UNIX out there.

I’ve used Mac OS X once, and I hated it. On a lighter note, you might want to see this (no offence meant): http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant

Only after using this machine can you understand the cause of fanboyism among Mac users. Three words : it just works.

The only system that can come close to the Mac in terms of simplicity and user friendliness is Ubuntu.

Anyways, enjoy the machine and post more details and ur experience soon.