Free Mac Alternative (No Windows!)

From Mac Guides

Pro

This guide is for someone in high school college or someone wanting a computer hassle free (no virus etc) but cant pay a lot of money. Some people go down the hackintosh road which works but can be unstable and illegal. Heres a guide to the next best thing in the end you will have: Almost all features of OSX and its completely free!

Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/ this is the best OS for what your about to do.

Either order the CD for free or download the ISO and burn it to a CD/DVD .

Boot your computer and do a complete install or you can allow a windows portion.

Allow update manager to do ALL updates!

Download Mac4lin http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac4lin/

Run the program in terminal press Y to all questions.

Then grab compiz fusion this allows expose and other OSX screen effects.

In the end you have a stable mac alternative without the worry of a virus or update breaking your system!

If you require windows programs there are WINE projects for Ubuntu just like OSX.

Con

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution. Linux is a user-supported system, meaning that other users develop, maintain and quality control the operating system, as well as many of the packages that run on it. By installing a Linux distribution, you are accepting the responsibility to support your own system if something goes wrong with it. If you encounter a defect, and are not capable of fixing it yourself, it is possible you will need to hire someone to fix it for you. Support contracts can be purchased, with varying levels of quality and professionalism in proportion to their cost. It is rare to find a support contract that costs less than the purchase price of either Windows or OS X.

Developing native software for desktop Linux is a historically low-RoI venture, and it's common for commercial software vendors to either avoid support for it altogether or add it well after Windows and Mac versions. For similar reasons, many hardware manufacturers may not supply Linux drivers or may not provide the high quality, high performance drivers seen on other systems. Supporting commercial Linux is a complicated venture as there are many different flavors of core OS, installed libraries, windowing toolkits, and hardware platforms to contend with. Most commercial packages thus take the tactic of supporting a strict subset of the possible permutations (though Ubuntu is among the best supported distributions).

Wine will certainly run many Windows programs; however, as they are not actually running on Windows there may be issues. Many software packages may work fairly well in WINE, but will still be unsupported by their producers.

No Mac software will run on this operating system, and many Apple peripherals such as the iPhone will require modifications that can void the warranty.

The majority of native software packages for Linux are clones of popular software on other systems. Depending on a given project's visibility, complexity and maturity, these packages can range in quality from from non functional to bare bones to highly functional. However, as unrelated clones, these software packages are rarely integrated to the same degree as Mac OS, and most have designs that are functional but unpolished.

The level of choice in libraries and visual toolkits can lead to inconsistencies and incompatibilities. For example, as there is no single analog to CoreVideo or CoreAnimation, one application may be able to open a file, e.g. a RAW file for a given camera, but it is likely that other applications will not be able to. There are similar limits pervasive UI services such as the copying and pasting of multimedia or spelling and grammar checks. There is also no analog to the iLife suite's integratation of a media library across various multimedia production functions, though there are certainly many applications that perform each of those tasks.

Examples of this disconnect can be seen in the screenshots at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac4lin/. Here, a Mac-like menu bar is used to display the title of the active window; in some cases, this menu bar is used for an application's menus and in others, and application maintains its own menu bar. Various controls are colored to look mac-ish, however they do not have consistent visual metrics. A modal dialog window is being displayed which actually prevents a user from accessing the windows in the background; on a mac, this would likely have been rendered with a pull down window. In essence, great care has been taken to clone the visual style of the operating system, but the lack of common design guidelines means that the underlying semantic style is somewhat chaotic.

People who are interested in Macs because they are easy to use, well designed, well integrated and well supported will likely want to stay away from Linux. The true cost of Linux is an often considerable investment of time and knowledge, with the possibility that what you want to do is either impossible or quite difficult. The true cost of a Mac is money.