Ubuntu and Mac OS X Snow Leopard

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What are the pros and cons of Ubuntu and Snow Leopard? Which do you think is better? What good features does each have that distinguish them from each other in terms of efficiency, productivity, and quality?

I currently operate on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but I am debating whether or not I should convert to Ubuntu.

You might as well set up your computer to dual boot OS X and Ubuntu via Boot Camp and see what you make of it. If you don't like it, remove the partition.

We can only give you our personal opinions, how you use your computer and what you think is important in an OS are what's important.

My system is a dual boot between Snow Leopard and Mint (which is essentially identical to Ubuntu).

Pros for Snow Leopard: You will never have any driver issues, everything will work reliably and (mostly) flawlessly. Generally a very smooth and polished system. It's still UNIX-based, and if you install Macports or Fink you can have a fairly decent package manager to get a lot of the programs you might want to use in Linux.

Cons for Snow Leopard: Inflexible, limited choice in how things are done. It can be a hassle to get UNIX stuff running on OS X. I've found Snow Leopard to be really bloated and memory hungry.

Pros for Ubuntu: Faster than Snow Leopard on the same hardware. Much wider software selection easily manageable through either the Software Center or Synaptic Package Manager. Much more customization options in terms of UI, look and feel, etc. I personally prefer the GNOME UI over OS X's Aqua interface, but that's subjective.

Cons for Ubuntu: Depending on your Macbook revision, some of the hardware may not work perfectly out of the box. This has improved in recent versions. Right now, on my Macbook the only thing that requires any manual set-up in Ubuntu is my webcam, and even that can be set up properly in about 5 minutes.

I spend almost all my time booted up in Linux. I really don't even use OS X anymore. I find using Linux to be a lot more efficient.

One more point: if you do install Ubuntu on a dual boot, do not use Boot Camp. That is intended for dual-booting Windows. You'll want to install rEFIt as a boot manager, use Disk Utility to shrink your OS X partition, leaving some amount of empty space for Ubuntu, and then tell the Ubuntu installer to format that empty partition as ext4 and mount it as '/'.

I just have one small question: How can I export my Firefox bookmarks from the Snow Leopard part to the Ubuntu part? My first idea was to save my bookmarks as an .html file and upload it on the internet somewhere; this way, when I log into Ubuntu, I can simply go to the domain where my .html file is uploaded and download it from there. However, I don't know any sites that would have this feature. Perhaps there is an alternative solution?

Either copy that .html file from your backup and use the bookmark import in Firefox, or (my preferred solution) install the excellent bookmark syncing Firefox add-on "Xmarks."

If you don't have a Dropbox, it might be a good idea to set one up to sync your documents between Mac and Ubuntu; otherwise you'll end up with files scattered across both partitions and will have a harder time keeping track of where everything is.

VirtualBox actually works well on Snow Leopard.

Except I can't seem to figure out where to find the Shared Folders on the Ubuntu side.

Yes, I read the manual.
But if the Shared Folder on the Mac side is: /Users/dave/Desktop ,
what would that be on the Ubuntu side ?

Any clues?

Ubuntu is only used by robots
OSX is used by Megan Fox

don't blow my cover damn it!

happy festivus!