| I think most of the Hackintosh community has probably tried Linux, at least in VMWware or Virtualbox. After all, it's much easier to install these days. Setting up a Hackintosh now is kind of like installing Linux ~8 years ago. That spare system you have might work (if it's semi recent hardware, in this case), but you might never get the thing to boot. However, if you buy a system with a Hackintosh in mind, if you read the forums and do the research, you will in all likelihood not have any problems and be able to treat it as if it were a real Mac. > would say it is much simpler to setup a nice Linux distro and make it look like a Mac... I'm sorry but this is a pet peeve of mine, or at least it touches on one. I ran Linux for ~8 years as my primary desktop. For most of that time I did not have a Windows machine. I used GNOME most of the time but also spent a lot of time in KDE and Enlightenment. I switched to OSX in '06 but I still install Linux every now and then to see where things are, and sometimes I pop by gnome-look or gnome themes sites to see what's going on there. Point being, I have a lot of experience using Linux. That said, you can maybe, maybe get Linux to the point where you can take a screenshot and it would pass as OSX to a casual OSX user. You can never, ever get Linux to the point where it would fool an OSX user for more than 2-3 seconds. Pretty much to the point where if they interact with the computer at all they'll know. It's like throwing a camo tent over a tank and saying "look, the tank is invisible". It might not show up from 10k feet but anyone that gets near it is going to know it's not OSX, or think it's a very, very broken OSX system. I've seen the blog posts about making GNOME look like OSX and they're insane. They put some crap ass GTK theme together, throw in cairo dock, tweak crap for 4 hours and say "look, it's just like OSX but Linux". No, it is not. > I feel Linux is on par or somewhere not too far behind. Am I wrong here? I don't think Linux can hold a candle to OSX, my opinion of course, except that the one app I've always wished OSX had is Tomboy... best "sticky notes" app ever. |
Just in terms of frameworks, on Linux there is (in common use today) GTK+, Tk, Qt, wx (and probably others). There's also different versions, and different themes (and the themes aren't interoperable, so if you have use a specific GTK theme, and start at a Tk application, they'll look completely different)
On OS X there is Cocoa, and that's about it. There is Carbon, but it's deprecated and used by very few applications
The default Ubuntu install looks good (colour-scheme preferences aside). It only looks bad when you start installing other applications - as soon as you install, say, a KDE application it looks horrible.. Not because that application necessarily looks bad, but because it's inconsistent..