Why run Yellow Dog Linux?
I would say that YDL is ideal for exploring Linux, since it has a nice out-of-the-box experience. I can’t say that the performance is any better than Mac OS X on the same machine, but the visual appearance is excellent and a nice antidote when the sticky-candy look of Mac OS X begins to grate on you. It’s possible there are a few UNIX software packages that will compile on YDL but won’t yet compile on Mac OS X. That’s because OS X has some strange quirks in the way it handles shared libraries of subroutines. But with a comparatively large market share, all the big programs are being ported to OS X. And you have a much larger selection of pre-compiled software on OS X. Things are rather limited on YDL because most pre-compiled software is built for x86 Linux. The problems with Java are an example of that. Linux is still not for the faint of heart. Mac OS X is a much better experience for anyone who wants to avoid the command line. And with Apple’s beta version of X Windows, Mac OS X rea
