IN a recent piece for TechRepublic, Jack Wallen, a longtime Linux advocate, contemplates the purchase of an iMac. As a Linux user myself, I can’t help but agree. But unlike Jack, I switched from Windows to both Linux (on the desktop) and the Mac (on the road) at about the same time, so I had none of the doubts that he entertained.

Starting with an old Apple iBook running Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) in 2005 and my main PC running Dapper Drake (Ubuntu 6.10) in 2006, I gradually learned to perform tasks that I used to do on Windows. I also found that there were quite a few similarities between Linux and the Mac, which are, after all, both based on Unix.

Over the years, I discovered that many of the open source applications I used on Ubuntu were also available on the Mac.

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