A comment like Joe's really surprises me. Time and again I see brilliant coders who for whatever reason cannot see the path to making their own live USB/SD sticks.
But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion.
Sell hardware that has no bundled OS.
Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks).
Or users can create their own OS memsticks.
Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share of their revenue.
If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.
I've read all of Joe's comments in this thread, and I'm not really surprised. He is either a troll (and not a very successful one if he is), or, more likely, a bigot who believes that the any software worth running costs >$100 (office, photoshop).
Unfortunately, he represents a non-negligible majority of users out there. But I care not discussing anything with him and his like on HN. I've got better use for my time.
Maybe he works for a company that sells software priced at over $100?
I have no doubt such companies have employees, or contractors, who not only monitor message boards on behalf of the company, but who post comments on them in a deliberate attempt to influence discussions in ways favorable to the company's interests. Whether they are effective is another question. But they are trying.
Younger readers should be aware of this as they are the ones being targetted.
Perhaps it's not that a majority of users are convinced price equates to quality control so much as a majority are aggressively manipulated in terms of what information about software they are exposed to.
It's actually pretty easy to do. I've seen several Windows, several BSDs and linuxes as well as some open-solaris derivative on x86 Macs.
The PowerPC macs are a bit less well supported just because there are fewer distros for PowerPC, but on the other hand, since apple's pretty much abandoned them, going with linux or a BSD has its own advantages
_I was not aware it's "easy" to run other OS's on Apple hardware. Knowing Apple, I'm still not sure I believe it._
I run linux (arch now, but once ubuntu) on a MacBook5,4. It's somewhat harder to get set up if you want to dual boot (the dual partitioning scheme is finicky, and although linux doesn't need it, OS X forces you to use it if there's a foreign OS, ugh..). See http://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook .
Only one proprietary driver (for wireless) is needed - the rest Just Works. (And flash plays smoother than on OS X :P )
One thing that could be easier is booting MacBook Pro from USB stick. A Unetbootin that works on Mac, and builds usb sticks bootable on Macs, would be good.
My preference is to use only the bootloader for the OS I'm booting, as opposed to a "boot manager" that presents a menu of OS's. I avoid using chaining techniques the way something like GRUB does. And I don't use MBR's if I don't have to. Disklabels alone will suffice. So the stick contains only an OS-specific bootloader and the OS, usually just a kernel with embedded ramdisk or a loadable kernel module containing a filesystem and userland. I keep it very simple.
This works well for me with PC's. Would this work with today's x86 Macs?
I installed Windows as dual boot on a friends Mac.
It's far easier than installing it on a windows PC.
Put in the windows disk and follow the Apple instructions - it includes all the drivers and even gave advice about sharing files
.
Joe here - I am unaware that USB/SD sticks are fast enough to run as my system drive. Ok, cool. I haven't used a stick in years (ever since this new thing called the Internet showed up).
Yes, agree with Mr Binary - in a perfect world, computer hardware and software are completely divorced. The hotel wouldn't worry about viruses, because there would be no storage on their computer at all - I provide that with my stick. All I need is a 'kiosk computer', hardware that I can repurpose.
If what you're using works for you there's little reason to switch. I have had certain consraints in how I use computers that motivated me to explore different alternatives that "do more with less". But as users demand smaller devices and more portability I'm beginning to wonder if these "unconventional" alternatives are not generally useful for others besides me.
Not only do I divorce the OS from the hardware, but I separate the OS from my personal data. Unless I have both wholly residing in RAM (which I find generally faster than HDD or USB/SD), they are not on the same media. As much as possible I try to make the OS read-only and the media used for data (e.g. RAM for short-term data storage or HDD for long-term data storage) read-write. Perhaps there are parallels to certain object file formats and their separation of code and data.
I've also thought a lot about and experimented with the use of separate, simplified, fast-booting OS's for different purposes. I am forced to use different OS's to perform certain tasks. But the popular all-purpose OS's are huge and often I only need a small fraction of their functionality.
What if we did not think in all or nothing terms about OS functionality? What if some OS's were small and only limited-purpose?
Rebooting is the slow step. But these limited-purpose OS's, being small and simple, can be very robust and responsive once booted.
The smaller the kernel and userland, the more RAM I have for storage.
But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion.
Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks.
Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share of their revenue.
If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.