radiojohn wrote:
Thanks for the info on AftershotPro...but is it for Windows? The fellow is trying to use Linux.
Yes pretty sure there is a linux version (personally never used it thou)
Osx has bsd at the core of it. To cut a long story short. First there was Unix and many people contributed and later were locked out of the software they developed which pretty much led to another implimentation bsd (many variations) linus torvolds came along and started up Linux the names a cross between linus and unix.
Also works very like unix. Macs tend to do things graphically but they still have a commandline coming from linux to mac I was pleased to find brew and macports these are package managers and have ensured that most linux / bsd software has a mac version.
Macs can run OSX Windows and Linux even all 3 at the same time if you run the latter two in a Virtual machine (a Virtual machine usually uses a large file (or several 2GB files as a hard drive) They support usb hardware so you can connect external drives to them to. Generally the virtual machine manages to run about 90 ish percent the speed of the guest os running directly on the hardware but as a general rule tend not to allocate more than half of the hosts physical Ram. Windows prefers around 4GB+ of ram so you would prefer to have at least 8GB of physical ram, Linux can run on less, (much less if its not running a gui and for some tasks it isnt needed many linux servers are managed from a web browser remotely). Of course any operating system can be the host OS although OSX is restricted to being a guest on OSX systems. A mac can boot directly Windows or Linux as well but it's a pain to shutdown and restart. A virtual machine can be suspended at anytime and resumed any time later.
If you have windows hardware you officially only have the choice of Windows or Linux (unofficially there are hackintoshes which run on a subset of windows compatible hardware).
Company I work for has us all subscribed to microsoft online. Since it runs in a browser window (usually for me Chrome) it doesn't care about the underlying Operating system. So you can have Microsoft office on any operating system capable of running a webbrowser.
Linux command line is very much like the OSX command line and generally with a desktop linux system you don't need to use it much. Although there are many times you may want to. If your administrating a Windows Machine in a networked environment cmd is a common command to open a windows command line as is (ipconfig and ping). Its just faster at times to just hit the command line.
Linux is a kernel and has a fair number of desktops or user interfaces available, android is essentially a linux desktop as is chrome OS the ones used on 'linux systems' are gnome and kde but there are others and a few variations. Most of the programs are the same anyway.
For me osx is like a super linux i can do pretty much everything I could do on Linux within OSX and get the commercial software such as Lightroom which wasn't available under Linux. Even administration of a Windows domain server is done by using a remote desktop session it doesn't matter what operating system runs that session its just passing mouse and keyboard commands to the remote system and displaying the screen.
Virtual machines are the big thing these days Amazon Microsoft and Google all offer them. Google can rent you a machine with 96 cpu cores and 8192 GB of ram (by the minute) or a small slice to run a service. If you are rendering video frames then 96 cores is very handy but hopefully its a blockbuster not a home movie :) it's not a small bill for that kind of power.