Today we have a technological cage match involving two operating systems, both UNIX- based, both mature, both with passionate detractors and even more passionate defenders, and both released just a week apart. I'm talking, of course, about Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), with its final release on October 18, and Apple' s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, which was available for purchase on October 26.

The stereotype for each OS is well known: Mac OS X is elegant, easy-to-use, and intuitive, while Ubuntu is stable, secure, and getting better all the time. Both have come a long way in a short time, and both make excellent desktops. So we have two great desktop operating systems out at roughly the same time. Let's see how they stack up against each other.

Hardware Support

Ubuntu will run on pretty much any computer with an Intel-compatible or PowerPC CPU. The distro claims that you need a bare minimum of 256MB of RAM, but expect glacial performance. In reality, you'll want at least 512MB of RAM, with 1GB even better. You're told to expect that the OS will take up about 4GB of space on your hard drive, which is nothing in terms of today's ginormous hard drives. My main Kubuntu box has 756MB of RAM, with a Pentium 4 CPU, and while certain tasks can be kind of poky, overall it's quite usable.

You can install Leopard on any computer made by Dell, HP, Lenovo, or... just kidding!

More Here