My first day with OS X
By Daniel on Wednesday 5 December 2007, 10:22 - Gadgets - Permalink
I have finally made a plunge that I had been thinking of making for some time: moving to a more effortless desktop operating system. I primarily use my computers for development and the usual stuff (mail, music, etc.), as such I want to spend less time on maintaining my desktop systems. I have a few additional requirements for a desktop system: it should have a UNIX kernel, shell, etc. and the usual development tools (Python, Ruby, C/C++).
The best candidate was OS X, so I bought the lowest-spec Mac mini. The first impressions are good: I am already getting used to the interface, installing TeX et al. was easy, and everything seems snappy. I had to print some stuff, just plugging my Laserjet 5M did the trick, no additional configuration was required. So far so good :).
Comments
Now just find a hassle free mail program. No, mail.app isn't it, mail.app is one of the worst applications I've ever seen in my life. :)
Hehe, for now it works for me (hey, I have got used to Evolution ;)). But I suppose there's always mutt?
Frankly, I'd never have thought you'd go for an Apple pc, at least not for the reasons you mentioned (less maintenance time).
I/we have an iBook G4 with OS X Tiger and although I have few complaints, I don't think it takes less time to maintain than CentOS 5 on the desktop. I'm running that most of the time now on the desktop because my Fedora pc is gone (see below).
Especially my wife hates the way Apple lets programs handle files. We never use the photo program, iTunes, frankly, none of the "Apple" programs, because we like to know where our files are and to decide where they are ourselves. This is a choice Apple makes that you can argue makes sense to a lot of people, but although my knowledge of Unix isn't impressive, I still like to feel I'm in control of a pc and not the other way around.
There are some things that I really like about having an Apple pc (sorry, I'm not yet 'ready' to use the fanboy word "Mac"). This includes boot speed, stability, virtually flawless suspend/resume (all of this is amazing on the PPC arch + Tiger, I don't know about x86_64 and Leopard), and some other easy bits. And it is sort of my only laptop (you really should have bought a second hand iBook, actually, in stead of a Mac Mini).
On the other hand, if you have the right hardware, this shouldn't be a problem with Linux/BSD either. I used to have an Athlon with an older nVidia chipset that did all of that just fine with Fedora 5, 7 and 8 until I gave it to my dad after his P4 died. (I didn't want him to buy another Windows preloaded machine and start the same misery all over again.)
I was also under the impression Daniël that you weren't fond of Apple's environmental attitude. Did something change in that respect? :-) (no I won't be too hard on you in that regard, anyway I am full of inconsistencies myself :P ).
regards,
herman/Mulgogi
Hi Herman,
Thanks for the long and useful comment! Some short answers (planning to blog more in the future).
"Frankly, I'd never have thought you'd go for an Apple pc, at least not for the reasons you mentioned (less maintenance time)."
Of course, I am not sure yet that that will work out. Some first minor annoyance in that respect are disk images for add-on software. yum or APT repositories are far more elegant, especially with a tool like synaptic. I do understand that not every 3rd party developer will provide repos, but for opensource applications it is a far more convenient format.
"I was also under the impression Daniël that you weren't fond of Apple's environmental attitude. Did something change in that respect? :-)"
Actually, there were some reports from other organizations. And it seems that the criteria of Greenpeace are not really objective and fairly arbitrairy.