Joel's new Mac adventure
I recently became the proud owner of a new MacBook Pro - 15.4" screen, 2G ram, 120G hard drive, DVD writer, Intel 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo.
I love this computer.
It brings me back to the Mac world; but thanks to Intel and Parallels (a virtualization app), I get to keep whatever I like from the world of Windows. Parallels (www.parallels.com) lets me run XP in an OS X window - or actually have XP application windows interspersed among OS X windows. It is downright freaky.
Amazing to me that after all these years, Macs still inspire a kind of stylish playfulness in software designers. I've migrated from Microsoft OneNote to Circus Ponies Notebook, for example. Using Entourage instead of Outlook. And more.
I'll report from time to time on my discoveries.
Joel
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Apple took BSD Unix and put eye candy on it. They scrapped all those years of lecturing us that PowerPC is better, OS 9 is better, think different, etc. I am amazed that people stil fall for the Apple panache. I regret all the thousands I spent on their hardware. I should have bought PC stuff because I would have got more oomph for the dollar.
I'm running OS X 10.4.X and can tell you that any time you need something done, it's a command line operation in Terminal. And I mean simple things like preventing a certain volume from auto-mounting, or turning Spotlight off to make the Mac run faster.
And Apple provides no docs to say how, you need to use net forums.
So how is this different from Linux? It's not.
I suggest you try installing Ubuntu Feisty when the final ships April 19. It will run on your Mac.
If you want eye candy, Ubuntu forums can tell you all about Compiz and Beryl. You can make Ubuntu look and behave identically to OS X, twirling docks and all, and 2x faster.
Let's not forget that Apple still charges luxury tax for what is now commodity hardware, and sues the hell out of small people even worse than Microsoft, and is completely in bed with DRM forces because of iTunes.
One day Apple will drop the computer biz to become a music / cell phone conglomerate. When folks realize they're paying a luxury tax for commodity hardware that does a better job of vendor lock-in than Microsoft, they'll "make the switch" to open source. Darwin is closed source now, by the way.
http://www.jsequeira.com/cgi-bin/virtualization/BrowseFacets
Matter of fact, you can run OS X in a box on Linux.
The one thing I will never do again, is put all my data - email / addresses / notes / passcodes - into proprietary vendor formats. The way I do things now, I have access from any OS be it Windows, Mac, or Linux, because of judicious software selections and open data formats. OpenOffice, Chandler, TrueCrypt, etc.
Apple HFS+ file system is something to avoid if possible, but naturally Apple, for vendor lock-in, does not provide ext3 or XFS, requires HFS+ to boot OS X, and offers, for an alternative, a half-baked implementation of an archaic UNIX/44bsd format which you should never use. Ubuntu can read/write HFS+ so if you want to dual-boot, you're in good hands. You may have to tweak the /etc/fstab file as I recall, the Ubuntu default is read-only, but that can be changed.