No Longer A Mac Guy
I got to be a Mac guy for a few months. I had the nice new Macbook Pro with the 15″ monitor and lotsa ram/disk.
I didn’t become a mac fanboy. I thought the device worked well, and I fell in love with the idea of 5 hours of battery life (which I actually got with the screen dimmed and the wifi turned off). I will never get used to a normal touchpad ever again. I kinda miss the nice Control-Space finder tool.
But I didn’t like installing and upgrading software, and I didn’t have the huge supply of ready-to-install software via ports that I have with the likes of Debian or Ubuntu. The filesystem hierarchy is different (not better) and it was not as much fun to get programming tools into the box. I don’t buy software, so I didn’t try any of the Mac special software that didn’t come with the box.
The UI is quirky and pretty, and the hardware is very nice but it wasn’t enough to win my heart in a few months of use. I actually didn’t like the terminal emulator, and that was a big turnoff. It had some nice UI effects, but I generally turn those off in Linux and Windows (not that I’ve spent any considerable amount of time in Windows in the past 7 years or so).
I think that Mac is a huge improvement if you’re used to Windows or RedHat-based distributions. If you are used to APT then you’ll not find anything nearly as nice in Mac. If you are comfy in XFCE, Gnome, or KDE you might find the apple UI a little annoying. I didn’t like that the UI was not remotable like X (though you can install X on it, just as you can install it in Windows — as a second-class citizen).
It was okay. I happily recommend it to my friends needing long battery life and jet-setter portability. If you have a Windows box, definitely check out Mac. If you are using Ubuntu or Debian, don’t expect too much and you might love it. I just didn’t fall in love.
