Mac
I think in my next computer purchase, I'’m going to go with a Macintosh.
The main thing that does it for me is the OS X. I’ve been a PC guy forever, and for the five years before law school have lived exclusively in Linux/Unix. I worked all day long in Unix, I came home and used Linux on my PC’s. Sometimes I’d boot into windows for gaming, but that was about it.
Then I came to law school. And I needed to start using XP and a laptop. Which linux didn’t handle too well: the hibernation was kind of funky. I haven’t found anyone who can get my machine (Thinkpad X31 — fabulous!) to hot-dock properly under Linux. The worst was when I hibernated in windows, and then woke in linux. This would completely screw up any files that had been left open in windows and worked on in linux. Very bad.
I miss that strong Unix shell. I miss being able to list a directory, pipe that output into text, or write up a quick script to automate some task. I can’t think of how many times I’ve wanted to be able to grep through a bunch of output. I miss the diagnostics I can do with ps, top, and kill. I’m sure windows can do these things, I’ve put emacs and perl on my machine. But its not the same.
But with OSX, it IS the same. OSX is built on top of a Unix. They’ve even got their own version of the coolest unix feature around: the FreeBSD ports system, renamed DarwinPorts. With ports you can install and upgrade about 2000 pieces of open source software.
But I’ve still got some apprehensions. Which is why I’m going to start investigating the situation. Is the Unix seamlessly entwined with the GUI? Can I really work around in Unix and expect the GUI to still work? Will X11 based applications work along with the Mac GUI? Will Mac people even know what I’m talking about when I ask about the Unix stuff? or will I look like a freak?
Will I have to buy new software? I currently use OpenOffice, which does a pretty decent job of interfacing with MS Office, but sometimes does act screwy. I’d hate to have to buy MS office, but probably will have to someday. It looks like the Mac OpenOffice is brand new, which might not be a good sign.
I don’t plan on buying a desktop anytime soon, and my current laptop still has a good couple of years left on it, so its not going to be soon. But its looking like it will happen. Maybe by then they’ll have two buttons.
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two buttons and a pointer
Comment by Aharon — 4/27/2005 @ 9:55 am
Oooh, ya. Pointer. the touchpad is hard. Maybe I can come up with a touchpad thumb technique that doesn’t require me to move my hand from the keyboard.
Comment by site admin — 4/27/2005 @ 10:08 am
Man, in terms of civics — it a choice between a company that flip-flops on gay rights and one that bans books from their well-designed shops, not to mention sues online reporters. It’s lose lose.
Comment by Rachel — 4/27/2005 @ 3:14 pm
At least with the Linux I had no-one to blame for anything.
Comment by site admin — 4/27/2005 @ 3:45 pm
There is definitely a place for Unix geeks in the MacOS world. For example, see Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks. Apple itself supports X11 in Mac OS.
Comment by Anonymous — 4/27/2005 @ 9:10 pm
Thanks anon. I’ll be sure to flip through that O’Reilly book.
Comment by site admin — 4/27/2005 @ 9:49 pm
You’ll find as you get older and busier that you need to eliminate unnecessary hassles from your life, and you’ll come to appreciate things that just WORK like they’re supposed to.
You’d be happier just giving up the crusade and just using something that works pretty darn well right out-of-the-box, Windows.
It’s tremendously freeing once you give up the crusade. I used to be an OS/2 partisan. So every time I bought a computer, I had to uninstall the MS OS, and I had to become a freakin’ OS/2 engineer in my spare time just so I could avoid using MS products.
I finally realized that it wasn’t worth the effort. There were things I flat needed to do on a computer that I couldn’t do because I had prejudicially excluded from my options the leading product. It just didn’t make sense anymore.
The Thinkpad/XP combo works delightfully well. Don’t exclude it from your options just because of a misguided partisan approach to software. Go with what works best.
Comment by Tom Giovanetti — 5/10/2005 @ 11:47 pm
“You’d be happier just giving up the crusade and just using something that works pretty darn well right out-of-the-box, Windows.”
I wrote that its not working for me though. It doesn’t have features that I like. XP on my laptop does have new features that I never needed before, such as hibernation and docking. But it doesn’t have features that I miss from unix — features which worked out of the box. Features which I’ve tried to work around and create in windows but I can’t get to do.
I think Mac has both the features that I miss and the ones that I need now. I also fear that it will have new features which I don’t like, such as the touchpad (hate those!) and only 1 button.
I’m taking a very pragmatic non-partisan approach to this. Educating myself as to what to do and wihch system will better fit my needs. I think you’re being very partisan when you respond to post about Macs with the line of “working out of the box”(!) Isn’t that a big plus of Macs?
Comment by site admin — 5/11/2005 @ 10:21 am