2 months with a Mac

Posted by andy

About 2 months ago I switched from a Dell laptop running Ubuntu to a Macbook Pro running OS X. The transition went relatively smooth. My motivations for switching to a Mac were threefold;
  1. Trying something new
  2. Bang for the buck
  3. As a fulltime Rails developer it’s probably a competetive disadvantage to not be on OS X :)

After years of running Linux exclusively it’s quite refreshing to see how things work on the other side of the fence. Very good job on the GUI! I think that’s really the strongest point of OS X, the programming API is enabling and Apple did a wonderful job with Xcode. I would imagine it’s much less painful to write against Cocoa than it is to the Gnome API, anyone with experience in both? The nextgen graphics arch for Linux must still emerge (XGL/AIGLX/EXA/Glucosee/etc?) and hopefully everyone will look beyond the silly wobbly windows RSN! There are a couple of things I do really miss from the Linux Dell experience:

  • Debian/Ubuntu repositories. I’m using Fink but it doesn’t even come close to the cohesion of the Linux repositories;
  • If you want OSS stuff to work, it’s better to compile it yourself on OS X, this can be a real time waster if you’re used to just apt-get installing stuff, see first point
  • Audio/Video support, strange as it may sound, Linux is much better at playing out media than OS X IMHO. Playing Quicktime movies in fullscreen actually costs money! Digital content creation is another thing though;
  • Picasa, iPhoto really really sucks, c’mon Google, port!
  • High resolution laptop LCD, I went from 1920×1200 to 1440×900, ouch!

These do make it up:
  • OS X’s GUI, excellent!
  • Multimonitor support, plug & play!
  • Sleep/Hibernate works flawlessly
  • Dual Link-DVI support!
Some commercial apps I really love:
  • TextMate
  • Parallels
  • Keynote
  • OmniGraffle Professional
Unmissable OSS apps:
  • Firefox 2.0 (Aqua)
  • Thunderbird
  • NeoOffice Aqua
  • Adium
  • X-Chat Aqua
  • Gizmo Project
  • Fugu
  • Chicken Of The VNC
  • pgAdmin III
  • Azureus
  • Audacity
  • SSHKeychain
Conclusion: I’ll definitely be sticking with OS X as a development platform for now. Next year we’ll see what the other laptop vendors have to offer, Apple’s offering is the one the beat IMO!

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  1. Mac Newbie – January 10, 2007 @ 12:59 AM
    A few years ago, I made the transition to Mac from Windows, and I've never looked back. I have experience administering Linux servers, so I was right at home with the BSD subsystem. Anyways, to address your problems with Quicktime, you should consider installing VLC. As a former Linux user, I'm sure you're familiar with this software. It works great on OS X, and performs much better than Quicktime--especially if you keep your files on a network like I do. Instead of Azureus, consider installing Transmission. It's much more lightweight, and I've had no performance issues running it in the background. Azureus is a lot bulkier than what I need, and is perhaps to bloated to run well on my computer. I get faster download speeds with Azureus, and my CPU load remains much lower. For a package manager, it is possible to install portage on OS X. I've never done this myself, but if you've got some time, it might be worth looking in to. Portage is very well maintained, so you might have better luck with that repository. Here are some links: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ http://transmission.m0k.org/ http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/macos/