Thoughts on Moving to OS X 16 years, 4 months ago by Martey Dodoo
My MacBook is continuing wending its way to me from Shanghai; it should arrive sometime before Wednesday (there is even a chance that it will be delivered this morning). More interesting than the fact that I decided to buy a MacBook (as opposed to a Thinkpad or Sony Vaio or any other model of laptop) is the fact that I am planning to switch to OS X. In the past, I have pilloried OS X as offering false choices to its users. You, gentle reader, are right to expect some answers.
My forays into the world of Linux were motivated not by a need to experience different operating systems and make my life more difficult, but an attempt to simplify things by routing around issues I had with Windows. While my ability to use Linux without serious issues has improved significantly since I started using it five years ago,[1] it has not made things simpler for me.
Incidentally, I do not think that this is Linux's fault. Hardware and software companies that want their products supported on Windows or OS X spend time making sure that there are no outstanding issues. While Linux has sufficiently better hardware and software support than when I started using it, it is still not on the same level as Windows. This is even true if your computer comes with Linux.[2]
While I fully realize that using OS X is not going to be all ponies and rainbows, I am hopeful that it will provide me with a decent experience and help me accomplish more. My thoughts on the matter a year ago, when my Thinkpad's fan needed to be replaced and I spent extended amounts of time using my work PowerBook G4:
If I were to replace OS X with Ubuntu, I think that it is possible that my productivity would actually increase. Maybe then the display would come back on every time the machine wakes from sleep (instead of just 50% of the time).
Actually, neither sleep nor hibernation are currently working on my Thinkpad. I am pretty sure that sleep will work on my MacBook.
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[1] The first time I installed Linux (Mandrake 9.0, now called Mandriva, because I had heard that it was good for beginners. After having ridiculous issues with multimedia and printing, I deleted the partition where I had installed it and used PartitionMagic to resize the NTFS partition where Windows was installed. This corrupted the partition, so I had to reinstall Windows (and I lost everything from January 2003!).
[2] For example, Dell laptops that come preloaded with Ubuntu Linux have a number of issues, and the modem jack in the Asus EEE PC is plugged because there are no drivers for it.