[PLUG] deep philosophical question

[Quentin Hartman]

On 5/20/07, Kurt Sussman <plug at merlot.com> wrote:
>
> Your thoughts, please?
>

I had a similar thought a few years ago, and I got a G4 iBook. The big OSX
experiment. It was nice, a lot of the fighting I did with Redhat on the
previous laptop was gone. I used it wuite happily for about 6 months. After
that time, I sat down and really objectively evaluated my usage profile. I
discovered that nearly everything I used on there was a Linux native
application that I had either installed using Fink (not painless!) or was
repackaged for OSX. There were a few exceptions, a couple native apps I had
come to enjoy, but nothing I couldn't live without. I also discovered that
even after 6 months I never managed to get completely comfortable with the
UI paradigm. It tended to get in my way more than I liked, and there were
certain things that I expected to be able to do easily, but were cumbersome
since it was Unixish, emphasis on the "ish". This made it harder for me to
figure things out when they went sideways. Yes, don't believe the hype,
things do go sideways on Macs. A good friend of mine is battling his iBook
regularly, though not as often as he battles his Windows desktop. But that's
another discussion.

So I dubbed the OSX experiment a conditional failure, and decided to install
Gentoo on it. All that discomfort went away, and I discovered that Gentoo
was not only better for me than OSX, it was better than Redhat had been pre
iBook.

Flash-forward to today. I abandoned Gentoo (too time intensive, and too
prone to breakage on upgrades) and am now a solid Ubuntero. For me, using
OSX was less efficient for me than Linux, but through it, I discovered that
there was a much better distro for me out there too. In full retrospect, I'd
call that a net win, but not due to any particularly great attribute of OSX.

As far as your comments regarding hardware support, my wireless (a store
brand Atheros based card) "just works", and I don't use hibernate.

But yeah, I'd love to be able to use textmate.... ;)

-- 
-Regards-

-Quentin Hartman-