Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I bought a Mac!

About a year ago I wrote some reasons why I wasn't buying a Mac. Well, a year has come and gone an I bought a Mac! And so far, I'm very happy with it!

I could go on forever about what's so great about my Mac, how cool it is just to unpack it, how beautiful the hardware and software are, and all that. But you can read about a million posts on the web about that, so I won't bother.

Instead I'm going to focus on the parts that aren't so good. This way people switching from Ubuntu to Mac will know what to expect.
  1. You have to pay for the software: Oh yeah, most software is closed source and payed for. I really miss doing apt-get and it just works, no payment, no registration...
  2. The keyboard is... different: I have a portuguese keyboard. The Mac doesn't have a } anywhere visible on the keyboard! It took me a while to figure I had to type --9
  3. X11 compatible... kind of: You can run X apps on the Mac. I installed Gimp, and it works. But the UI is a bit clumsy... For starters, the keyboard shortcuts aren't the same for X and Mac (e.g. in Mac you copy with -c, in X with -c). Second, the windows interaction is awkward. In "X mode" you have to click the window to get the focus, then click the button on the window to make it work. Since the Gimp has multiple windows, this is very annoying.
  4. No out of the box NTFS write support: C'mon! I have an external 500Gb HD formatted in NTFS! I had to install MacFUSE from google to make it work!
  5. Only 2 USB ports: Good thing I have a hub!
  6. Strange video output: It has a mini-DVI. Never seen one before. Oh well, I don't have another monitor, so it's not a big problem.
And I can't remember anything else... but I only have the laptop for 4 days!

Don't get me wrong, I love my Mac! But, like all things, it has some downsides. And the biggest one AFAIK is the non-open nature of this platform. Still, if I was going shopping again today, I would still buy the Mac!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

1) theres macports.org with lots of good software in the repository.
sudo port upgrade all
sudo port install packagename
So at least theres a similar system on the Mac :)

3) a FAQ entry on Wilber-loves-apple tells you how to come around this annoying windows thingy
http://darwingimp.sourceforge.net/howto.html#intg1

Have fun with your Mac! :)