Zac Garrett

A Little History

When growing up around computers like I did one tends to believe that Apple computers are one of the worst things in the world. I refused to touch a Mac computer for many years, I would tell people to get a “real computer”. In all honesty I did not try OS X until recently, not because I did not want to, but because I could not bring myself to spending the money buying the hardware.

When OS X was being ported over to the x86 based Intel hardware I thought for sure this was going to give me the option to run OS X on one of my home computers. It turned out that to do this you have to do quite a few workarounds and it is not legal. For me personally, I did not have a computer at the time that would support the requirements needed. I quickly went back to my ignorant ways of hating Apple.

In the last few years I grew to love Linux. I ran it extensively at home for quite a few years and refused to run much of anything else. I did use the BSDs during this period, but nothing “mainstream”. I loved (and still do) the power you get when running Linux. If you do not like how something works it is open source and you can change it yourself or talk directly to the developers. This works wonderfully when everything is running smoothly, but you get a few bumps in the road and everything is out of whack. I cannot remember the number of times I’ve reformatted because it was easier than trying to fix the issue(s).

My biggest complaint with Linux has been the lack of good wireless support. My primary machine is my laptop and if it is wired there is no point in even using it. I know I am going to get people saying, “Why didn’t you try XYZ, it works great!” To put it simply, I spent many hours working on wireless. You could even say that number in days. I’ve tried nearly everything to get wireless working easily, nothing has made it even remotely similar to the ease of Windows XP with Service Pack 2. There were a few I had high hopes for, but the pain of installing them took that ease away very quickly.

Search for a Great Laptop

In January of this year my laptop literally started falling apart. So, my search was off for a new system. My requirements were that the hardware had to support the *NIX environment very well, have a resolution better than 1280×800, and be powerful enough to do everything I need. After a bunch of research I came down to two systems; Thinkpad T60p and the MacBook Pro (15inch).

Both of these systems will work with just about any distro of Linux and both have great reviews from everyone I asked. I was really in a quandary of which one to choose. There is one that I’ve had bad thoughts about for almost all my life. As well as the one that I’ve actually had bad experience with while working in a PC Services center at Intel. I thought it was going to be an easy choice of going with the Thinkpad. I could just not bring myself to buying a product that I dealt with on a daily basis and it had issues.

What does that mean? Yes, I am a owner of a 15 inch MacBook Pro.

Well, what do you think of it?

First impression, the sucker just works. After spending countless hours tweaking Linux to get it to work just right it is an amazing feeling to have a computer that just works. I had the computer running wirelessly in under half an hour. Most of that time was waiting for some (stupid in my opinion) demo video on the first boot. It also took me a bit of time to find my crazy WPA password (generated by GRC’s password generator).

Software

Once I was on the internet I started looking into how to change the theme. I have always been a fan of dark color themes, you might have noticed by the color of this site. I started to find some theme sites around that did not really explain how they worked. After a bit of searching around I found that a third party piece of software was needed to customize the interface. At this point I am really confused, even Windows had a decent interface for changing the colors. How could this “superior “operating system could not have a way to change the color scheme without paying someone else money. Thinking that I was missing something I forgot about changing the colors for a while and moved on to something that would be better.

I opened up the terminal and was soon at home. All of my simple commands were intact, for the more advanced tools I use I found neat tool called fink that is very similar to apt-get in the Debian based distros. I used this tool to install quite a few tools that I use on a daily basis and now that my computer is setup I do not use the fink all that much.

One of the things I miss most about Linux is a good package manager. When switching from MS Windows to Linux the first thing I noticed was the sheer number of free pieces of software out there. Take for example the Synaptic package manager that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu; The ability to install nearly anything with a few simple clicks is wonderful. Now I am back in a state where I have to manually look for the software and install it.

I’ve also noticed that there is not all that much free software for Macs. Coming from a world of free open source software it is a wakeup call when you get that annoying shareware popup asking for you to pay them. Come to think about it, I do not believe that I even get these messages on Windows much anymore. The only programs that I can think of that still give these are GetRight and WinRAR. I do not even use these pieces of software anymore as there are less annoying free alternatives.

Most of the open source software that I have used and love will work in OS X… with a bit of work. As most of these programs use the X11 GUI you need to install that. This requires grabbing the second DVD that came with the computer and finding the correct file to install. Not the simplest task in the world, but nothing compared to trying to edit the xorg.conf file.

Once installed I could then go about installing my other applications that needed it; primarily GIMP and Open Office. Both programs installed quite easily once the required libraries were on the system. I found a huge problem with running X11 applications in OS X, they are resource hogs and have quite a few annoyances.

When running a X11 application in OS X you may notice that it runs really slow. This is because it has to run a ton of different processes it has to run to get that one program working. I saw it using around half of my RAM with all of the processes combined. This caused everything else to slow down while the program was running.

The issue that caused me to stop using any X11 applications was the inability to keep focus. I do a bit of image editing for various purposes and I find that GIMP more than gets the job done for me. The issue with GIMP in OS X is that the panes for the program are in different windows. When going between these windows/panes things get moved around. For example, trying to move a file from one open file to another does not work properly. I do not know why, but it is annoying. Also, if you keep the program open in the background and you hover over it the program all of the sudden grabs attention. After having this happen a dozen times I had to stop using the program.

After a bit of research I found alternatives for the two X11 programs I wanted to use. For GIMP there is GIMPSHOP which integrates directly into the standard OS X GUI. It works exactly like I would expect. There is also a good alternative to OpenOffice called NeoOffice. It is based on OpenOffice, but puts the OS X feel to it. With these two alternatives to the alternatives I no longer use X11 for my everyday software.

Hardware

One of the things that has always scared me about the Mac was the mouse’s lack of two buttons. Being that my primary system is a laptop and I use the touchpad exclusively on it I need a mouse that works great. I right click a ton and I need something that is easy to use; the touchpad itself on the MacBook Pro may only have one button under it, but if you use two fingers on the touchpad it turns into a right click. You can also use your two fingers to scroll. I love this feature; I end up missing it when I get on another laptop. The mouse is something that should not be feared by PC users thinking of switching to a Mac. If you want to use a normal mouse, you can use just about any PC compatible mouse. I did have a few issues with an old wireless keyboard/mouse setup where only the keyboard works. Replacing it with a similar, but newer model worked like a charm.

I am very particular with it comes to a screen. This is the thing you are going to be looking at nonstop and I for one want it to be perfect. For this reason I refuse to get a glossy screen. I’ve worked on too many systems with this type of screen where if the light hits the screen just right it is annoying. I was told that Apple fixed this with these laptops, but under the glaring lights of the local electronics store I saw different. I am not a designer and would rather have something easy to look at for countless hours at a time than something that could cause an annoyance.

Conclusion

Overall I am extremely happy about getting a Mac. I was extremely hesitant on getting one, but I am very glad that I took this step. I am so happy that I will be recommending Macs to most people who ask me for a computer recommendation. The only reason I would say to stick with a PC today is if you are a heavy player of games. I have noticed that quite a few of the popular games end up getting ported over to OS X if they are extremely successful. If you look at Blizzard Entertainment, creators of StarCraft, WarCraft, and Diablo, all of their recent releases are released at the same time for Macs as the PC.

A computer should work. If you do not like the way something works then odds are someone has created something better. The OS that works the best for me is OS X. I do not try to force any software on someone. I feel that a user should use whatever they are comfortable with. If you are happy with Windows, I see no need for one to switch. If you were unhappy with it, like me, look around to see what else is out there. You may just find something you like better.