MacBook
So we got MacBook Pros at work for our latest round of laptops. Being that we are and equal oppertunity employer we had the choice between new Dells or the Macs and we thought we’d give the macs a try. As soon as I got mine I installed Parallels and got a Ubuntu and XP virtual machine up and running. Ubuntu isn’t officially supported so I guess I should have expected it to be crashing every once in awhile. I can’t work like that though so I’ve ended up working on getting everything to work in the mac world.
There are a few apps that I’ve found I needed in order to get this going, first off was Adium which was my replacement for Gaim. Entourage is our replacement for Evolution and I’m not totally sold on that yet but it seems to be working okay. For an IRC client I ended up with X-Chat Aqua which was a function I previously had setup in Gaim, but it might be better this way as I’ll get distracted less often by IRC when checking my messages. I ended up doing battle with Fink and at this point I’ve got Gnome, Gimp2.2 and apt tools running under Darwin X. There is also a remote desktop client out there which has worked very well so far, I admit I didn’t try out anything else looking for a solution as this was the first thing I ran across and it seemed to fit the bill. MySQL tools have a mac port that even includes a desktop widget that I haven’t tried out yet, but it looks interesting. Firefox seems to run well enough and I’ve spent a little while out getting my extensions put in, hopefully they make my screen shots sexier.
The real pain for me is adjusting to the mac, the whole Command instead of Alt and the lack of a right click is a tough thing to get over. Learning to Command – Tab and Command – Tilde to rotate windows is taking a bit of learning as well as learning how to hide and bring things back and use hot corners and the dashboard feature. I had thought untabbed terminals would be a real pain but it’s not turning out to be as much or a problem as I had originally though it would be. The thing that bothers me the most though is a click the red x on Firefox, and while the window does go away the app is still open, that is going to take awhile to get used to. Overall though I’d have to say the conversion is going well but I don’t think I’ll be a power user for a little while. I suppose I’ve still got my Ubuntu in a virt machine if I get really frustrated by something or think I’m missing a piece I need.
As far as portability, battery life, weight of the machine, wireless and feel of the keys the hardware itself is light years beyond the D800 I was using before. I think it would even have been a good investement had I gone and wiped out OSX and went with a base install of Fedora or Ubuntu. For those people out there with kids, it’s a small thing but the way the power cord works with a magnetic hold that’s enough to keep it attached but not on there real tight has already saved the laptop from multiple spills on the floor.