I had been using a Linux laptop for over 6 years until it died last fall. Now I'm using a MacBook and I'm absolutely loving it. Why?
- Power management. Suspend and resume just works. The battery life is great. Linux has catching up to do in terms of power management. (I know ACPI docs are bad/non-existent, and that it's not the kernel hacker's fault, and that lot's of things are improving. But my Mac does a better job right now when I need it, and I didn't have to configure anything.)
- Keynote. I need to give good presentations as part of my job, I need to communicate ideas. Every minute I don't spend fighting my presentation tool is an extra minute that I can spend on content and delivery. OpenOffice Impress and MS PowerPoint drive me nuts. Keynote is so ... simple. It just works. It has a decent interface. Well done animations are suddenly worth the effort (and nothing explains a technical process as good as a well-done animation).
- Presenting works. How many times have I seen people fail to get X11 to talk nicely to a projector? Even (Linux) kernel hackers had that happen to them. If they can't figure out X11, I sure don't want to risk to look unprofessional in front of an important audience. With my MacBook, I just show up, connect my Laptop, and it works. Every time.
- It's still a real UNIX (unlike Cygwin). I've got Emacs, I've got bash, and most of development work doesn't feel any different from what I did with Linux.
- It's got MacPorts. I thought I was going to miss Linux package management tools, but MacPorts is just as good (if you don't mind waiting for the compile to complete).
- Time machine. Yes, I do know rsync. I do know cron. I do know all kinds of tools. Did I use them regularly? No, I was too lazy, as I suspect most people are. Have I lost data because of that? Yes, and it hurt. Now, I do a backup every night when I come home, because it happens automatically. If I break my MacBook, all I have to do to restore my old system (including all installed programs and settings) is to hook up a new Mac to my backup drive. OS X will do the rest, which is great since I bet that my hardware will fail just before an important deadline...
So is all that worth several hundred dollars? For me, it is. Buying a MacBook has taken away one more thing to worry about. I rely on it to just work, and so far it has not let me down.
I thought I was going to miss Linux package management tools, but MacPorts is just as good
MacPorts is decent, but it is definitely not as good as apt/dpkg in terms of overall package quality, comprehensiveness, and convenience. In the same way that Mac power management "just works" (and I agree with you enthusiastically there), Debian/Ubuntu packages "just work." Also, MacPorts only applies to Unix-style software: most Mac applications do their own installation/uninstallation/updates, which is much more annoying.
Another delightful thing about package management on Linux is that it is commonplace to upgrade all the packages installed on your system every 6-12 months, for free, whenever new revisions of your distro are released. Compared to paying $99 for a new version of OSX that isn't integrated with any of your installed packages, it's not nearly as nice.
2. kenote: don't know about this, but there are so many choices in this space now. c'mon.
3. ubuntu 8.04 and above are ok with this now. i do it all the time.
4. i'ts more of a bsd-flavored unix. i guess that's ok.
5. macports suck and you know it.
6. time machine: well, i guess that's convenient but i don't know in which format time machines store data. that makes me nervous. here, just copy and paste this. use it EVEN if you have time machine.
$source="mysource";
$destination="mydestination"
rsync --archive --delete $source $destination
i'll throw in the cron entry too for every day at 2am (put the above in run-backup.sh)
# m h dom mon dow command
0 2 * * * /sbin/admin/run-backup.sh
now, if you like your macbook because you like how pretty it is (which i'm guessing is the real reason) then enjoy it.
Oh, and interestingly, suspend and resume work flawlessly on my MBP under Fedora 9, without configuration. So yeah, this is still a hardware issue, and when the hardware is good, it works fine.
Ubuntu 8.04 on my Dell D830 has decent hibernation (never use sleep or suspend, so I don't know it they are good).
It seems that assorted issues come up because of various hardware configuration: video card, wifi, sound card, etc. But as of now I'm quite happy with my Kubuntu laptop.
The comment about using them regularly was mostly targeted at rsync, tar, and other backup tools. I never invested the effort to automate my backups even though I am well aware of cron.
Part of the problem is that the manual part of connecting the backup hard drive remains. I don't like online backups since I don't have sufficient bandwidth. So what I was really looking for was a nicely scripted backup solution that integrates with udev, so that I really only have to plug in my hard drive. And figuring out udev -- which tends to change from version to version -- is something that I thought I'd do "later."
autofs and test -e for the existence of a file in the mount point. But this is all moot since you've already decided to let Apple handle it. I wonder how many people who use Timemachine actually verify the backups created with it.
- Power management. Suspend and resume just works. The battery life is great. Linux has catching up to do in terms of power management. (I know ACPI docs are bad/non-existent, and that it's not the kernel hacker's fault, and that lot's of things are improving. But my Mac does a better job right now when I need it, and I didn't have to configure anything.)
- Keynote. I need to give good presentations as part of my job, I need to communicate ideas. Every minute I don't spend fighting my presentation tool is an extra minute that I can spend on content and delivery. OpenOffice Impress and MS PowerPoint drive me nuts. Keynote is so ... simple. It just works. It has a decent interface. Well done animations are suddenly worth the effort (and nothing explains a technical process as good as a well-done animation).
- Presenting works. How many times have I seen people fail to get X11 to talk nicely to a projector? Even (Linux) kernel hackers had that happen to them. If they can't figure out X11, I sure don't want to risk to look unprofessional in front of an important audience. With my MacBook, I just show up, connect my Laptop, and it works. Every time.
- It's still a real UNIX (unlike Cygwin). I've got Emacs, I've got bash, and most of development work doesn't feel any different from what I did with Linux.
- It's got MacPorts. I thought I was going to miss Linux package management tools, but MacPorts is just as good (if you don't mind waiting for the compile to complete).
- Time machine. Yes, I do know rsync. I do know cron. I do know all kinds of tools. Did I use them regularly? No, I was too lazy, as I suspect most people are. Have I lost data because of that? Yes, and it hurt. Now, I do a backup every night when I come home, because it happens automatically. If I break my MacBook, all I have to do to restore my old system (including all installed programs and settings) is to hook up a new Mac to my backup drive. OS X will do the rest, which is great since I bet that my hardware will fail just before an important deadline...
So is all that worth several hundred dollars? For me, it is. Buying a MacBook has taken away one more thing to worry about. I rely on it to just work, and so far it has not let me down.