I currently use Debian GNU/Linux. I love Linux. Been using it on my main computer for around 8 years now. (Before that I was using an operating system called Windows – you might have heard of it!) But my plan (if all goes well) is to use a Mac as my main workstation from now on.

If I love Linux so much, why the “moving to Mac” idea? Well I’ve been eyeing up those oh-so-sexy sleek things in AppleCentres for years now. They always look like they’re “from the future”. I like that. And I love the idea of OS X being “unix-like” under the hood, so I should feel right at home. But up until now I’ve been faithful to my trusty Linux boxen.

I think what finally moved me from “vaguely wanting a Mac” to “I am going to buy a Mac” was when I recently upgraded Debian on my lovely (but battle-weary) ThinkPad T20, and the thing wouldn’t even boot into X. In fact starting X caused a hard crash (you know, the kind where you have to unplug the thing and take out the battery).

Now these things happen from time to time, but this one really stumped me. In fact I spent several hours trying to fix the problem. It’s still not properly solved (I worked around it by downgrading the kernel, but now sound doesn’t work – doh!).

That’s when it dawned on me. I spend a lot of time tinkering like this with my Debian machines. Occasionally it’s frustrating, and often it’s fun (if you like that kind of thing). It’s a great way to learn about computers too. But eventually I realised that most of the hours I was spending tinkering with Linux could be better spent doing actual work. 🙂

Like many people who have never bought a Mac, I have this vague idea that they are “more expensive than PCs”. But if the Mac can save me even an hour or two a week of tinkering then it will have paid for itself in a couple of years. I need a new computer soon anyway (my main machine is an 800MHz Pentium for goodness’ sake), which means I’m going to be forking out some cash whether I like it or not!

So my theory is that I waste a lot of time tinkering with Linux, whereas Macs are supposed to “just work”. For my main work computer, that sounds great. Let’s see if it’s actually true…

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.