rjamestaylor's Journal: Switched Back

I switched back to Linux/Windows today, officially, with the sale of my not-too-used Titanium PowerBook G4 550. Sold it $800 less than I paid for it (not bad, really) to a friend and co-worker who is a graphics designer. Very appropriate sale.

"Officially" - because in reality I've been leaving my TiBook at home in favor of my 18 month old Toshiba 2805 running, depending on hard drive installed at any given moment, Windows ME (came with it) or RedHat 7.2. At the office my desktop is Windows XP Pro (rock solid) and my servers are all RedHat Linux. The TiBook has been a great machine for my family to watch DVDs on. But not to do real work.

Eventually the dock, no matter what settings I used (and I tried a lot of things) just became an annoyance. The lack of a real program launcher (vis a vis Windows' Start menu, the Gnome Foot, or the KDE thingy), the annoying lack of coherent Alt-Tab window switching, the lack of a decent terminal program (yes, I bought and used GLTerm after damning Terminal; and, yes, I futzed with XDarwin to use "standard" XTerm but could never get Gnome to work to my liking (Gimp kinda worked)) -- at least on WinXP/Me I've got superfast and capable PuTTY.

The thought of programming in Cocoa was enticing but practically DOA since my corporate users are all WinTel based. I new I would need VirtualPC to support Win/IE users. I just was not prepared for how slow VirtualPC would be (all updates applied, 768MB Apple RAM, All kinds of "settings" tweaked)--unbearable for long periods of time. I'm stuck in a WinTel world (business). Just a reality.

There were a number of things I like about the TiBook and Mac OS X, but I found myself gravitating back to WinTel/Linux. I went most of June without waking the TiBook from sleep mode. I just didn't need it.

Then came the .Mac annoucement and the Jaguar upgrade. I couldn't see paying another couple hundred bucks for a machine I wasn't using. Even with the speed increases in 10.2, I wouldn't be using the Mac to support Windows users. Not practical.

Re:Obviously clueless

[rjamestaylor]

You must be responding to someone else's post. Or your reading comprehension skills are subpar.

i hear ya

[BigBir3d]

although, my old roommate has a iBook 500MHz with the DVD drive that he was thinking about selling; and 10.2 has been enough better for him to think otherwise. he is a hard core linux guy, red hat mainly. he still has issues, but it is better.

for me, i am a weenie linux user. actually, ex-linux user as i just sold my pc to a friend who is going to try to install win95 on it *sniff* back on topic; for me, the linux weenie, os x is great. i get a decent GUI to go with the command line that i now appreciate. but i dont have _most_ of the hassles of mandrake or red hat or whatever. it is nice, i can do basic ssh or scp stuff to my website [yzedf.com] easily. granted, it is cheaper to have a pc, but my uptime is 11 days [power outage, the ups ran out of juice :(].

another thing, this iLamp is so damn quiet!

i am sure that in about a year or so, most issues that most people have with os x will be resolved. and then, the application library should be sufficient for the real 'switching' to begin.

of course, IMO.

Re:...what?

[bobbyt]

I switched back after a week. It had more to do with the ibook's hardware failing and apple refusing to speak to me unless i paid per call or purchased Apple care. I hit google groups (just like I always do when I have a problem) but found nothing that would help. There's so much info everywhere to fix even the smallest PC problem and I couldn't get a simple answer on a mac question. I'd rather sell it and take a $300 loss than give apple anymore of my money. It burns me that apple would charge so much for hardware, then not support it. As well as knock the 1yr warranty provided by the manufactures of the equipment down to 90 days to collect more money. Un;ess they make things cheaper and easier for people to switch I doubt they'll ever get more than 5% of the computing market. Back to windows/linux where I can shortcut and mouse my way around quickly for less.