So, after 7 years of being a mac laptop user, I’m strongly considering switching back to Linux.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, the hard drive in my (18 month old) Macbook died. Nothing super-serious, but unlike in the past, replacing the hard drive isn’t a 3-screws operation, so rather than rushing out and getting a new drive, I just waited until work on Monday and grabbed myself a Linux machine.<\/p>\n
In using Linux for the past week, there’s relatively little that I miss from OS X. (The biggest drawback may be lack of Netflix; curse my addiction to DRMed streaming media!)<\/p>\n
Although I’m on a bit of a beast of a machine — a Dell Precision M2400, hardly the prettiest of Linux machines — I’ve found that overall, Linux has most of the things that I use on a daily basis from OS X — in many cases easier than it would be to get them via OS X. <\/p>\n
All of my nitpicks come down to minor differences than any switch would have — for example, I miss being able to quickly change between *applications*, instead of just windows of an application; I feel a bit slower on Linux than I did on Mac still, and for some reason my several attempts to install Flash don’t seem to have actually worked. I am missing having Exchange MAPI support in a mail client; with our Nokia mail setup, this means I can’t get my mail from outside the firewall except via webmail (ewww). <\/p>\n
But a lot of the things that were problems in the past, just haven’t been issues. Sound and Power seem to work just as well as on OS X. Since I already use VLC, not much difference there. I miss Safari a little bit — not for any particular reason, just in the ‘getting used to things’ sense — but a full screen Firefox… version-whatever-I-Have (apparently, after checking, the answer is ‘6.0’) doesn’t feel particularly different in any significant way.<\/p>\n
After 7 years of being on mac, and now switching back to Linux for the past week — I haven’t yet found anything that feels like a huge win for mac, and I have found many small wins for Linux. I expect that in the next couple weeks I’ll make a final decision on whether I want to make the jump and get a long-term computer that’s Linux, but right now, I’m leaning strongly towards “yes.”<\/p>\n
I’ll just have to keep my tablet handy for watching Netflix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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