Operating System Cognative Dissonance

[da]

I've come about 85% of the way to deciding to buy a mac laptop to use as my desktop computer. 15% reservations about it. I was at about 90% before I talked to dan yesterday.

On a day-to-day basis, the things I care about are: emacs (aquamacs), firefox, being able to turn on sshd, being able to use my media (photos and audio). This is all good.

Also there are my coding projects, which I currently do on my linux desktop. I want to be able to turn my linux machine off and still be able to develop in macland. Most of my remaining 15% reservations are about the development switchover.

Fink has lots of great unix packages. But if I buy (*suck in breath*) an intel-based mac, it looks less happy-shiny. The latest news I can find is that intel/fink currently relies on hackery and compiling from source. That's not the sort of coding project I'm looking for, when I really want to just install things to get a project done.

I just want the perfect operating system, 's that too much to ask?

Maybe I should just give up doing dev work on the same machine, and specifically boot a second machine for it. Maybe I should give up getting a mac laptop and buy a slightly cheaper intel laptop. Maybe I should get the mac, use it for what it's good for, and assume the rest will come along soon enough. Like Parallels- I could theoretically run virtual linux, and have the server stuff under the hood? If it's not stable yet, probably it will get there eventually.

*sigh* what a waste of brain-power, cognative dissonance is.

Comments

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Hm... work-related conference, could you possibly borrow a work laptop for a couple of months or at least for the conference?

More stuff to think about -- the Mac Mini is really tiny, even if you need to carry a keyboard and mouse, it will all fit on a backpack and be lighter than a laptop, the only problem is you'll need access to a monitor wherever you go. And really, desktops are not suited to be used *during* a conference with only chairs and not tables.

Also, if you end up with one of the Macs that has no video card (like the Mac Mini or the new MacBook), you may not be able to run stuff that needs studly video cards, like FinalCutPro and/or Aperture, so that's one thing to decide now unless you want to upgrade the computer later.

Speaking of MacBook, yes, they just released a cheaper less studly laptop yesterday, to replace the iBooks.

And also, Macs tend to hold their value pretty well, and that's why you don't see them for cheap on eBay, I still have and use (occasionally) a 400MHz Blue&White G3 (it was once a top-of-the-line, fastest desktop around period) and it's surprising how much stuff still works just fine and most of what doesn't is software that *really* needs the vector processor (AltiVec/Velocity Engine) that G4/G5s have or a studlier video card (that computer has maybe 16Mb). And even though I'm using an iMac G5 most of the time now, I still have the iMac G4 in the living room and it's still a lovely machine (I got the G5 because I do have some software that still needs Classic, which doesn't run on the Intel Mac anymore and I'm gonna wait for them to release in Universal Binary before I jump).

Speaking of eBay, if you get a Mac from another person you don't know, get one locally so you can test it before taking delivery, you don't want ot be stuck with a lemon.

Also, some people I know got pretty good deals buying refurbished Macs straight from an Apple Store or their website (click on the big red tag "Save" from the Apple Store).