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

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

my guess is that the fink situation will resolve pretty quickly.

[kraig.livejournal.com]

DarwinPorts > fink.

I'm currently without my Powerbook, but I can show you on Linda's iBook if you like.

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Hm... this is strangely interesting. I'm not sure *why* you (or anyone else, for that matter) would want to *program* in assembly code. Xcode is pretty nifty and nice. But then again, try to find from other folks what they say -- if I understand things correctly, Xcode will probably use an assembler, it is, after all, the Unix way of doing things. If I wasn't being lame right now, I'd research it for you, but in any case, I *thought* that Xcode was largely reliant on gcc and gcc probably calls some gnu-assembler (even though they were complaining about gas, maybe it's a different version?, and how come, gnu stuff tends to be pretty well synchronized?).

More stuff to think about -- most mac users get stuff from the Mac side of versiontracker.com -- I'm sure you can find stuff like mplayer already compiled and ready to go there, mac users don't usually compile anything.

Even more stuff to think about -- do you *need* a laptop now? Because the mac desktops are several times cheaper. You could get a desktop now and see how you like it. Also, while I know people with an Intel Mac laptop who are very happy with it, there are lots of people complaining about various things like bad wi-fi reception and overheating, you may want to wait a few more months to get one unless you absolutely need one right now.

Good luck!