Mac and me...

My Mac OS X Desktop

My PowerBook G4 17"

Side View - Only 1" Thick

At Night A Glowing Keyboard

Mac OS X - Unix Power!

As I wrote in the article on "Linux and me", the aspects of Linux I love the most is the fact that there is no proprietary company behind Linux, the source code is freely available, it is Unix based and you have the freedom to choose how you want to build your particular installation. Let me elaborate a bit...

Because GNU/Linux is a combined effort of many, many different individuals all over the world, there is no single company that can change/force the future of the project to the beneft of only a selected few. Therefore I cannot foresee that GNU/Linux will follow the route Longhorn will with the implementation of TCPA for example. This is a great relief to me...

Because the source code is freely available, it is impossible for people/organizations to get away with backdoors in the code. Also, it is inevitable that code will mature faster and turn around times for bug fixes and new features will be dramatically improved upon.

Unix has earned a reputation for being robust, configurable and stable. It has been with us for more than 30 years now and is the basis on which the modern Internet is built. To have a Unix based OS for your desktop operating system is like driving around a rugged terrain in a BV206.

Because GNU/Linux is a collection of distinct, modular components, you have the freedom to choose which components you want for your specific needs. I am paranoid on file system performance and reliability. Therefore I am using ReiserFS. If I wanted good compatibility, I could have opted for ext2/3.

You might be wondering what does all this have to do Mac OS X? Well, I have two big issues with Linux. The first and most important being the fact that Linux feels "patchy". Just as the ability to build up your OS from modular pieces has advantages, it is inevitable that it will inherently not integrate in all aspects. Lets say you decide to use WindowMaker for your window manager. Now you want to use applications that have the same look and feel as the window manager. You can use Mail.app for e-mail, and maybe one or two other nice applications for other tasks. But there is no nice photo editing software that was built for WindowManager. By far the nicest application is The GIMP - which has the same look and feel of the GTK based GNOME desktop. It works perfectly in WindowMaker, but it does not fit into the same look-and-feel of WindowMaker. I do not want to run KDE or GNOME as I like the way WindowMaker works, but I want to run powerful applications like XEmacs and The GIMP. So I end up running a hybrid of different applications - everything functional, but I do not like the way my desktop looks and works like. Copy and paste does not always work correctly between KDE/GNOME/X11 applications - usually just enough times to irritate you.

Secondly, there is not nearly as good commercial support for Linux than there is for Windows. Why is this important? Because this influences the availability of drivers for your newly purchased hardware, the quality and functionality of those drivers, and the availability of full featured software. No one can argue with me (as of today, 19 June 2003) that there are some applications that are just not available for the GNU/Linux platform. Though this is slowly changing, applications like AutoCAD, Visio 2003, Microsoft Project 2000 etc. still have no equal in the GNU/Linux world.

Though these two concerns are not nearly as important as the ones I have with Windows, it did cause me to be unfaithful by looking around... And boy oh boy did I look around. One day I was shopping for a replacement notebook for my ageing Dell Latitude C800, and just out of curiosity I looked at what Apple had to offer in their notebook line. I knew of Mac OS X being based on Unix - something I read in an article in 2000 I think. And I also remember vaguely that it looked nice. So I rekindled my interest in Apple Macintosh computers, just to be totally blown away by the Apple PowerBook G4 17" notebook. I just had to determine whether I could run all my personal and business applications on Mac OS X, as well as making sure I do not loose the key benefits I mentioned in the opening paragraph that caused me to switch to Linux in the first place, before I could make the switch. Just as I did for Linux, I made a list of all the applications I needed to get replacements for. This was rather easy, and almost all had better replacements on the mac than in Linux. The best of it all is that there are some projects which tries to get all the GNU/Linux utilities ported to Mac OS X as both strives to be Posix compliant. Most applications are very easily ported. One such project is Fink. Using Debian tools like apt-get, it is easy to install Mac OS X versions of most Unix open source applications. As an example, the whole of GNOME and KDE has been ported. So I do not need to give up on utilities like The GIMP etc., though I prefer to use the native Mac OS X versions if at all possible.

Mac OS X does not completely comply with the benefits I enjoyed with Linux, however it does come pretty close. There is a proprietary company behind Mac OS X - Apple. However, they are not nearly as manipulating or controlling as Microsoft. Also, they believe in open source - something that Microsoft still has to learn. Darwin is open source - Darwin being the core of Mac OS X including the Mach 3.0 microkernel and the 4.4BSD core. Apple took the code from the open source community and modified it to suit their needs. However, they regularly commit their changes back into the open source CVS repository for the community to use as they see fit. Only the upper Carbon/Cocoa/Aqua layers are propriety, which also makes the mac unique. Because of the 4.4BSD base, Mac OS X is fully Unix based. Apple took the FreeBSD kernel as reference platform. Although Mac OS X does not provide quite the same level of diversity than Linux, many things are interchangeable. For example, if for some reason I do not like the Aqua interface, I can easily run XDarwin instead and run a window manager like WindowMaker or FVWM2 etc. on it. I can run all the GNU based software should I feel like it. I cannot easily change the file system or kernel, but then again if it works properly it is not that important.

Furthermore, most applications I found was much cheaper for the mac than for Windows. I do not mind to pay for the software I use, especially when the price is in line with the value the application presents to me, but to pay R8000 for an Office application is nuts. I found some nice replacements for some of the common applications I used to use:

Windows	Linux	Mac OS X
Microsoft Office XP/OpenOffice.org	OpenOffice.org	Microsoft Office X/OpenOffice.org
Visio 2003	Kivio	OmniGraffle 3.0
CorelDRAW 11/Adobe Photoshop 7	The GIMP	CorelDRAW 11/Adobe Photoshop 7/The GIMP
Putty/SecureCRT	Native	Native
Outlook XP	KMail/Kalendar/Evolution	Mail.app/Calendar/Entourage
PGP	GnuPG	PGP/GnuPG
VMWare	VMWare	Virtual PC

As can be seen in the top left image, Mac OS X is beautiful. It is really a pleasure to work in it. And aside from the beauty of the operating system, it is highly robust and stable. I only once had a kernel panic since I started using it on 17 April 2003. And that was because I used an unknown low level 3rd party application... I managed to get it to hang using Virtual PC, but I do not really consider this a bug as applications like Virtual PC and VMWare work on a very low level with the system, emulating another computer inside the host computer. I had just as many crashes in Windows and Linux with VMWare.

The picture beneath that is my new PowerBook G4 17" laptop. It is a brilliant machine and only 1" thick. I have 1GB of RAM installed in it, and I can throw as much processing to it as I like - it multitasks quite acceptably and stays responsive. I am currently using it in dual screen mode with another external 17" LCD monitor (Acer AL712) attached to it. Together with CodeTek VirtualDesktop, I now have 6 virtual desktops each (1280+1440) x 1000 in size.

As far as the switch is concerned, it was not difficult at all for me. Everything works very intuitively and most things are actually much easier to do than in Windows. Yet you have a Unix based operating system (Darwin) at the core and can very easily drop to a Unix console session to issue some nice Unix commands should you desire so. I would actually recommend an Apple to anyone not working in a Microsoft shop. It is initially a little bit more expensive, but the benefits far outweigh the price.

I am very happy with my new Apple Mac - it looks great, works great and is very reliable. I would recommend one to anyone who likes working with computers.