I’ve been using a MacBook Pro as my main computer for a while. When I purchased my last laptop for personal use Lenovo was having some serious problems with their supply, so I got pissed off and went out and got a laptop I knew I could get that day. And actually it worked out quite well all things considered. My main work system for years has always been Linux, and I just can not use a Windows based machine any more. However the swap to OS X was relatively painless.

I’m getting back into developing on a regular basis though, like sitting down and spending a few days at a time actually coding. And the little things started to irk me about working under OS X. Apache config weirdness, MySQL problems after having to install a different version for testing, having to start up a distinct X server to run Ethereal, that kind of thing. Not killer stuff, just annoyances. Stuff I’m sure I could overcome if I took the time. But I’m a Linux user at heart, so instead I snagged an old server system I had sitting around and reinstalled the aging Ubuntu distro it had, and now I’m back to a Linux system as my daily workhorse:

Linux Desktop

A few things:

  • I love the notifications on OS X, little bubbles that pop up and stay off on the side of the screen for a bit to notify you of events. Just about all the popular OS X apps for communication integrate with it, and I like the way it works. Well joy of joys, Gnome has a notification system as well. Grab the python-notify package for some command line tools you can use to hook up your own stuff (there’s supposedly a notify-bin command line tool… not sure what package that’s part of but it wasn’t in my default install). Use the Mailbox Alert plugin for Thunderbird to be able to execute arbitrary commands on new emails so that notifications from Thunderbird match the style of the other messages
  • The state of the sound system is still pretty nasty. When I first installed sound wasn’t working for Flash under Firefox. Poking around some I found some libs and got it working, but only one program could access the sound device at a time even though the Gnome control panel had sound set to use esound. Eventually it was just randomly flailing through the options in different places to eventually get a set of settings that actually mix sound sources. I’m assuming there’s just no easy way to query stuff out of sound card and figure out support, but that’s been so crappy for so long. I haven’t even tried out Skype yet. I’m afraid to, cause I might start poking options again and end up with a completely non-functional sound system with no way to get it back working again.
  • I miss Quicksilver already. The Gnome replacements don’t live up yet. If there’s a project I need to spend a bit of time hacking on to scratch a personal itch, that’s definitely it.
  • I was really impressed with the install options. Turns out the optical drive in this system is on the fritz. I was going to do a network install with it, but along the way I ran across the options for moving the install ISO over to a USB stick. Fired up my laptop and transferred the image to a stick I had sitting here and I was up and running. That was awesome.