I purchased a MacBook a few months ago. My decision to run with Apple hardware was based on a few factors
* I /really/ like Apple keyboards. If there’s one thing they know how to do it’s build a rad keyboard. I’ve used the thin Aluminium ones fulltime for a few years now.
* The case is nice. Normally I’m not big on vanity, but in the case of a machine I was going to cart around a lot, it having a nice shape and no sharp edges was a factor.
* Hacking at it will horrify AppleDorks, and to me that’s a bonus.
With this in mind, I searched eBay for a MacBook 3,1 which were produced in late 2007 early 2008, and sport C2D processors. I don’t need uber grunt, and thus far it’s had more than enough go to do everything I need.
Shortly after this, a bet arose with a coworker to the effect that I couldn’t live with OSX as my day to day operating system for 30 days. I agreed, because I love winning.
The first and most confronting thing was the window management, I have used Openbox for a while now, and before that E17 both of which supported focus follows mouse, and click does not raise. For 30 days I twitched a little everytime it didn’t do what I expected. As a bit of a kick while I was down, I discovered that iTerm2 has a mode for focus follows mouse, at least amongst it’s own app windows with only 4 days to go.
The next big gripe I had was the clipboard. I’m so used to highlighting text being enough to select text and middle clicking pasting it that all this Command-C and Command-V business left me very confused.
It wasn’t all bad though. As package managers go, homebrew is pretty nice and porting my unwieldy environment across to Darwin kept me entertained for a few days.
The 30 days have now expired and vesper (My macbook) is now running Debian unstable in a triple boot with OSX and Windows, which will be the case until I get my new disk and can install fBSD alongside them. I’m a lot happier with the machine now, although stay tuned for 2 follow up posts about Linux on a macbook, and a survival guide for if you’re forced to use OSX.
