Day: November 28, 2004

Lesser Mac

When I got my Macintosh in July, I half expected that it would become my primary workstation, as I’d seen detailed by a number of (often surprised!) bloggers like Tim Bray and James Duncan Davidson. Despite my initial bad experience, once it resolved itself I was gung-ho to use OS X–I even impressed myself by fixing a problem to which even Google couldn’t find a solution.

The more I used the Mac over the next several days, though, the more I found myself wanting… something. I’m still not sure exactly what it was–I tried all of the built-in applications and liked features of them, particularly Mail’s ability to combine IMAP accounts–but I found myself using the X server and terminal window to connect to my Linux box more and more often. (It didn’t help that Mac’s X server doesn’t antialias fonts.) Finally I gave up: I reconnected the monitor to the Linux host and Switched back.

I still use the Mac from time to time when I want to check websites in Safari and IE5/Mac, but mostly it’s just a CD ripper for my iPod. It’s not even as good at that as my Linux machine: the iPod seems to choke on some iTunes-generated MP3s, even with error correction enabled and having the encoded files “optimized for Velocity Engine”, but I haven’t had a hiccup playing back the files I ripped and encoded in Linux.

One final irony–much to John’s chagrin–is that because I don’t use the Mac as my desktop, my primary means of using its UI is through a virtual display running on X under GNOME. It’s just easier that way.