Comments | sps: Ready for prime time

sps

Ready for prime time

Dec 02, 2009 16:18

For reasons I'm not yet going to go in to, my new laptop is a Macbook Pro.

Holy crap.

We'll see what it's like to live with, but the preliminary impression? Snow Leopard is ready for prime time ( Read more... )

Comments 4

dcoombs December 3 2009, 03:22:27 UTC

Yeah, with OS X they've done it right, and then actually *improved* it with each version over time.

Nearly everything "just works" to a sometimes shocking degree, and even then there's always a command line to fall back on.

The downside I've found is that when something doesn't work, there's a really steep learning curve to diagnosing/fixing it, unless you're familiar with their application frameworks, which I'm not. Linux it ain't. But this has only come up maybe twice since I switched 3 years ago.

hendrikboom December 3 2009, 16:16:26 UTC

Alice got herself a macbook, and is completely happy with it. Everything works out of the box, and that's the way she likes it.

They're Unix-based, so it's somewhat easier to port free software to it than Windows machines. That doesn't affect her, but it will probably affect you.

That said, Apple does have a reputation for locking down their systems. The main reason I ended up with an Amiga long ago and not a Mac was the way the Mac was locked away from programmers. It took years before any programming tools were available to the general public, and even then it was a Pascal interpreter (not even a compiler!)

Have fun. It's probably a good investment.

HAve you played with the data and control forks yet in the file system?

-- hendrik

sps December 3 2009, 17:35:29 UTC

Windows and Solaris both have multiple data streams, now. Of the plausible contenders, only Linux doesn't.

sps December 6 2009, 03:03:41 UTC

...And the development environment, while not pre-installed, seems to be supplied on the O/S restore disk.

Also included are a music player, a DVD player, a music tutor, a minimal photo editor, all kinds of seemingly useful things. The overall experience is much more like Ubuntu than Windows. Software installation is straightforward, too.

There does seem to be a tendency for small utilities to be $15 rather than free, though (not that there aren't many freebies and abundant Linux ports for things with lower UI requirements). A cultural thing, I think.