The epic saga which brought me to the point I am now...

While my wife was still a student at the University of Pittsburgh, she was complaining that her old Dell Latitude CPi was falling apart. It was; It was either the first or second model of Latitude (233, 266, something around that era of Pentium 2). I told her when she graduated, she could have a new one. She graduated in May.

She decided she wanted something small, and then that it would be the 12" iBook. I at first tried to talk her into a Dell, because a laptop shouldn't cost 4 lawnmowers. She was sure, and so before I went to USENIX (by train) we paid a visit to MacOutfitters rather spontaneously one day (I left work, where she'd come to meet me, got most of the way home, then turned and went in that direction randomly). After we looked I told her, "I think you'll be happier with the Powerbook." They didn't have a non-SuperDrive model, so she got the best Yay Apple loans.

Anyway, cut to a month later. I went to Ann Arbor for Cartel, sort of an informal gathering of a small group of schools with similar computing environments. While we were there, I was forced to recap why I'm bitter at Linux, and I apparently picked up a reputation as the miserable person. But during those discussions we also talked about MacOS, and that, combined with playing with my wife's machine previously, pretty much cemented it. When the manager from our group who was there (not my manager) spoke about it, I threw down the gauntlet. He picked it up, but the first thing I got, due to the wheels of bureaucracy turning slowly, was a clamshell iBook which won't hold a charge. Then, I got a loaner 15" TiBook from Apple (a 567mhz unit). We knew it had to go back, and I said, "If you can get me a machine before it needs to go back, fine, otherwise, I'll wait for whatever new machines they announce." Simple story, they got it, sat on it for bureaucratic reasons until Apple's machine was already gone, then gave me the new 15" TiBook hours before the new 15" AlBooks were announced (and began shipping). So, I hate my employers. Oh well.

Anyhow, over the last month I've had time to migrate my environment. Here's what I learned, in no particular order.

-uControl is very useful if you're used to Caps Lock being control, but it's not perfect. The key still "locks" and if you switch between X11 and Aqua windows often you'll find you secretly have control locked, and need to turn it off. Very annoying.

-CodeTek Virtual Desktop does a reasonable "pointer focus", except that because of how X11 works, at least in 10.2, there's a discontinuity when you switch into X, and you need to click. Speaking of X, having X11 windows spread over multiple desktops confuses the focus model, because apparently something is finding coordinates in "the screen" and ignoring the fact that it's not mapped on the current desktop and thus doesn't really have that geometry. Presumably disabling pointer focus in X11 will fix that.
Also, Virtual Desktop tells the windows to move themselves, so if the app is busy, it might take its good old time unmapping after you changed desktops. Finally, clicking in the pager to change desktops may move a window inadvertantly.

-The internal airport antenna in the TiBook sucks. It's possible to deal but I don't like any option I've yet seen.

-Safari, while less buggy than Mozilla was on my last (Linux) laptop, is still buggy.

-Lack of bluetooth is more annoying than lack of IR, but both sort of suck.

-darwinports made it easy to get libraries I wanted. Custom port files I wrote and need to contribute made it easy to get the map software I run, including fetching from CVS to build it.

-Mail.app deals poorly with an IMAP server with a lot of shared folders unless you're clever about configuration, but it "just does" Kerberos 5 (GSSAPI), so it just works with my mail server, no annoying passwords to type if I typed my Kerberos password once today.

-iSync Palm integration is poor.

-Something about the keyboard and how I type keeps making keys on the left side (mostly a, s and z) double. The last Powerbook had the same effect.

-Can't find an A3-sized scanner which is supported, relatively cheap (not $1000+) and CCD.

And as far as the OS itself:

-It's UNIX!

-Microsoft software for a UNIX platform!

-All the familiar UNIX tools.

-Annoyingly no strace.

Yeah -- I'm definitely pretty well sold on OS X at this point. If they weren't so damn expensive I would have no problem at all justifying them. My next laptop will definitely be a PowerBook though. I'm hoping my friend who is an ADC member can grant me one of his 20% developer discounts -- that takes a lot of the pain away.

ms

No argument. If I was getting one for myself, now, there might be people I could get to get me the discount. But I took the hit on my wife's so she'd have it while we were on the train the next week.