I am sold.
This past weekend, I bought a PowerBook. It was about time: my Win98-running PC laptop is five years old; and Brown has a crazy .edu deal; and I’m tired of asking my friends to test Web site stuff with Macs… Not to mention that this new machine is half the weight of the old one, more compact, robust and has much better battery management. There were many reasons to get a new machine.
Not wanting to entangle myself unnecessarily with Bill Gates again, I checked out OpenOffice.org.
I’m completely sold. Not only on OOo, but also on OS X, the whole deal. When I was having problems with keeping the ‘net connection going and had to reinstall the OS, my heart sank: this is a big annoying deal in Windows. It wasn’t here, everything got archived cleanly, even most of the preferences. OOo checked for twenty million components that it needs in order to run (or that’s how many it felt like, anyway), and installed without a hitch. I finally have a Unix environment to play in.
It hasn’t all been entirely smooth, of course, as I’ve gotten to know this system. But here’s a huge difference between this and Windows PC: none of the problems I’ve encountered have corrected themselves as if by magic. Everything seems to be happening for a reason. If something seems to be going wrong, my gut feeling is that eventually I’ll find a solution that makes sense.
Current mood: geekhappy. (Though not blindly so: if you think of any issues I should look out for and want to let me know, I’ll cook you borsch and be generally thankful.)
April 14th, 2003 at 11:47 pm
Suggestion: you may want to avoid the graphical
aim clients that come with macos X and go
for something which lives in a terminal:
naim
(and make sure you’ve got all the perl developer libraries and gcc installed too — you may have to find someone with the dev tools cd, but that shouldn’t be hard)
April 16th, 2003 at 9:34 am
As always, feel free to lean on me or (more accurately) Misty for Mac & OS X help.