I loved my Hackintosh

So my wife has a Macbook and I bought some software for her which gave me a chance to see what the Mac is all about.

After 6 months, I have reluctantly decided to go back to free software. Not that any of the experience was bad. On the contrary. Running OSX has been the best OS I have run in years! Better than Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mint and other desktop friendly linuxes for me and certainly faster than Vista and seemingly more capably.

I was constantly surprised by how well it performed and of the ease of use. I know many people who swear and curse Mac users, but frankly, the criticism is not justifiable. I think its an awesome platform and I can see why there is so many users converting from Windows to Mac. Its not as hard as switching to Linux as its a very attractive and easy to use system for windows people. You will have more trouble adapting to the keyboard and mouse changes than to using most of the software.

One of my favourite things about the system was the consistent way apps behave and look. It seems to be the direction that KDE is heading and I wish we were a little further bit. Whatever we think of Cocoa/ Carbon or DirectX, the lack of single dominant framework for Linux is not making it easy to compete head on. I know I am in the minority for believing this, but in the past few months I had to develop some software on all 3 platforms.

Linux was certainly the hardest with having to choose GTK1, GTK2, QT, etc, for widget sets, each with slightly different levels of completion and with peculiarities of each.

The main reason I am leaving the Mac world behind is that for 95% of the time, I was running applications such as firefox, songbird, lazarus, jdownloader, etc, on it. These apps are all cross platform, so I figured I might as well run them on Linux or even OpenSolaris.

Lasting impression of Mac. Pound for pound, I think its a much better O/S to use than Linux, but the lock-in of apps such as iTunes and iPhoto mean that I can't commit to it.

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