Goodbye Windows and Linux, hello MacOS X!

It’s taken me a long, long time. Finally I decided the other day that enough is enough – I’m fed up of grinding PCs that actually used to perform fine, fed up of application crashes and lockups (even in XP) and the high maintenance of Windows with respect to patches to avoid fatal exploits etc.

So I’ve ordered an Apple Mac Mini. A stroke of genius by Apple – you buy it, move aside your huge noisy PC tower and replace it with a tiny silent box and plug in all your existing hardware. Perfect for migrating from Windows. You can always flip back to your old PC for any application transition problems, and you get a new "PC" with a much better OS (by all accounts) for very little money.

So it should arrive next week. I haven’t been this excited about computers since I was a child. It should mark a sea-change for me. How often is it that you can look at webpages about an OS and actually get excited about the default applications that come with it – even the calendar application looks sexy!

Windows XP doesn’t even come with a calendar application – even most mobile phones include one for free! If it did come with a calendar application you can bet it would suck just like Notepad, WordPad and Calculator! Trivial applications that are still incredibly basic.

I can’t wait to try it out. I’m lucky in that most if not all of my work is in Java so as long as my Java tools work on it and I can browse the web and use email I’m happy – goodbye Gates! If you want to blame somebody Bill, it’s partly this guy’s fault. Just reading about problems with Mac OS X made me take the trouble to look into it more, That and a couple of my friends are dedicated Macophiles.

Oh, and for what it’s worth I gave Linux/KDE a try first and I found it to be sorely lacking. Linux is great for server apps and console mode development but I just get frustrated with the problems getting applications to work, keeping them updated (without ending up with multiple RPMs for different distributions of the same application) and so on. It’s "not bad" and certainly more stable than windows, but productivity did not improve – if anything the opposite.

I’m hoping for some serious improvements in productivity from Mac OS X. Let’s see if I get them…