Greetings from not-so-afar

[Matthew Carpenter]

On Tuesday, November 26, 2013 08:44:39 Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Leon Goldstein <metapsych at earthlink.net> > 
> Still here.  I'm dabbling with some more current releases, e.g. SuSE,
> > but still using 10+ year-old Libranet 3.
> > I'm still hovering over making the switch to a Mac.  I'd like to hear
> > about dual booting a Mac with Linux.
> 
> Unless you've already used OSX often, and like it, I'd strongly
> discourage that transition.  My new employer gives (forces?) a Macbook
> on all new employees, so I found myself having to use OSX as a primary
> OS for the first time ever.  Its been a rather painful transition.
> I'd say my biggest gripes are the lack of sloppy-focus for the mouse
> (focus follows mouse), and the obscene instability of the OS.  Without
> exaggeration, I'm experiencing kernel panics at least once/week.  I've
> informally polled my coworkers, and they experience the same
> instability.  We're not doing anything crazy, just (mostly) normal
> desktop usage scenarios (web browser, multi-tabbed terminals connected
> to other systems).  I don't get how anyone tolerates this crap.  Its
> horrible.  Beyond that, the performance is truly terrible compared to
> Linux.  If I run a few 'brew' package builds, the interactivity takes
> a nose dive.  The mouse literally stutters its way across the desktop
> (and this is with the SSD disk and 8GB RAM).  At home, I've got an
> assortment of macbooks from 2010 all the way up to the most recent
> 2013 retina model, all with Fedora on them, and they are rock solid,
> stable & performant.  So its definitely the OS that is at fault for
> the instability and performance problems.
> 
> 
> So if you like OSX then i guess go for it. But if you haven't used it
> much, I'd recommend that you think long & hard before making the
> transition.  I can't help much about dual boot.  All of my home Macs
> are single OS (Fedora), and my work Mac is OSX only.

My experience was much the same.  I gave OSX over 3 months to win me, then 
that MBP became the best Kubuntu box I've yet run.