Greetings from not-so-afar

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Leon Goldstein <metapsych at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>
>>Wow,
>>
>>I totally forgot that I had messages automatically filed into the list folder
>>for this group.
>>How the heck is everyone?
>>Brought back a lot of good memories to find this folder and 422 unread
>>messages.
>>
>>Me, I'm still running mostly Kubuntu boxen, and having to deal with CentOS and
>>Windows 7/Windows8/Server* at work.
>>
>>Hope you are all healthy, well-employed, and well.
>>Matt
>>
>>
> 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.

-- 
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       https://netllama.linux-sxs.org