Hackintosh!
So after my last blog post, I decided to try out OS X inside a virtual machine ….. but after four tries, I gave up and just wiped my hard drive and installed natively.
Installation went surprisingly well, and most of my hardware is “liked” by the hacked versions of OS X (I used iATKOS 5i). Everything that should be working, is working except for my sound card… which is partially working. I hear sound, but the front audio ports for headphones and microphones does not work, and neither does the back microphone socket, but I’m still quite happy with that considering OS X wasn’t designed to be run on my hardware (and apparently with some hacking, I can make those things work too).
So far I’ve been using OS X for two days, and I must say, I like it much more than I had expected.
My first computer was a Mac, and I used a Mac till OS 8.something (in 1999 my dad bought me a my first PC because Macs were, and still are quite pricy). I was originally quite reluctant to leave Mac OS, but eventually had to BUT I soon discovered Linux, and started using and loving it.
For the last 5/6 years I’ve been using Linux, and I only really used OS X two or three times at my Dad’s work place. I originally thought I would LOVE to have a Mac (with OS X), but a few days ago I changed my mind because I thought I had become too used to Linux (which I have!) and would not be able to use OS X to do everything I want.
I thought there would be lots of things that I would not like about OS X, but it turns out the list is actually a lot smaller than I thought.
There are a few things I don’t like about OS X, and some things I miss from Linux. For example:
- I really hate the keyboard bindings. This is probably because I’m now used to Linux shortcuts etc. I managed to “fix” some of them (eg in the Terminal app I wanted page up/down to actually send the page up/down characters).
- I STILL dislike iTunes, although it is much better than in Windows. I really miss MPD with gmpc.
- I don’t really like the dock. This is probably one of the things that most people DO like, but I’m not really a fan of it.
- I can’t seem to find a decent IRC client on it. X-Chat Aqua isn’t really quite as nice as it is on Linux, and Linkinus isn’t too good either in my opinion.
- I don’t really like the fact that OS X doesn’t depend THAT much on log files. It does use them, but I don’t think the details it gives are always useful.
- I kinda miss the ability to configure things from the command line. I don’t know if you can configure things from the command line in OS X, but from what I understand you can’t really do much system configuration from the command line except small hacks.
Overall, I like OS X, and will probably continue using it on my machine till I get a real Mac (hopefully in September).
Some of the things I like about OS X:
- Undoubtably the thing I like most is how everything is so tightly integrated with each other. While this is also possible on Linux, it DOES need a lot of configuration to get it perfect. On OS X, it is all ready to go, out of the box. Linux is also heading that way, with things like d-bus interaction between apps has become more and more efficient, but not all apps take advantage of this yet.
- I like the fact that everything looks the same, and isn’t “odd”. By this I mean there is no “KDE” look, or Gnome Look. Everything fits in fine with the UI. I know you can use special tools etc to make KDE apps fit into Gnome, and vice-versa, but again that requires configuration. Personally I didn’t ever bother doing that, although I didn’t really like how KDE apps didn’t fit into my Gnome desktop.
- Close source applications work better on OS X than their Linux equivalents. For example Skype is on Linux and on Mac OS X, but the Mac version is MUCH more stable than the Linux version. I guess this is mainly due to all the sound systems that are available in Linux. Skype switched to ALSA recently from OSS, but now a lot of people want PulseAudio support too, or ESound support etc. There are too many choices I think, and I think that is causing a bit of chaos. This issue would probably be fixed a lot faster if Skype were open source, but I don’t think people should live in a dream world where everything is open source, sure it would be nice, but lets face it, thats never gonna happen. So in reality, the better choice will indeed be the one that works, and in my opinion, so far in OS X is the better choice.
On OS X, I’ve managed to actually have a pretty good quality conversation over Skype with my sister, which I haven’t been able to on Linux.
I don’t know if this makes me sound like I’m anti-Linux now, believe me I’m not! I LOVE Linux still (more than I like OS X!), in-fact I’m running it inside a VMware Fusion virtual machine right now and will wipe my machine and put Gentoo back on it as soon as I get a real Mac to sit beside my Gentoo machine.
I also thought I’d mention this: I know a lot of Linux users who say EVERYONE should use Linux, and there is no excuse for using Microsoft or Apple products. This goes to the people who think this way: You are all idiots 
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Some people say Apple and Microsoft products should be avoided because they are buggy. Sure Windows IS buggy, and sure OS X probably has some bugs too (I haven’t found any yet!). BUT truthfully, can anyone say that Linux applications are bug free? The only difference is that you have the ability to fix the bugs yourself…. which is quite a useless ability if you are a normal user who doesn’t give a damn about how the internal works, and doesn’t have a clue what C++ is!
To be quite honest, A LOT of Linux applications have A LOT of bugs. NetworkManager is quite buggy, so I stopped using it and manually setup wpa_supplicant to connect to my wireless network, but I don’t think my Dad can do that! A normal user like my father needs GUIs to do everything, they are easier to use for someone who has no clue how to use a CLI (and doesn’t want to learn how to use it!). Naturally Linux IS becoming more and more user friendly, and I think there WILL be a point where I can safely install Linux on either of my parents computers, and not have to worry about them not knowing how to do something, but till that day comes I REALLY think it is pointless and ignorant for people to tell everyone to boycott Apple and Microsoft, and switch to Linux unless they are willing to understand the internals a little and figure out how to manually edit things from the CLI, which over 90% of the world’s population probably isn’t .
Besides… Apple products are really nice in my opinion, not very buggy and they work very well! (I love my iPhone <3!!!)
Lol like most of my posts, I wrote this while super sleepy so it probably makes no sense, oh well.
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