Switch
Was recently reading about Jeremy Zawodny’s recent switches and its something that makes quite a bit of sense to me. I’m in the process of switching myself.
- I have been a great long-time supporter and user of Evolution. However, in my day-to-day use on a machine with 768MB of RAM (with the only other apps open being Firefox, a few gnome-terminals, X-Chat, Liferea, GAIM, and Emacs), I find that after about six days, I’m swapping in the region of 900MB. That’s just too much. Thunderbird is looking better day after day. I’m switching.
- While Y! Music Unlimited looks cool (again, only available in the US), pushing WMA and not supporting iPod’s is a big mistake. With its growing market share, and the lifestyle karma surrounding it, its doubtful that folk would ditch an iPod for cheaper online music. As for me, eBay and the record stores will have to suffice for music. I’m not switching.
- I’ve given Adium a serious go (i.e. used it for IM for a day), and love it. It could do with better modern MSN support, but thats’ libgaim at work. Growl being the excellent notification system, is what Linux lacks (well, it doesn’t lack – we have D-BUS, but nothing in the front-end to exploit it; don’t count the arguing planet.gnome folk about what kind of notification bubbles to use). Toyed around with iChat AV for my AIM account, and my iSight works yet again. Safari is usable (but Firefox is clearly better). I think once I sort my mail out with Thunderbird on Linux, going OS X will be easier. I’m switching, soon.
- Terminal.app is another story. Fn+PgUp/PgDown gets trapped by the application itself, and does a Terminal scroll-back. This poses a real problem when I use my usual combination of ssh+screen+irssi to IRC. iTerm does this rightly so, but there’s no way to make the Alt/Option key the Meta key. I am not impressed. Dear InterWeb, anyone have a clue on how to make my Terminal act the way it does on Linux? I’m looking for a solution before I switch.
- I’ve been toying with the idea of getting some new shiny Apple hardware. Its between a Powerbook and an iBook. If I get a 12″ iBook, I lose the audio-in feature (and have to buy an iMic), I’m stuck with 1024×768 (which is what my most of my workstations do, sadly), I can’t get the SuperDrive (do I really need to burn DVDs?), 32MB video RAM (is that really enough?), no dual display, but video mirroring only (there are hacks to make screen spanning work, and success has been reported on the 12″ iBooks), but a great 6-hour battery life at 1.33GHz. With the Powerbook, my only real choices are between the 15″ and the 17″ – I get a higher resolution boost on either, 1.5-1.67GHz, 4.5 hours battery life at most, 64-128MB video RAM, S-Video out, GigE, and a backlit keyboard. Expected difference in cost can be around AUD$1,600-2,000, for something Apple’s really ditching by next year. I’m switching, once I decide between looks vs. functionality vs. bag space.
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