I finally gave in to the dark side this saturday. Could not resist it any more. I finally broke down and ... got me a Mac. A powerbook to be exact. Retired my old x86 laptop and went down the path of OS X and the PPC (temporarily). It has been an interesting 48 hours as I tinker with my machine, getting it ready for duty as my development machine on Monday.
There are quite a few reasons for getting the powerbook. They range from the superior quality of the hardware itself, to the "It Just Works" experience that my colleagues were experiencing with their Apple laptops, to sheer lust for all the nifty features that came fully functional on a standard OS X install. All these great features and I would not be giving up the *nix environment that I have grown so comfortable on after all these years on Linux desktops.
My greatest challenges in the last 24 hours have been adjusting myself to the "Mac" way of doing things and configuring the laptop for development. I have until Monday, as there will be certainly no time for me to do any fiddling with my development system once the workday begins.
Navigating around an OS X system is relatively easy using a mouse, but for a variety of reasons (speed, looming RSI and the unwillingness to carry an extra mouse peripheral), I prefer to use the keyboard for most of my functions. The average linux (KDE/Gnome) desktop allows you to do this rather well, but with a rather different set of key bindings. The biggest thing to get used to is the Alt/Command difference. Coming from an emacs background is both a blessing and a curse. Most of the OS X apps support emacs bindings with the control key, especially cursor movement (^f, ^b, ^p, ^n, etc). Unfortunately, they do not support the Alt keys, as the equivalent of the Alt on OS X is the Command key and keys like Cmd-b and Cmd-f are already used, being Bold and Find, respectively. These are keys I use a lot in navigation (move forward one word, move back one word), so I find myself having to use a lot more keystrokes than I used to. I'm sure that I'll get used to this in time though.
After spending a few hours learning the system and adjusting it to my preferences, I realized that I would have to repartition the system. I wanted to reserve HD space to put a linux ppc distribution on it later, just in case something came along that OS X could not do. Unfortunately, repartitioning a HFS filesystem is a destructive process at present, so I was forced to wipe the system and reinstall. Fortunately, this process is relatively painless. You pop in the disk, select a few options (less than even an ubuntu install) and you can almost leave it alone till it is finish about 30 minutes later. It was the easiest system install I have ever done in my life.
After that, the next challenge was simply setting up a development environment on OS X. OS X is meant to be a consumer desktop, not a development workstation, despite its BSD/*nix roots. It is quite a bit more effort to install the necessary applications I need to develop on. Fortunately, I could draw upon the experience of several of my colleages, particularly Adam. Following his advice, I went with fink to provide most of the resources I needed. I suppose I could have tried OpenDarwin instead, but fink gave me the familiar apt-get tools from Debian.
After downloading the necessary .dmg file from the site, installation and usage of most applications was relatively easy. The major applications such as python2.3 and postgresql 7.4.x was installed with "apt-get install x". The smaller, lesser known applications were more of a pain though. Things such as psycopg, twisted and clearsilver required source installs as they were not in the repository. I even played with DarwinPorts for a while as it had most of those packages. Unfortunately, the DarwinPorts versions were newer than what I needed, so it was back to source installs.
Finally, a little under 48 hours after I got the laptop, my development station was set up, all systems were running and I was ready to develop. It has been an interesting experience so far and the laptop has been a joy to work with.
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