- Joined
- Jan 20, 2004
- Location
- Pictland
As a few of you will know from topics here in previous years I’ve been a Linux guy for quite some time. Back in the early 20-teens I’d finally had enough of Windows nonsense and launched a two year survey of the various Linux distros out there and finally settled on Mint. Of course it was/is the most Windows-like distro out there — no shame in that, but I’ll get to that in a minute — but it suited me, did most of what I needed and was (finally!) an OS that worked for me as opposed to constantly being man-handled and jerked around by the “we own you” attitude of Windows.
Over the years I did what I guess any good Linux user does: I learned a bit command-line fu, tailored and tweaked my system, and in the end arrived at a relatively stable environment that became pretty much 2nd nature to me. Never had to wonder where things were and could usually find — or hack — what I needed to do any particular job and life was good. Until your distro did, or needed, a big update and then you more or less had to tear everything down, drag the absolutely necessary into the new spin, rebuild your house so to speak, and carry on for another few years until it all became necessary again. Tolerable, but not a lot of fun, especially after a few iterations.
Now the Windows-like issue of Mint: I can honestly say that I started in computers when there was no GUI to be had. If you did computers you did it with the commandline or you didn’t do it at all, simple as that. Of course that all changed when Windows came out and the commandline was more or less retired — well, for “civilians” it was retired
— and we all charged into the graphics-driven future. The thing is the whole idea of Windows was perfectly decent, nothing wrong in principle with it at all. Sure, some kludgy bits here and there but overall it was, obviously, brilliant and exactly what the computing world needed. So that’s why I ended up choosing the most Windows-like Linux distro there was: Mint used all the same basic principles and left out (most of) the stupidity that made Windows intolerable, at least for people like me.
The other thing that I always did — and TBH rather enjoyed for many years -- was building my own computers. I’d do a few months of intense research, pick the best gear options that made sense and that I could afford, order all the bits and build the thing from the bare case inwards. Great fun, at the time. For whatever reason the kicks from that process severely diminished over time and I eventually ended up dreading the inevitable process of cracking the beast open and messing with whatever needed or wanted messing with. And the fans! Man, that was always a PITA. I’d go to great lengths to over-spec my cooling in order to minimise the fan noise issue but no matter how much effort I went to — I never did try liquid cooling — it was always just that little bit too much. That seemed to be an inherent problem with computer noise: the quieter it got the more you were sensitive to the little bit that remained. Madness!
The other thing that I could never beat was the lifespan issue: every PC I’ve had since … well, since I started which was a rather L O N G time ago, had a much shorter MTBF (mean time between failure) than I would have expected. Maybe it was a common/inevitable side effect of building your own computer but none of mine lasted more than 5 years, give or take a year, before some serious hardware issue ruined your day and sent you on a 1 or 2 week “fix my box” derailment project. I always thought the DIY approach was so much more clever than, for instance, Apple’s “you take what we give you and you pay more for it” approach but I had to admit that their gear had a hell of a lot longer in-service record than any PC I ever came close to.
OK, time to start heading for the conclusion here. A few years ago my wife decided she’d had enough of the whole DIY computer culture and she dumped her PC and got an iMac. I totally understood her choice — she was never a computer geek, as in geeky about computers — and watching as she settled in I started to see some of the undeniable benefits that Apple had to offer, assuming you could pay for it: a well-curated OS, seamless integration across the system, looked beautiful, and you had actual Support people out there if and when you needed it (more or less). As she found her way around she said time and time again “if you want to do something on a Mac, just try it the way it would make sense to you. Most of time that works.” That really stuck with me because that whole concept was completely foreign to me as a PC guy. Nobody cared whether you could find your way around intuitively, you just learned the quirks you needed to learn and lived with it. Needless to say she’s been much happier with her Mac than she’d ever been with a PC.
Well, the inevitable happened recently and my latest DIY PC suddenly broke. And I work on my computer for a living so I needed a solution ASAP. To make a long story short I’m now on a Mac Mini and loving it. All the usual stuff about Apple is true and I won’t repeat it but I will say that one of the pretty astounding things about Apple computers is the fact that the OS is much, much deeper and broader than I’ve ever seen on a Linus OS. In a few short weeks I’m up and running and now starting to use Automation to elegantly link the building blocks of the OS together to do things that I want my system to do. I made a wallpaper changer for instance — I have a LARGE library of hand-picked wallpapers I’ve collected over the years — and I’m now using built-in tools like Applescript, Automator and Shortcuts as well as proprietary tools like Keyboard Maestro to build more sophisticated aids for the work we do here at Casinomeister. Pretty much none of this was even thinkable on ANY Linux distro unless you wanted to go back to basics and start hacking stuff at the commandline.
So there’s all that AND my little Mini is totally silent AND I’ve easily got more computing power for the buck than I would have if I’d gone the PC route again. That’s a new thing for Apple, they are rather unbelievably now totally competitive on price, with the Minis at least. Yeah you pay some Apple tax for pretty much everything else but now that I see what they are REALLY offering — better hardware, longer in-service time, better software, better Support, frankly a better experience — I can’t say they’re cheating anyone. They’ve obviously poured a gazillion years of development effort into this whole “Apple” thing and now have the quiet but incredibly powerful advantage of a well-curated computer experience from long before you open your new computer’s box. Everything just works, and it does so really quite elegantly. And there is SO MUCH under the hood, it’s honestly quite incredible.
So yeah, I’m now an Apple fan, much to my own surprise.
- Max
Over the years I did what I guess any good Linux user does: I learned a bit command-line fu, tailored and tweaked my system, and in the end arrived at a relatively stable environment that became pretty much 2nd nature to me. Never had to wonder where things were and could usually find — or hack — what I needed to do any particular job and life was good. Until your distro did, or needed, a big update and then you more or less had to tear everything down, drag the absolutely necessary into the new spin, rebuild your house so to speak, and carry on for another few years until it all became necessary again. Tolerable, but not a lot of fun, especially after a few iterations.
Now the Windows-like issue of Mint: I can honestly say that I started in computers when there was no GUI to be had. If you did computers you did it with the commandline or you didn’t do it at all, simple as that. Of course that all changed when Windows came out and the commandline was more or less retired — well, for “civilians” it was retired
— and we all charged into the graphics-driven future. The thing is the whole idea of Windows was perfectly decent, nothing wrong in principle with it at all. Sure, some kludgy bits here and there but overall it was, obviously, brilliant and exactly what the computing world needed. So that’s why I ended up choosing the most Windows-like Linux distro there was: Mint used all the same basic principles and left out (most of) the stupidity that made Windows intolerable, at least for people like me.The other thing that I always did — and TBH rather enjoyed for many years -- was building my own computers. I’d do a few months of intense research, pick the best gear options that made sense and that I could afford, order all the bits and build the thing from the bare case inwards. Great fun, at the time. For whatever reason the kicks from that process severely diminished over time and I eventually ended up dreading the inevitable process of cracking the beast open and messing with whatever needed or wanted messing with. And the fans! Man, that was always a PITA. I’d go to great lengths to over-spec my cooling in order to minimise the fan noise issue but no matter how much effort I went to — I never did try liquid cooling — it was always just that little bit too much. That seemed to be an inherent problem with computer noise: the quieter it got the more you were sensitive to the little bit that remained. Madness!
The other thing that I could never beat was the lifespan issue: every PC I’ve had since … well, since I started which was a rather L O N G time ago, had a much shorter MTBF (mean time between failure) than I would have expected. Maybe it was a common/inevitable side effect of building your own computer but none of mine lasted more than 5 years, give or take a year, before some serious hardware issue ruined your day and sent you on a 1 or 2 week “fix my box” derailment project. I always thought the DIY approach was so much more clever than, for instance, Apple’s “you take what we give you and you pay more for it” approach but I had to admit that their gear had a hell of a lot longer in-service record than any PC I ever came close to.
OK, time to start heading for the conclusion here. A few years ago my wife decided she’d had enough of the whole DIY computer culture and she dumped her PC and got an iMac. I totally understood her choice — she was never a computer geek, as in geeky about computers — and watching as she settled in I started to see some of the undeniable benefits that Apple had to offer, assuming you could pay for it: a well-curated OS, seamless integration across the system, looked beautiful, and you had actual Support people out there if and when you needed it (more or less). As she found her way around she said time and time again “if you want to do something on a Mac, just try it the way it would make sense to you. Most of time that works.” That really stuck with me because that whole concept was completely foreign to me as a PC guy. Nobody cared whether you could find your way around intuitively, you just learned the quirks you needed to learn and lived with it. Needless to say she’s been much happier with her Mac than she’d ever been with a PC.
Well, the inevitable happened recently and my latest DIY PC suddenly broke. And I work on my computer for a living so I needed a solution ASAP. To make a long story short I’m now on a Mac Mini and loving it. All the usual stuff about Apple is true and I won’t repeat it but I will say that one of the pretty astounding things about Apple computers is the fact that the OS is much, much deeper and broader than I’ve ever seen on a Linus OS. In a few short weeks I’m up and running and now starting to use Automation to elegantly link the building blocks of the OS together to do things that I want my system to do. I made a wallpaper changer for instance — I have a LARGE library of hand-picked wallpapers I’ve collected over the years — and I’m now using built-in tools like Applescript, Automator and Shortcuts as well as proprietary tools like Keyboard Maestro to build more sophisticated aids for the work we do here at Casinomeister. Pretty much none of this was even thinkable on ANY Linux distro unless you wanted to go back to basics and start hacking stuff at the commandline.
So there’s all that AND my little Mini is totally silent AND I’ve easily got more computing power for the buck than I would have if I’d gone the PC route again. That’s a new thing for Apple, they are rather unbelievably now totally competitive on price, with the Minis at least. Yeah you pay some Apple tax for pretty much everything else but now that I see what they are REALLY offering — better hardware, longer in-service time, better software, better Support, frankly a better experience — I can’t say they’re cheating anyone. They’ve obviously poured a gazillion years of development effort into this whole “Apple” thing and now have the quiet but incredibly powerful advantage of a well-curated computer experience from long before you open your new computer’s box. Everything just works, and it does so really quite elegantly. And there is SO MUCH under the hood, it’s honestly quite incredible.
So yeah, I’m now an Apple fan, much to my own surprise.
- Max
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