I’m an experienced Windows and Linux user. For Microsoft’s products, I’ve used DOS, Windows 3.X, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 7. For Linux, I started with Fedora in the year 2006, and then I’ve been using Ubuntu for a very long time. After getting tired of the annoying distribution upgrading of Ubuntu ,[1] I switched to a rolling-release distribution, Gentoo. But soon I found that in most cases, I don’t really need and want to compile everything.[2] Then I chose Arch Linux, which has given me a period of happy time, providing both choices and “simpleness”. But finally, I stopped using it[3] and decide to make Mac OS X my next OS.[4]
Oct 06, 2020 New installs of Office 365 for Mac will also require macOS 10.14 Mojave or newer starting next month. The Office 365 apps for Mac are currently available from both the Mac App Store and a. Speaking of 'Next,' the naming of OS X 10.9, as the upgrade would be numbered, remains a mystery. Although some Apple enthusiast blogs speculated last fall that it could be designated 'Lynx'. Versions of Apple's Mac operating system used to be named after big cats, but that all changed with Mac OS X 10.9, which took its name from a Californian surfing spot (or possibly a dog).Apple.
Actually, Windows is very good for me as long as I don’t write programs. But I always want to use Linux when it comes to programming because Windows is lack of good command-line shells[5] and many useful utilities and tool chains. I love Linux’s great development environment but I’m just tired of tinkering with it. I want to focus on using tools to create things rather than keeping making tools usable. There is a Chinese proverb saying that “Sharpeningthe axwill not delay the work of cuttingthewood.” However, using Linux is more like making an ax from wood and iron ore… So, it might be the right time for me to make a change. Would Mac OS X be a good choice?
Well, I will never know the real answer until I get one and try it for a while. However, I can see what other people says on the internet and I luckily have some experiences using Mac in computer labs belonging to the ESL services in UT.
Here is what people says about Mac OS X on StackExchange. And the following is the reason why I want to use it:
The only bad news for me is that Mac is very expensive, and I’m still saving money and waiting for a good deal (Back to school deal?). For now, I have to build up a temporary development environment on Windows.[6]
[1] I love Ubuntu’s convenient package management tool apt-get
. However, the distribution upgrading every six months is really time consuming and I have to worry about the compatibility of configuration files after every upgrading. Well, avoiding upgrading is a choice, but I also don’t want to miss some new features and the new version of some software. Also, Ubuntu’s install medium seems problematic. As a member of LUG in my college, I’ve helped classmates to install Ubuntu on all kinds of laptops, but none of them succeeded without some manually hacking.
[2] Gentoo does give us more choices. However, sometimes it seems to force me to making choices about things I don’t ever know. Well, it is true that I can learn many things from exploring those choices. But I don’t really want to know everything because both my time and interests are limited. It keeps me away from focusing on important things. Every time I needed a new tool to solve my problems, I had to check the use flags of that tool and all packages it depends on. And after those exploring I had to wait for a long time for its compiling, which sometimes failed because of unknown problems. After I finally fixed all the problems and installed that tool successfully, I’d already forgotten why I wanted to install that tool at first.
[3] Recently, it forced me to learn to manually create and edit dozens of configuration files in order to updating to systemd
from initscripts
, which violates my freedom of not learning things I’m not interested in. And I’ve experienced instability of some frequently used software.
[4] I’m still waiting for a good deal and currently I use Windows 7 in my laptop for web surfing and entertainment and I ssh to a Linux machine maintained by my department to do programming (you see, I don’t hate Linux, as long as I’m not the one who maintain it…).
[5] OK, there is cygwin, there is MinGW, but for me, they look like totally foreigners on Windows.
[6] Working on a SSH (see footnote [4]) is not always convenient.
© Rundong Du and “Simplex Signum Veri”, 2012.
The original content of this blog by Rundong Du is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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