Comment by iowahansen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iowahansen | Hacker News Reader

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I'm generally a person that values function more than form, but I have to say it is a real daily joy to work on gorgeous hardware like a Macbook Pro. The reason Macs are more expensive because they only offer high-end hardware specs. A similar spec'ed Dell comes roughly at the same price. If you are hacker, always use the best tools there are. This is an invest in yourself.

Hardware aside, the real reason you should switch is OSX and the applications around it. Stuff just works. Sounds like a marketing message but its true. You can focus on accomplishing the task rather than wrestling with shortcomings and crutches of the environment. Application developers on the Mac also have the philosophy to integrate with existing services as much as possible, which makes a huge difference, because most of the stuff you use is able to talk to each other. Compare that to Windows where every application/service is its own island.

Imho, OSX is by far the best platform out there right now bar none. It's amazing to see how even non-hackers are blown away once they switch.

You should too.

>A similar spec'ed Dell comes roughly at the same price.

I believe that Macs are awesome. I want one! But the same price argument doesn't fly. When I bought a new laptop about a year ago, I ended up with a Dell 'cause the same spec'd MBP was double the price, and I couldn't justify the expense. Having a quick look on the respective web sites, that is still roughly the case today. That makes for a pretty expensive OS.

don't drink the cool aid and save your money. the last straw for me was a bsd socket problem that used to cause crashes on clisp (if you google it you'll find it. circa 2005) -- went back to debian, and i don't even know whatever became of that problem.

your dell is fine.

Have you tried the latest Ubuntu?

Sure. Two problems with it:

1. Still fairly bad video hardware support. I spent two hours helping a buddy set up a mid-range ATI card recently, and we couldn't get full acceleration to work. The configuration just plain sucked.

2. Fonts in the X environment are so ugly that I can't stare at an editor window full of code. Good fonts are rarely open-source.

Ubuntu is nice, but it doesn't come close to the experience of opening a box, pushing the "on" button, and being able to start working right away.

1. fair enough. i can see how that could be a deal breaker. You probably know about the sad state of affairs with those vendors, and I guess reasons don't matter much if it doesn't work. all i can say is that it is improving.

2. it's not the fonts. check this out: http://ubuntutips.net/node/10.

in a nutshell, just put <match target="font"> <edit name="hintstyle"> <const>hintslight</const> </edit> <edit name="autohint"> <bool>true</bool></edit> <edit name="rgba"> <const>rgb</const></edit> <edit mode="assign" name="hinting"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> <edit mode="assign" name="antialias"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match>

in your ~/.fonts.conf file.

you won't believe your eyes. try it. :)

Wow I tried it and it looks great now! Thanks a lot!

Thanks, will definitely give it a shot.

And this is why people like the mac. I can edit an XML file in emacs, I just don't want to have to figure out which file to edit and what to put in there.

here's one example that drove me up the wall:

== swapping ctrl/caps lock ==

* on osx *

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~jfieber/osx/ -- i believe i ended up using ucontrol.

* on ubuntu *

go to System/Settings/Keyboard Preferences (xmodmap is still there if you're so inclined)

also, off the top of my head, it was a pain to:

1. add widgets to the menubar (on ubuntu i just add it)

2. rsync backups to an openbsd server because of the hfs+ tags

3. changing the buttons in Mail.app -- they were horrible

4. shutting down spotlight (can't even remember that one)

5. verbose booting

6. and my personal favorite: getting a cd out of the player when the power is off.

There are answers, I'm sure, to all these questions but you have to figure it out.

-utx

Or go to the Keyboard system prefs and click on Modifier Keys.

i mean, exchange the behaviour of the caps lock key with that of the control key.

ucontrol, and fkeys let you do that. both seem to be unmaitained though.

The Keyboard prefpane trivially lets you map the Caps Lock key to Control. I used that setup for a long time. Are you actually asking to keep Caps Lock around but map it to Control? I guess that really is tricky, but it never occurred to me as useful, because I never use Caps Lock, so I just happily have two Control keys.

Is that url your page?

no. i just found that whilst looking for ucontrol. should have made that clearer.

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