I'm a linux guy. I've been using linux primarily since before the 1.0 kernel days back in 1993. I've never owned or used a macintosh for more than just helping someone get their mail or VPN up and running.

On friday, I installed Leopard (not Snow Leopard) on a MacBook Pro laptop for work which is about a year old and I decided that I was going to take it home and get to know what all of the fuss is about.

Friday night, first impressions: Nice hardware. Beautiful screen. Clean fonts. Nice, quiet keyboard. I liked the initial 'take a picture for your profile' which uses the screen as a flash - nice touch. I found more wireless access points from my home living room than I've ever found using any laptop that I've ever used before. Nice wireless/antenna. I changed the battery to the most conservative option and I got > 3 hours of battery life from it the first night. Nice. The magnetic power connector is also a nice touch. I had known about that before, but using it several times was nice. Pretty, well-engineered, productive and useful right out of the box. Good job Jobs! :)

Saturday night, I mainly tried out the software that came with the OS. I poked around with things and got to know how good safari was and ichat, mail, etc ... Some initial impressions: iTunes is *way* faster on a mac than on windows. Javascript on Safari is very zippy! Finding things on a mac is not easy for a Linux or Windows user. Finding installed applications could be made easier in my opinion. Time capsule is a great feature. Rock band is fun. I think that I would like to buy parallels or something so I could dual-boot with it though. I liked that the VOIP client just worked out of the box and was very easy to set up and configure.

I began to miss my > 1 mouse buttons. I tried holding the mouse button down, I tried double-clicking, I tried everything and had to figure out the mac-way of doing things without a second or third mouse button. I'm sure that I could hook up an external USB mouse, but I wanted to do things the 'mac' way, so I worked without it. Also, I'm used to tapping the touchpad for a left-click. I dont know how many times I tried that and waited for something to happen ... :)

Saturday night, I tried to download the xcode and iphone SDK (2 GB). It was a normal HTTP download from the Apple site but the transfer failed twice (not sure if it was the wireless connection, or the web server or what, so I don't really blame the mac or safari). I tried it with wget on linux and it downloaded great the first time, so I copied it to the mac over scp (which was standard on the mac) and I was good-to-go. I tried a torrent client - tomato torrent was the first hit on google for "torrent mac", so I downloaded it, and it pretty much sucks and never made one connection nor downloaded anything at all.

Sunday night, I installed the Xcode stuff and tried out some of my code that I am writing on linux. CVS worked great, but I couldn't compile something I was writing that needed PCRE (perl-compatible regular expressions) and I wasn't quite sure how to install it, so I went on to a different set of source code that I am working on. It's a multi-threaded application that uses pthreads. It compiled fine, but when ran, anything over 10 threads, it would hang. Using 10 threads, it ran fine. My perl scripts ran fine without having to install any CPAN modules at all.

Now, before all of you mac people start responding about how stupid I am or how easy it is to solve my problems. Let me explain. I didn't have days to figure things out. I just wanted a good taste of a mac and overall, I was very impressed. Some things very good. Some things not quite as good, some things a little weird and different. I'm sure that if I spent more than 60-ish hours (only about 5 actual hours) with a Mac and OS X, I'd probably figure things out and everything would be great. I would love to do some iphone development and would love to really learn to make this nice laptop really sing, but I have to return this machine to its rightful owner tomorrow morning and I'll be returning to my Ubuntu 9.04 box on my quad-core 4GB PC box. :)

I like linux and I like the mac, but being a little linux-biased, I think that more linux people should taste the macintosh experience a little bit and bring some of the mac flavor over to the linux side. Personally, I think that Windows is a lost cause and Mac and Linux are the way of the future. If anyone at Apple is reading this and wants to send me a free MacBook Pro, I'd love to use it as my primary machine every day, but if I were to spend my own hard earned money on a laptop today, I'd spend $500-$800 on an HP or Acer. I just can't justify $2k on a laptop no matter how nice it is. I don't think that I'd really go the hacintosh route mainly because it makes me feel dirty. :)

I never really figured out if there was a package manager or something else like apt or yum on linux. Is there?