But first, I want to talk about my Mac a little more. Many of you have been asking me why in the hell would I make such a totally lop-sided trade, giving up everything that’s familiar to me for a three year old G5 iMac that came with Panther? Well, let’s address these issues, let’s get it all explained and justified, so I can feel like a Real Mac Owner and you can all just accept it and move on.

Let’s compare Specs for a moment.

Most people who do a spec to spec comparison think I’m crazy. Especially when you factor in the Media Center remote, my 37″ LCD TV I had hooked up to my desktop that I can’t currently hook up to my iMac, the fact that I can’t run Windows on a PPC therefore there is NO gaming and my Creative Labs sound system that sounds better than the internal iMac speakers. They reason that my Desktop is the superior machine. Looking at Hardware, you’d be right. However, there’s one glaring flaw.

Conventionally, the argument against the Mac Platform is that it’s expensive, it’s proprietary, it doesn’t run Windows Software, less peripherals work for it, the systems aren’t generally as expandable as a PC… and there’s some merit to those arguments. That being said, however, I tend to look at these issues differently.

A computer is all about the software that it runs. Without software, a computer would be an ugly box with blinking lights. It’s software that makes the machine come alive, it’s software that makes the magic happen. The PC side of the fence is a perpetual disappointment, and that’s my professional opinion. Vista is a monumental flop, GNU/Linux is totally focused on the foundational work and completely ignores the User Experience, and the faster the chips get, the slower the software gets.

Being a power user is a curse in many ways. Every time I install an operating system, I’m constantly reminded at how bloated software has become. Windows Vista, for all it’s improvements over Windows XP, runs half as fast as XP on the same hardware. Prefetch and Aero cover it up to the average user, but it only takes five minutes in Steam before you realize that you should either dual-boot in to XP or give up on the notion of gaming on your computer.

That’s a hard choice, especially for a system with 2.3GHz Dual Core processor with oodles of RAM and a solid GPU. It wasn’t a devastating choice to me, as I’ve sort of given up on PC gaming anyways, but to know that your system should be able to do things that the OS is preventing you from doing is unsettling, and it’s one that never sat right with me.

Now, I’ve got as much experience with Vista than the best of em’. I steadily used Windows Vista since it’s 4051 days, and it was my primary OS with the release of Beta 1. I was using Vista years before any of you ever heard of it, and I stuck by it because it was a work in progress. Driver issues? Hey, I could let it slide - it’s still in the oven. Microsoft dangled major advances in my face, and I bought it all up.

WinFS? Was never released. Indigo? Never materialized. Avalon? Total disappointment. MSH? Left it behind. XAML? They threw it right out the window, pulled Silverlight out of their ass, and pretended it was the same thing. Right down the list, Microsoft promised and promised. but never delivered. Mix that with the horrible performance issues, constant driver problems, WGA nightmares and a pinch of disgust, it drove me to Linux.

Now, I’ve been a Linux tinkerer for years now, ever since my pops bought me a copy of Mandrake 5 from Walmart because I was on Dial-up and didn’t have a CD Burner. I was always a hobbyist, I’d fuck with it every once in a while, knew the basics of the platform, was familiar with Gnome and KDE, but I never even entertained the notion of running a single boot setup with Linux until February of 2007. Something about buying the OS, and realizing that nothing had changed, sort of made me throw my hands in the air and say ‘fuck it!’

I formatted my Linux and Vista drives, installed Ubuntu Dapper on my primary drive, and I used it exclusively until just a few months ago. I’ve got to say, it was a rewarding experience - I had the opportunity to really geek out to some of the coolest projects on the planet. The first time I installed Compiz was a mind blowing experience. A ridiculously difficult one, especially since I had an ATI Radeon x800 (which at the time required an armada of hacks to get the thing to work in Debian) however, after getting X to work with XGL, finagling the open source driver to act right and then finally getting compiz running, I was totally blown away.

As a usable computer, Linux was leaps and bounds better than Vista. Some could argue that vista was prettier, but Scale (Expose on the mac) and the way it handled virtual desktops were the kind of features that, once you had them, they were the standard to which all other operating systems were rated.

The problems with Linux really stand out when you use it as a primary operating system. It always botched USB storage devices, Aptitude had constant problems with replacing dependancies with versions that don’t work with your software, every time you ran the update manager, you risked bricking your system, and not to mention your entire time on the machine was spent tinkering with it. You couldn’t get away from the system looking like a 3D accelerated version of Windows 98, and no matter how much you fucked with it, you couldn’t make it feel quite right.

For example, when Edgy was released, for some reason, I couldn’t get my ATI card to act right. I had problems in Dapper, but I overcame them after a week of fucking with it. It would run Beryl (Compiz, and then some), but it was very unstable. I called up a friend of mine, and traded my x800 for his GeForce 5500 just so I could get in nVidia’s corner and get some software that worked the way it was intended to. It was at that point I realized something very basic, something that would have seemed counter-intuitive to me not a year prior: the hardware is worthless if it doesn’t do what you want it to do.

Fast forwarding to a few months ago, I felt like I was faced with a very annoying, very artificial problem. Vista still sucked, but it felt like a modern OS in many ways that Linux and XP didn’t. XP was a faster OS, but it was totally unacceptable as far as how it looked and felt - i needed something with a little more beef to it. Linux, albeit a nice OS, didn’t feel cohesive, it felt hastily thrown together and I just wasn’t happy with it.

So, I started thinking. At the end of the day, I want to be able to dick with my blog, surf the internet, and consume content. I wanted all the features that are a staple of a composited Desktop - Expose, Spaces and Cover Flow. I wanted all of that, but I wanted it to just work. I decided that I didn’t want to enter Bash just to get my computer to do something that should work out of the box. The only acceptable answer? Buy a Mac.

Now, I can’t afford a $2000 computer right now. So, I started to think about just how powerful of a machine I really needed. After pimping linux for so long, I was confident that I could get by without Microsoft Software, and I had a pretty good idea of exactly what I wanted as far as software went. That, paired with my six month run with a Mac Laptop, I started to take stock of who had a mac, and who would be willing to trade for it.

Luckily enough, Ol’ Sacawa bought a pimped out iMac G5 a few years back that would more than handle whatever work I’d throw at it. I pitched to him the prospect of a straight up trade, and he eagerly agreed. I decided that if I were going to switch to a Mac, I would surrender my desktop completely. I wouldn’t try and keep my huge media library. Literally, out of 700GB of storage, more than 600GB of it used up, I backed up a grand total of 20GB of data. My music library and my pictures folder. In contrast, he filled up my 80GB external drive twice, and still had data left over to transfer.

For me, this is just as much a lifestyle change as it is a computer swap. In a way, this is me saying ‘I want to be a novice again’. Of course, I’m still a geek - but now, the time I spend in front of a computer is being spent writing for my blog and surfing the web, instead of getting frustrated at half-functional software. I’m admitting that Microsoft and those Freetards are totally wrong, and I’m jumping ship. I reckon you could say that this is akin to being saved, this is salvation.

The worst problem I’ve had with this Mac is a faulty power supply… luckily for me, that’s taken care of now. It’s a system that literally takes the length of a re-install to get running, and is ready to use right out of the gate. No finagling software and dicking with settings, it’s the opposite of Windows and Linux.

As for Speed? Leopard boots faster than Vista. Leopard runs faster than Vista. Leopard looks better than Vista. Leopard has features that won’t even show up in Windows 7. All around, it’s just a better system. Period. A 2GHz iMac G5 is plenty computer for a geek, honestly - my only regret is that I didn’t do this sooner.

Well, I do miss Writer… but, Ecto isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Of course, I would have been happier if I didn’t have to hard-code the table. Writer did that in WYSIWYG, too.