Say hello to my little friend...

No, not this one:

This one:

This weekend, I switched. This is the first time I've seriously used a Mac in well over ten years, and in a way it feels like I've come home after a long absence. I already feel more comfortable using the Mini than I do using a Windows machine.

Coming from a string of Linux boxes, this machine does all that they did and more: Full Unix commandline shell? Check! Unix dev tools (Vi!) and scripting languages? Check! X11? Check! The list of Unix happiness goes on and on. But what really gets me is that, as everyone says, "It just works". Scanner, digital camera, wireless network settings, sound sharing between apps -- everything worked without any issues. I didn't have to tweak any kernel modules, compile extra apps or hack config files by hand to get everything up and running.

Having used WindowMaker as my Linux desktop for many years, the OS X UI feels surprisingly familiar. The dock, the mini-windows and app-icons are all represented in almost the exact same way. You can really feel the NeXT history there. Even the "new" finder (which some people hate) can be run in a way that looks a lot like the NeXT file manager (or the GNUStep GWorkspace.app for that matter).

What has really made my day though is how easy it is to install and uninstall applications. With a few exceptions, you just drag the whole thing into (and out of) the Applications folder. That's it. Nothing like Windows where you run an installer that defecates files and registry entries all over your system. Or Linux where you spend a good part of a day looking for a package of the app you want, trying to resolve 15 dependency packages for it, and then finally grabbing source and compiling it because for some reason the only package you could find doesn't like your version of libfoobar.so.

The hardware is pretty spectacular too. It's small, quiet, and feels like it's been put together much better than any PC hardware I've ever seen. The old "beige-box" PCs I have sitting around look like massive, ugly dinosaurs beside the mini.

The verdict: I'm keeping it!

• Tags:
• Mac Mini
• Mac
• OSX
• Linux
• Unix
• windowmaker
• NeXT