Entering the Mac world

That’s it! I switched to Mac! I have been a happy Ubuntu user for nearly 2 years now. Happy, well, maybe not from the fact that I was using Ubuntu, but more due to the fact I was no more using Windows… However, since the beginning, there always were a few annoying glitches I learned to live with, but which were there, sleeping, always….

For example, I never got the language correcter to work in Open Office. The Linux version of Skype sucks. My printer scanner was half working. The soft phone I wanted to use with my VoIP provider never worked, etc… A lot of little tiny annoying things which, when I think about it, made me unhappy..

Last week, I went to Seattle for the MSSQL Jump In Camp. It was a 5 days camp organized by Microsoft to learn from open source communities and to help them implement support for MSSQL in their applications. My goal there was to implement PDO and MSSQL support in ImpressCMS. It was an outstanding week! Being surrounded by genius open source geeks and hardcore Microsoft engineers was nearly overwhelming! We were able to implement MSSQL in ImpressCMS (Yéé!!) and now we only need to finish the changes needed in the install script to make everything work flawlessly.

Anyway, I met a lot of great people there, one of which came from Switzerland, Xavier Perseguers. He, as well as many other developers in this camp, was a Mac user. Funny it was to see the room half filed with Mac laptops at a Microsoft event… But it was indeed a « jump in » camp so I guess it made sense in a way ;-).

Xavier was kind enough to show me around the Mac OS. It was a first for me since… well… probably since I was 12. The last time I was on a Mac was in high school,  when Mac computers were looking like this image…

Well, technology surely changed since that time! Still, it remains a totally new world for me. I have been a Windows user all my life, and a Ubuntu user for the last 2 years. Mac OS is nothing like what I was used to. But it seemed attracting nevertheless…

My Dell laptop was more then 2 and a half years old and it was starting to do weird things. I would have needed to buy a new one anyway. But I was getting tired of Ubuntu… And I could not go back to Windows. I simply could not. Even though Windows 7 looks far much better then crappy Vista, it still has too much going on, too many things I don’t need, too many pop ups, too many options…

So I came back from this camp and made an executive decision: I need to switch to Mac! Which I did! I went to buy a slick new MacBook Pro last Sunday. Expansive, that’s for sure, but not much more then what I would have spent on a Dell anyway.

I start playing with it Monday morning. A lot of new things to learn as one could see from my Twitter feed but here I am, 6 days later, fully operational on my new Mac, happy as I never was in my life using a computer !