Linux

Story time: My first Mac was the first generation of Mac Mini that had an Intel processor. It could play WoW and was so much more convenient than the Linux distros of the day, and so much more stable than Windows. What more did I need? Sure, OS X was no BeOS, but it was pretty good.

And so I bought a series of Macs for myself, while at work I mostly used Linux or Windows. When I got my first MBP, I was shocked at just how good the trackpad was and what the battery life was like. My last Mac was a 27” iMac. It was mostly great, but the upgrade ability was limited to a pair of RAM slots without major surgery.

Meanwhile, at work I was using Linux 100% of the time and it had become so much more user friendly and had so much better hardware support that I couldn’t justify spending the money on a new Mac. And Macs still had crap gaming support.

So for my next computer I bought… a Steam Machine, the old set top box from Alienware. Why? Well, I wanted to play some games, my iMac was fine for daily use, and I had a great TV setup.

And then I moved. The iMac screen died in the move, so I started daily driving that Steam machine. And omfg I had forgotten how fucking terrible Windows was as a daily driver, but at least my gaming library was was good.

Soon a friend really needed a computer and had no money, so I built myself a new desktop and gave him the Steam machine. I set it up to dual boot Linux so I could also use it for work. But windows was still awful, so I ended up only switching to it for games.

And then Valve started heavily supporting Wine. And the games I was playing most ran on it. So I wiped the Windows partition and never looked back.

I’ve kept that desktop as my main machine and upgraded hardware in it a few times. Though at this point it’s been five years since I’ve updated anything and it’s still fast enough that I don’t see any reason to.

But I did want a laptop. So, in a narcoleptic haze I bought a pair of low end Thinkpads for $50, plus a new ssd and battery for one of them. I literally can not tell you what I was thinking when I did, because narcolepsy. But here’s the thing, even though they are 15 years old and were low end when new, they run Debian great and I daily one of them when I need a laptop.

My current work machine is a very high end MBP and it is amazingly fast, quiet and has incredible battery life. But I only really use it as a ssh relay to ssh into my cloud workstation. It’s just sitting there, plugged in and doing nothing that a RaspberryPi couldn’t if I could get corporate IT to register it on their Tailnet.

What’s the point of all this story? You can get yourself a Mac, and it will be a great piece of hardware until it isn’t, and then you won’t be able to repair or upgrade it. Or you could spend half as much and build yourself a nice desktop, keep your laptop for when you need to be on the go, or switch it for something with swapabable batteries.

Either way, a laptop and a desktop is probably better for you and won’t cost more than a MacBook Pro.