So, the new computer arrived on Friday. I got it hooked up and working, but it doesn’t feel like home yet. When I installed Ubuntu on the laptop, I immediately felt at home with it. If I wanted to do something, I could do it. If I didn’t know how, I knew where to look for answers. With the Mac, I’m still learning the system’s quirks. Fortunately I had done a little bit of reading, so I knew what some of the biggest gotchas were ahead of time. I still don’t have it set up quite the way I want yet - for example, my mail is still on the laptop exclusively. I hope to be able to run with a network profile that will enable me to use Thunderbird across various machines seamlessly.

At this point I don’t even have nfs shares auto mounting at boot. Not that that’s a huge deal, but it will become one if my plan is to come to fruition.

I would say that from a pure usability standpoint, Linux wins (for me) while Windows comes in second, and Mac OS X is in last at this point. I’m sure that will change as I get more used to things, but Mac OS X is certainly not as intuitive as I expected. There’s a lot of jargon and things that the user is expected to know. I’m not saying that Windows and Ubuntu are jargon free, but at least it’s jargon that I understand at this point. Keep in mind that it’s been 10 years since I last used a Mac for anything of any substance, so I’m a little rusty.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Bees are on the what now?” - Homer