Operating Systems Dilemma

Posted on 1st December 2010 in Something Daily

This week is becoming interesting. Mondays and Tuesdays are always pretty easy: I don’t have a lot of classes, and homework is usually due later in the week. So when I go home, I can hang out. Like how I didn’t really accomplish anything yesterday and just played New Super Mario Bros. Wii with Eric. I mean it’s a pretty good game – almost as good as being productive. Almost. We finished all the regular levels, including the crazy frantic battle at the end where giant bowser is running after you – we were all screaming. It was crazy. But now, since we apparently don’t have better things to do, we’re going through the game again and getting all of the star coins to unlock the really difficult secret levels. It’s not as bad as the replay gimmick in Super Mario Galaxy 2 that makes you play the whole game twice, but it’s similar. But who am I to complain? It’s fun – I mean I’m playing it, right? Anyway the week is getting interesting because I know that tonight is going to involve a large amount of frantic work that’s all due tomorrow. And the South Park season is over, so I don’t have that to break up the craziness tonight. But today’s the craziest. Tomorrow will be better. And now for something completely different.

Considering the process of building my own desktop computer has made me a bit uncomfortable with my affinity for Mac OS X. My original idea for a computer build was essentially “Make a computer that runs OS X”. Doing a little research, I found out about the Hackintosh community and the compendiums (compendia?) they keep of OS X compatible parts. This is all good, but doing a bit of research on the process outside of that community has led me to the realization that installing X on a non-Mac computer is ultimately more work than it’s worth. Choosing the correct parts seems to be the easy part, with the numerous lists of compatible motherboards and processors floating around the internet. The impression that I get is that hacking the OS, installing and running it successfully are the hard parts. I’m positive that it’s doable, and I’ll probably try to do it eventually. I won’t however, have a very high expectation of success, and I’ll pick hardware that’s compatible with both Ubuntu and OS X.

The thing is, I’m worried that using OS X exclusively will lead to me wasting money in the future, not to mention becoming married to one company/OS. I don’t want to have to ‘settle’ for an operating system that I’m not amazing with, or that doesn’t run the software that I need, because it doesn’t run on my hardware. My ideal situation is, of course, running OS X on non-Apple hardware, for the experience of building my own computer for a cheaper price than Apple and running the software that I know/require. I can see why Apple makes it so difficult to do this, though. They really don’t want me to do this. So I’ll try and make a Hackintosh when the time comes.

However, short of getting that to work, I’m practicing as much as I can with Linux (which isn’t a whole lot different anyway), because apparently Linux can run on tons of hardware types. I dual boot 10.6.5 and 10.10 on my white MacBook, and I pretty much only use the Linux partition these days. It’s good practice, and I love finding all of the downloadable packages for added commandline functionality that you can’t really use in OS X. It’s a great system, I just reeeeeally wish that Logic and Steam were compatible with it. If they were, I’d drop OS X in a second. Seriously. Watch, I’ll do it.

And no, I won’t use Windows. UNIX owns DOS and the system under Vista and 7.

Hey, I found a picture of young Stephen Colbert. Believe it.