The Desktop OS Wars
As far as OSes are concerned, I don't mind Windows, but I find that it gets in my way sometimes. That is fine for most people because they know the workarounds (e.g. reboot, re-install every 6 months...). To me, this is a waste of time since other OSes don't have this problem. This observation is mostly from XP and previous versions, but based upon what I've heard about Vista, I don't expected much better. Also, the lack of a robust terminal/shell (with things like adequate scripting) is completely inexcusable when the competitors run bash and the like.
Linux is a rock-solid OS. It dominates the server environments, and rightly so. The problem is the desktop user experience. The average computer user cannot be expected to survive here, and even the most technically savvy users often find themselves searching through forum posts for hours on how to overcome some hurdle or another. Driver support is non-existent for the most part. The installation process is flawed for the vast majority of distros (one exception is Ubuntu and the like). Also, while package management is great, there are often packages that are missing and/or outdated, so it loses much of its utility. Granted, Linux in general (and Ubuntu in particular) are making great strides in this area, but the progress is too little, too late.
That brings me to OS X. I think Apple's really gotten it right. Take something solid (BSD - though modified with a very different kernel) and put a nice UI on top of it, and that's exactly what they've done. I have a terminal session (bash) open 90% of the time when I'm programming, which is indispensable. I never payed much attention to aliasing or font rendering before, but I can't help but notice how much better everything looks. Some of that has to do with the top-notch (read: expensive) displays that Apple uses, but at work I've used the same (non-Apple) display on Windows, Linux and OS X and there is a clear difference.
Final Thoughts
I have to say, I am very impressed with my MBP so far. It does everything I want it to, without any of the quirks that are present in other hardware/OS configurations. I think this is due to the relatively small number of available hardware configurations for Macs. This puts Apple in the unique position of being able to test every possible hardware configuration - they know it works. I've heard from other Mac users that "everything works", but I don't think I really believed them or understood the implications of that statement. Now I get to experience it firsthand, and it's refreshing.
Anyhow, I hope to get back to posting more Scala stuff soon, and maybe something about Java for a change.
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