I bought a new laptop a couple days ago. For the past 6 years I’ve been using Macs just about exclus­ively; for the past 3 years or so it’s been my Mac­Book that’s been my main machine. How­ever, for the past sev­eral months I’ve been increas­ingly annoyed with the Mac­Book: the case is crack­ing; the track­pad but­ton is stick­ing; and, some­thing which mat­ters to very people other than me, Apple has been slow in fix­ing some bugs and the source code wasn’t avail­able for me to fix them myself. So, after much delib­er­a­tion, a couple days ago I picked up a Toshiba Satel­lite, on sale and marked down even fur­ther because it was a demo model. Accord­ing to the spe­cific­a­tions it’s bet­ter than a mod­ern Mac­Book in pretty well every way, and at about one quarter the price. The only down­side was it didn’t run OS X, which I was becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with anyway.

I inten­ded to run OpenSol­aris on it because I quite like the tech­no­lo­gies in OpenSol­aris. Unfor­tu­nately OpenSolaris’s hard­ware sup­port is very poor, but the laptop I bought looked like it had the highest chances of work­ing, and it was very highly rated by Con­sumer Reports as well. After try­ing vari­ous OpenSol­aris dis­tri­bu­tions and developer builds, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that it’s not going to work, at least not yet. It was prob­ably naïve of me to think I could get my wire­less card work­ing under OpenSolaris.

No mat­ter, though! My back-​​up plan was to run Linux. The last time I ran GNU/​Linux as my primary oper­at­ing sys­tem was in 2004. I ran Slack­ware with a cus­tom built win­dow man­ager and cus­tom, well, everything, and I stayed will­fully ignor­ant of what was hap­pen­ing with “main­stream” Linux. When it came time to install Linux on this laptop, I went with Ubuntu — as main­stream a Linux dis­tri­bu­tion as you can get — just because I wanted DVD burn­ing soft­ware imme­di­ately so I could try yet another OpenSol­aris install CD, and Ubuntu seemed like it would have the quick­est install time.

I think I’m going to stick with Ubuntu. Set­ting up everything was so mind-​​blowingly pain­less it hardly even feels like Linux any­more. I’m per­versely a little mourn­ful about that. I dare say Ubuntu is easier to use (for me) and easier to set up (for me) than OS X is. Wire­less, email, instant mes­saging, Flash, Drop­box, all my devel­op­ment tools, everything is cohes­ive and is set up in a mat­ter of seconds; it all feels imme­di­ately com­fort­able. Even ZFS, my one source of geek pride, my one devi­ation from “main­stream” Linux, the one reason I wanted to install OpenSol­aris in the first place: set up in a couple seconds and work­ing flaw­lessly, and still light-​​years bey­ond OS X’s Time Machine. Maybe Ubuntu isn’t easier than OS X for the gen­eral pub­lic, but I’m not the gen­eral pub­lic so that doesn’t mat­ter much to me.

The plan is to even­tu­ally retire the Mac­Book and turn it into a full-​​time media player (it’s cur­rently only a part-​​time media player). I don’t think it’s going to be too long before Ubuntu is my full-​​time oper­at­ing sys­tem. I never thought I’d say that.