iTwat
So apparently I own an iMac now.
I didn’t spend any money on it, obviously; I inherited it from my grandfather, who was given it by my uncle for his fiftieth wedding anniversary six or seven years ago. I think if you’re going to get a Mac, it should involve death in some capacity.
It’s a G3, but a relatively late model, so it’s still almost usable; 450 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB HD, DVD drive.
It also came with Mac OS 9.1, which is painful. I was initially going to dualboot with a real OS, but Mac OS turned out to be too impossible to use to keep, so I just wiped the whole thing and installed Debian.
I just realised this was actually the first time I installed Debian; I’d used it before, and I’ve installed other Linux distributions (Ubuntu on my laptop, Fedora and Gentoo on my desktop), but never Debian itself.
The installer is straightforward to use, though obviously it lacks Ubuntu’s shiny buttons, so it’s “too difficult for the average user”. What surprised me, though, is that it supports encrypted partitions at install-time (it has for a while now, I just haven’t used it in so long I didn’t know).
I doubt my mom, who wants to use that computer for random typings, is going to appreciate having to blindly enter a 40ish-letter passphrase (in English) every time it boots, but whatever. Encryption is shiny.
(Incidentally, my low opinion of Apple products has only been reinforced by this iMac. The G3 form factor makes it impossible to cool adequately, so it smells vaguely like burning plastic most of the time (though it hasn’t started smoking yet), and the input devices it came with are fucktarded.
The keyboard I can deal with, though I question the placement of the ⌘ keys, the labelling of the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys (which just have cryptic arrows on them), and the replacement of those three keys at the top by F13 through F15 (because we really need more F keys; not that the ones that were there originally saw much use, though (except Print-Screen)).
The mouse, though, is actively user-hostile: no right-click (Ctrl + click isn’t a valid alternative), no scrollwheel (and the fact that it’s seven years old is no excuse), literally painful to use for any length of time because of its shape, and it cost $59 new. Oh, but you can adjust the intensity of the light!
Jesus fucking Christ. Good thing I have plenty of USB back-up mice.)
echomikeromeo said,
February 17th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
No question that Apple sucked before the OSX days. Best thing you can do with a system that won’t support OSX is install Linux. Also agreed about lack of right-click. It’s not so bad if you’ve got a laptop, because then you really can control-click and use the trackpad with the same hand, but it’s still less convenient.
How did we ever use computers with 450Mhz processors?
Cairnarvon said,
February 17th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
With a basic Debian install the speed is pretty adequate. It’s certainly faster than the seven-year-old ThinkPad running XP my mom is using now.
I’m more worried about the RAM, though. 128 MB isn’t nothing, but once you have an e-mail client, two IM clients, and an SSH server running continuously, it’s going to bottom out pretty quickly, especially since my mom seems to want to run MS Office under Wine (which I’m not going to let her, but still).
Anonymous said,
February 17th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
I found Debian etch ran a lot faster on a G4 Mac mini than Apples own offering. With 512Mb of RAM in OS X, it would constantly hard lock with the dreaded spinning beach ball of death - highly annoying.
echomikeromeo said,
February 18th, 2008 at 1:26 am
My Dell laptop runs Ubuntu on 533MHz processor/384MB RAM faster and better than my iBook G4 runs OSX on an 800MHz processor/640MB RAM.
I have to admit, when I think about it, I’m baffled as to why I like Apple.
Saythings said,
February 19th, 2008 at 6:16 am
Yuck.
Even with my slavish devotion to all things shiny and mac, I still think their mice suck donkey shlong, especially those weird G3-era round-ish nightmares. (I’m a trackpad whore, now that I’ve been stuck with laptops for so long. Even if I had a desktop, I have no desk)
Remember when computers all had different types of mice, and you couldn’t just swap a mouse (or a keyboard) between computers? I love how virtually everything is usb now.
(You like apple because they dust their keyboards with crack, and every time you type, you inhale a little bit, cooked to perfection by the processors underneath… wait, that only works with laptops)