Adventures moving to a Macbook Pro

One of the reasons why I wanted a Mac was so that I didn’t need to VNC into a Mini to do development of Flock. My previous machine was an IBM TP60 – a decent machine which I had setup for dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu. Originally Linux was Edgy then I dist-upgraded to Gutsy – big mistake as dual-head screens no longer worked, but I digress.

It was a love-hate relationship with that machine. It had a docking station which is something that I think is missing from the Macs. Then again all I really need is just a few more USB ports so a hub will suffice. The 4:3 screen sucked, however IBM has a new version that has a wide screen so it’s a bit better. Linux was absolutely awesome – super fast, snappy response, no crashing… developing Flock was a breeze.

Windows was a whole different set of apples! The performance was absolute garbage, taking anywhere from 1-2 hours for an fbuild_all (neat little script that automatically updates subversion and builds from the root source dir). Linux was no more than 45 minutes. Now this is largely due to ccache being broken under cygwin, but even loading Thunderbird/Flock/Firefox/Pidgin/Skype makes the machine crawl. I stayed mostly in Linux because I wanted to actually get *some* work done. This created problems tho every time I booted into Windows because inevitably the tree would be so out of sync that I’d be spending a minimum of 1.5 hours just building before I could do anything. Occasionally during the build my machine would hang when it was linking large object files.

Enter the new intel Macbook Pro: As soon as I got it I immediately got my hands on a Gutsy and WinXP disc. I got my machine triple booting in probably less time than it took to do a full rebuild of Flock under my old machine. I still needed to setup the build environments on each OS, but that wouldn’t be so bad. I spend most of my time in OSX and I love it. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for all these years – nice eye candy with standardized installation of software (read: drag program into Applications folder) and a shell to interact with. Performance of WinXP is actually better than what I was getting about of the IBM – so I’m happy there.

Having triple boot on the Mac is great – I think anyone developing cross-platform software targeting the big-3 definitely need to consider Mac.