Changing my laptop after 6 years with it.

About 3 weeks ago I bought a new laptop.  I had the intention to buy a Lenovo X1 Carbon but it was impossible as Lenovo simply wouldn't let me to do it.  They claimed it'd take about 6 weeks to fulfill the order.  I hadn't that much time for other reasons I'll talk about later.

My previous laptop, and I'm talking about both the work and home ones, it's around 6 years old.  Huge time in terms of technology, but I'm a Linux user, and that my friends it's the difference between earth and heaven because despite the slowness with latest Ubuntu releases, it worked as I needed until recently, and that's why I needed to upgrade.

After reading a lot of reviews I found a consistently recommendation to buy a Mac Book Pro.  The Lenovo was in second place. After several years using Linux (since 2001) and before that Windows, I thought it was worth to try and use OSX for a change. I must confess that I've liked it.

It's double the specs of the Lenovo laptop I was looking for.  And the OS it's a Unix derivative called OSX Maverick (but you already know that, don't you?)

On a first basis, my idea was to install Ubuntu on it (and in fact I did) but I had to give it a try, so I explore a little bit the system and found things I liked a lot.  Multiple desktops as in Linux.  That was a major discovery.  Gestures, I liked them a lot.  And the usual Open Source software that I used on a daily basis such as Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, Libreoffice, Gimp, VirtualBox, among others. Also, there's tons of Open Source apps available too and that's great for someone like me who claims to bring OSS to companies for a living.

However it's absurd that I've got to download software from webpages in order to install them. Definitely repos, PPA, yum, apt-get and all of that infrastructure is amazing and one of the strongest differentiators of Linux.  No wonder why there's so many viruses for Windows and -apparently- for OSX, too.

I haven't finished the tuning, probably I'd hit some roadblocks here as it seems OSX likes to hide the granular control from their users.  Let's see.  Meanwhile, this has been an interesting change, it forces to renew myself and not to stay on the same comfortable world that I've been for all this years using Linux.

I've got to say that I installed Ubuntu in a 100G partition with all the intention to use it, but as soon as I found the virtual desktops (and that Linux didn't supported VGA and Network thunderbolt adapters) I decided to give OSX a real chance.

Hopefully I'd write about installing Ubuntu on the Mac and how to share mouse & keyboard using Synergy between OSX and Ubuntu, as I'm still using my old laptop :)