Windows/Linux User Thinking of Switching to Mac

[Jessehk]

Hi everyone.

I'm an electrical engineering student in Canada who makes frequent use of both Linux (Emacs/LaTeX, GCC, Eclipse, etc) and Windows (Matlab, Office, everything else).

I started my Linux experience about 6 years ago with Fedora Core, and have since used Gentoo, Arch, and now Ubuntu. I'd like to think I have a good idea of what I'm doing.

Lately, Apple's hardware (specifically their Macbook Pro) has been very appealing to me. I love the form factor, the keyboard, and the LOOOONNNG battery life. The only problems are:

1) I love running Linux for the things it's good at.

2) I NEED to have certain windows applications (like Maple, Matlab, Office).

So far, my thoughts are that I would boot OS X by default, use Bootcamp for Windows, and virtualize Linux.

However, I've heard some things that are making me uneasy about this plan. I also have some questions.

1) OS X only has read support for NTFS natively (no write) and Bootcamp in windows only has HFS+ read support. With my Linux/Windows dual-boot I keep everything in my NTFS partition since both can read and write to it. What can I do (other than installing third party software like ntfs-3g) to make this easier?

2) I've heard that the Windows drivers supplied by Bootcamp don't allow the hardware to function perfectly. For example, I've heard numerous stories about the keyboard backlight.

3) I've heard that Flash support in Snow Leopard is AWFUL. This might be an issue since I would probably use OS X for everyday internet browsing. Do a lot of people notice this?

4) I am aware of the possibility of using something like VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox to virtualize windows instead of bootcamp. How well would Office work in this situation? How about computationally intensive software such as Matlab, Mathematica, or Maple?

5) I like to use a lot of Unix-y tools and I am aware that there are multiple package managers to allow for their installation on OS X. What are the state of these tools? What are the chances that if a project releases its C source code on a Git repository (for example) that I would be able to compile and run it on the Mac without modification? In essence, how compatible is Mac with Linux/BSD software?

6) Would the integrated graphics (the Nvidia 9400M, I think) be able to handle something like Starcraft 2 when it comes out? This is really the only game I care about at this point. ;)

7) Are their any other "warts" the Mac users have noticed that would be good to be aware of?

I know that's a lot of questions, but part of the reason I'm asking here is that these questions are difficult to ask Apple Store employees either because they are very specific or because it's difficult to get a straight answer because the reveal "faults" in Apple's products.

Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks :)

[dyn]

1) I love running Linux for the things it's good at.

2) I NEED to have certain windows applications (like Maple, Matlab, Office).

So far, my thoughts are that I would boot OS X by default, use Bootcamp for Windows, and virtualize Linux.

However, I've heard some things that are making me uneasy about this plan. I also have some questions.

1) OS X only has read support for NTFS natively (no write) and Bootcamp in windows only has HFS+ read support. With my Linux/Windows dual-boot I keep everything in my NTFS partition since both can read and write to it. What can I do (other than installing third party software like ntfs-3g) to make this easier?

As of Snow Leopard OS X supports both read and write for NTFS, if you look around the internet you'll see a lot of documentation about this and how to enable it (in short: use /etc/fstab with the appropriate settings to mount the ntfs disk). HFS+ unfortunately seems to be indeed read only, if you want read and write you need to resort to 3rd party apps.

3) I've heard that Flash support in Snow Leopard is AWFUL. This might be an issue since I would probably use OS X for everyday internet browsing. Do a lot of people notice this?

Flash is awful. Period. If it the OS is not Windows then Flash is awful and even with Windows it can be resource-hungry as if it hasn't eaten for a week. You may notice it if you're system is under a lot of load or if you check the Activity Monitor but other than that you won't notice it. You could also use plugins to block Flash so you can allow it when you want to (added value: it automatically kills al those annoying ads that popup, make a lot of noise or can cause a seizure). Flash in OS X is no different than in Linux.

4) I am aware of the possibility of using something like VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox to virtualize windows instead of bootcamp. How well would Office work in this situation? How about computationally intensive software such as Matlab, Mathematica, or Maple?

Office will work very well in a vm but I don't know about the other 3 software (they tend to not run nicely on a non-virtualised system). I know Matlab and Maple have OS X versions you can use. You can use the Windows version of Office but you could also use Office 2008. If you need macros the only option is the Windows version as Microsoft "wisely" (note the sarcasm) decided Mac people don't meed macros, they should use AppleScript. Lucky for us Mac people they realised that this was the stupidest thing they could do and they are undoing it in the next version, Office 2010 (if you want to wait for some time...this is an option too). If you want to virtualise stuff other than just Windows I'd go for Fusion 3 as it is a rock solid virtualisation product with a lot of support for a lot of operating systems. VirtualBox is the new guy on the block with a lot of potential but it isn't there yet (running FreeBSD with VirtualBox is a nightmare) and the GUI is awful (moving vm's is also a complete nightmare because of this). Parallels also has problems running non-Windows systems properly just like VirtualBox. This is easily explained by the fact that VMware has the most experience in virtualisation and they share a lot of their code base in all of their products. If you have been running vm's already you might want to use the virtualisation product from the same vendor (but that would be obvious ;)).

5) I like to use a lot of Unix-y tools and I am aware that there are multiple package managers to allow for their installation on OS X. What are the state of these tools? What are the chances that if a project releases its C source code on a Git repository (for example) that I would be able to compile and run it on the Mac without modification? In essence, how compatible is Mac with Linux/BSD software?

OS X is UNIX, Linux/BSD are not. All three share an awful lot of the same software. Most UNIX people use a Mac because it is UNIX but with a nice GUI unlike Linux or any of the other alternatives. If you install Xcode and MacPorts and/or Fink you'll have a great system. You can use Macports to install things like wireshark, gpg, git, mercurial, etc. A lot of stuff already come default on a Mac like Vim, Emacs, Perl, dig, bash, tcpdump, curl, etc. If you install Xcode you'll get gcc and subversion as well. There should be no problem pulling code from a git, mercurial, bazaar, subversion, etc. repository and compile it by using gcc (you can install all those by using macports/fink). You may run into some problems as the code is not written with OS X in mind (roughly the same problem as with getting GNOME to work on FreeBSD). Apart from that OS X is just UNIX that uses nearly the same (and up to date) software as Linux does so that shouldn't be a big problem.

6) Would the integrated graphics (the Nvidia 9400M, I think) be able to handle something like Starcraft 2 when it comes out? This is really the only game I care about at this point. ;)

Although the 9400m is a great integrated graphics card (it can drive a 30" monitor without any problems and run games like C&C Generals and C&C RA3) don't expect it to run everything :p I don't think it can run Starcraft 2 really nicely but time will tell.

7) Are their any other "warts" the Mac users have noticed that would be good to be aware of?

Management of the windows is different from Windows and Linux. It takes some while to get used to the OS X way of doing it but there is a lot of documentation and sites out there that will definitely help.

[Karl L.]

It sounds like your needs are similar to mine. I am also an engineering student (computer engineering), and I use a lot of the same software that you do. I own a Macbook Pro 4.1 (the revision before the unibody ones came out). Let me attempt to answer some of your questions. My answers might be slightly tainted by my personal experience.

1) For proper NTFS support you should consider NTFS-3G, which is the exact same driver that Linux uses to access NTFS partitions. It allows full read-write support and is fairly stable. The only complaint I have about full NTFS support in OS X is that it leaves its .DS_Store files ALL OVER the partition. Although it does not harm the partition it really bugs me to see them when I boot into Windows. Maybe I am just OCD about this, but it bugs me so much that I created a batch file that runs on Windows startup and removes them.

2) Keyboard backlighting under Windows doesn't work right? I can't say that I have ever had a problem with that. I would have to agree, however, that driver support under Windows is simply HORRENDOUS! The part I have trouble with most often is the touchpad driver. If you plan on using your laptop under Windows for any descent length of time, make sure that you have an external mouse handy. I love the multitouch features that the touchpad supports, but its driver has a tendency to crash. Sometimes it happens after only a half-hour or sometimes it will happen after 4 hours, but it almost always happens at some point while I'm using Windows. Since "crash" is an overused term let me define specifically what I mean. When the driver "crashes" I can still move the cursor using the touchpad, but all advanced multitouch features fail to work, including double-click. The only solution I have found to this problem, besides getting an external mouse, is to reboot Windows.

3) I have personally never had a problem with flash support in Leopard or Snow Leopard. I regularly use Firefox (don't even get me started on Safari), so I don't know if that has anything to do with my experience. I believe that flash uses slightly higher resources under OS X than under Windows, but with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM I don't really care. If I need to do anything resource-intensive, I would be using Windows or Linux anyways (and probably not be watching flash videos while I'm doing it).

4) VirtualBox works fairly well under OS X (except for the issue with switching work spaces with it is running), but, being a virtual machine, is not particularly good for any heavy computing. Therefore, Microsoft Word will run just fine, but Matlab and Mathmatica run significantly more slowly than in a native environment. I would not recommend running them virtualized unless you enjoy torturing yourself. Althought Microsoft Word runs well when virtualized, Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac works even better, so why bother? While I am in the vein of word processing, I feel compelled to mention that OpenOffice is a worthy competitor, in my opinion.

5) OS X has many of the classic Unix utilities built-in by default. Although I am a heavy command line user (have you ever tried to get any actual work done using Finder?), I have not come across many of the classic utilities that are not built-in. In fact, the only thing that really comes to mind is GCC, which can be easily installed by downloading and installing Xcode. That said, because Xcode uses GCC as its compiler, virtually any Unix program can be compiled for OS X without too much difficulty. I feel that it is important to note that although OS X does have a version of X11 installed, and therefore can run X11 programs, they do not look or feel the same as native! The only program that I have installed that this fact really bugs me about is Wine.

6) Considering that I do not have a GeForce 9400M (my model has a GeForce 8600GT) or Starcraft 2 (obviously) I cannot say how well it will handle it. If the graphics of Starcraft 2 are anything similar to the original you should have no problem at all. My GeForce 8600GT runs Half-Life 2 (the most graphics-intensive game I have installed) as smooth as butter. Although I do not own one, I have friends that have the Macbook Pro model with the 9400M\9600GT and the Windows drivers for it are terrible! Screen-tearing is often evident, and the computer gets very hot under Windows\Linux because they only use the 9600GT. I do not believe that there is a fix for this issue yet, but Apple is aware of it.

7a) Considering that I am not exactly your average Mac owner, or average computer user for that matter, there are a few things about the hardware that really annoy me. The thing that is the absolute worst, in my opinion, is that I only have 2 USB ports! My Gateway laptop that I owned in 2000 had 2 USB ports. For comparison, my sister's 1-year old ASUS laptop has 4 USB ports. Doesn't Apple realize that this is 2009?! To make matters worse, if I use 1 USB port for my external mouse (so I don't have to worry about the touchpad drivers crashing AGAIN), I only have 1 more available for other uses (such as plugging-in one of my 4 flash drives that I regularly use). I also lothe the heat output. Although I do not have the troublesome GeForce 9600GT graphics card in my laptop, it still gets VERY hot after an hour or so of use, regarless of which operating system I am using.

7b) I don't want you to get the false impression that there is nothing that I like about my laptop. That would be a lie. I really love the multitouch features of my touchpad (when they work); every laptop should have multitouch! I also like how the screen and keyboard backlights automatically adjust to the environment. Battery life is also very good compared to most other laptops sold today, but it comes with one caveat - Windows gets significantly lower battery life than Snow Leopard\Ubuntu. I get about 5 hours of batter in Snow Leopard\Ubuntu (assuming that I'm not doing anything outrageous like running VirtualBox), but only 4 hours in Windows doing the same thing (although Windows 7 gets slightly better batter life than when I was running Windows Vista). I blame the difference on the Bootcamp drivers. Did I mention EFI yet? EFI is so awesome, especially when you extend it with rEFIt. It is so nice to not have to worry about bootloaders when I multiboot. EFI with rEFIt is a huge benefit if you plan on doing anything with multibooting; for the normal single-booting user I fail to see the difference between EFI and BIOS.

7c) There are a few other things that I have learned since buying my laptop. First, you should definitely consider buying a refurbished Macbook Pro without any upgrades from Apple, save for the VGA\DVI adapter that will allow your laptop to connect to standard monitors and projectors (why didn't Apple just use the idustry standard?). If you want to upgrade your hard drive and RAM, buy them elsewhere, such as Newegg and install them yourself; it will not void your warranty. Fortunately, with the unibody Macbooks\Pros it is significantly easier to upgrade your hardrive than with my model Macbook Pro. Second, I would highly recommend Quicksilver for OS X. If you like Gnome-Do you will love Quicksilver. In my opinion, it is even more useful than Gnome-Do because Finder is harder to navigate, by default, than Nautilus. It also allows you to make universal keyboard shortcuts for heavily used programs, such as Terminal! Finally, I would recommend tripple booting with Linux if you plan running all three operating systems. Although Linux will run in VirtualBox no problem (in fact, it runs better than most other OS do virtualized), I would not recommend it. In my opinion, half of the Linux experience is Compiz; I do not know how people used Linux before it was created. Multiple workspaces is also a useless feature when virtualized, in my opinion. I think that virtual machines should be used for testing purposes, but have little everyday use. If you need to use a program regularly go native.

I hope that you can get something useful out of this post. I believe that I gave you a lot of useful information, but, as with everything else, take it with a grain of salt. Some of my Mac-fanitc friends disagree with me on some, or all, of my points. I admit that some of the things I mentioned are nuances that others may not take issue with. The above is just my experience with a system that I have been using regularly for the last year and half.

[Hendrick]

Computer Science and Engineering Major in college. Garnet, I'm only doing intro stuff in engineering so far, but I need AutoCAD Inventor 2010 for multiple products. I didn't really want to install Windows just for one app, so I turned to Parallels, to see how it runs. As you probably know, AutoCAD Inventor can be quite demanding in terms of resources.

It's definitively slower to load, and at times, it seems a bit choppy when completing task. (2.66GHz MBP, 4GB RAM). But overall, it's not terrible. Just don't expect the same performance and speed out of running a resource intensive application via Parallels or any other virtual machine. But, I have to tell you, it's not bad enough that I've installed Windows via Bootcamp yet.

On the side note, I could've sworn I've seen tutorials of how to install Linux based OS using bootcamp. You may not have to virtual machine it if you don't want to.

[giga Veteran]

I've used Matlab extensively on 10.4 and 10.5--it did everything I needed without any problems. Mathematica and Maple I'm not so familiar with, but they do support Mac OS natively as far as I can see.

http://www.maplesoft.com/products/system_requirements.aspx

http://www.wolfram.com/products/student/ma.../techspecs.html

For NTFS write support, NTFS-3G is an adequate solution, but I highly recommend Paragon NTFS if you can spare the money as it is much quicker. Note: I haven't used NTFS-3G (or Paragon) in quite a while, so my past experience is probably outdated and incorrect. Always give the free solution a shot first and if you're satisfied, then case closed.

[Jessehk]

Thanks to all of you for your very comprehensive responses. I'm going to carefully go over them and continue to research.

Thank you (x200)!

[greenwizard88]

I would not do it. I have a macbook pro, and 1) Linux support on it is horrible. It took over a year from when it was released to have Ubuntu work properly, and even still the linux drivers for it just aren't all that great. I never got the wobbly windows thing (I forget what it's called) to work properly. As for running Windows on it, well Windows 7 gives you some decent drivers, but Apple's bootcamp drivers are once again, pitiful. Apple looks at Windows and Linux as 2nd class operating systems, and treats them likewise.

If you can afford to only use OS X (or if you can afford to run linux and windows in a VM), I'd suggest going for it. Otherwise, you will not be happy- heck, even the bootloader for OS X is horrible.

[kevinvandale]

Hi everyone.

I'm an electrical engineering student in Canada who makes frequent use of both Linux (Emacs/LaTeX, GCC, Eclipse, etc) and Windows (Matlab, Office, everything else).

I started my Linux experience about 6 years ago with Fedora Core, and have since used Gentoo, Arch, and now Ubuntu. I'd like to think I have a good idea of what I'm doing.

Lately, Apple's hardware (specifically their Macbook Pro) has been very appealing to me. I love the form factor, the keyboard, and the LOOOONNNG battery life. The only problems are:

1) I love running Linux for the things it's good at.

2) I NEED to have certain windows applications (like Maple, Matlab, Office).

So far, my thoughts are that I would boot OS X by default, use Bootcamp for Windows, and virtualize Linux.

However, I've heard some things that are making me uneasy about this plan. I also have some questions.

1) OS X only has read support for NTFS natively (no write) and Bootcamp in windows only has HFS+ read support. With my Linux/Windows dual-boot I keep everything in my NTFS partition since both can read and write to it. What can I do (other than installing third party software like ntfs-3g) to make this easier?

2) I've heard that the Windows drivers supplied by Bootcamp don't allow the hardware to function perfectly. For example, I've heard numerous stories about the keyboard backlight.

3) I've heard that Flash support in Snow Leopard is AWFUL. This might be an issue since I would probably use OS X for everyday internet browsing. Do a lot of people notice this?

4) I am aware of the possibility of using something like VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox to virtualize windows instead of bootcamp. How well would Office work in this situation? How about computationally intensive software such as Matlab, Mathematica, or Maple?

5) I like to use a lot of Unix-y tools and I am aware that there are multiple package managers to allow for their installation on OS X. What are the state of these tools? What are the chances that if a project releases its C source code on a Git repository (for example) that I would be able to compile and run it on the Mac without modification? In essence, how compatible is Mac with Linux/BSD software?

6) Would the integrated graphics (the Nvidia 9400M, I think) be able to handle something like Starcraft 2 when it comes out? This is really the only game I care about at this point. ;)

7) Are their any other "warts" the Mac users have noticed that would be good to be aware of?

I know that's a lot of questions, but part of the reason I'm asking here is that these questions are difficult to ask Apple Store employees either because they are very specific or because it's difficult to get a straight answer because the reveal "faults" in Apple's products.

Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks :)

Hi everyone.

I'm an electrical engineering student in Canada who makes frequent use of both Linux (Emacs/LaTeX, GCC, Eclipse, etc) and Windows (Matlab, Office, everything else).

I started my Linux experience about 6 years ago with Fedora Core, and have since used Gentoo, Arch, and now Ubuntu. I'd like to think I have a good idea of what I'm doing.

Lately, Apple's hardware (specifically their Macbook Pro) has been very appealing to me. I love the form factor, the keyboard, and the LOOOONNNG battery life. The only problems are:

1) I love running Linux for the things it's good at.

2) I NEED to have certain windows applications (like Maple, Matlab, Office).

So far, my thoughts are that I would boot OS X by default, use Bootcamp for Windows, and virtualize Linux.

However, I've heard some things that are making me uneasy about this plan. I also have some questions.

1) OS X only has read support for NTFS natively (no write) and Bootcamp in windows only has HFS+ read support. With my Linux/Windows dual-boot I keep everything in my NTFS partition since both can read and write to it. What can I do (other than installing third party software like ntfs-3g) to make this easier?

2) I've heard that the Windows drivers supplied by Bootcamp don't allow the hardware to function perfectly. For example, I've heard numerous stories about the keyboard backlight.

3) I've heard that Flash support in Snow Leopard is AWFUL. This might be an issue since I would probably use OS X for everyday internet browsing. Do a lot of people notice this?

4) I am aware of the possibility of using something like VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox to virtualize windows instead of bootcamp. How well would Office work in this situation? How about computationally intensive software such as Matlab, Mathematica, or Maple?

5) I like to use a lot of Unix-y tools and I am aware that there are multiple package managers to allow for their installation on OS X. What are the state of these tools? What are the chances that if a project releases its C source code on a Git repository (for example) that I would be able to compile and run it on the Mac without modification? In essence, how compatible is Mac with Linux/BSD software?

6) Would the integrated graphics (the Nvidia 9400M, I think) be able to handle something like Starcraft 2 when it comes out? This is really the only game I care about at this point. ;)

7) Are their any other "warts" the Mac users have noticed that would be good to be aware of?

I know that's a lot of questions, but part of the reason I'm asking here is that these questions are difficult to ask Apple Store employees either because they are very specific or because it's difficult to get a straight answer because the reveal "faults" in Apple's products.

Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks :)