I’m lucky, because for this anniversary I’ve had the chance to bring together great Chilean bloggers, but this is the first time a “celebrity” writes on this blog.

Well, for me at least Franco Catrin is a celebrity, the kind that appears on television, because he really has been on TV, on the fondly remembered show TvNauta. Franco is a reference for many Chilean developers, and it is an honor that he agreed to take part with this post, quite a timely one at that:

The ritual

It was two or three in the morning, I no longer remember very well. I was preparing a delivery of an application and at the same time thinking about the coming days: the upgrade ritual was upon me. That ritual I always avoid until there is no other choice left or until some disaster strikes. As an Ubuntu Linux user I would migrate to the new version when it had been out for almost a year, but this time my wait was already going on a year and a half. Why such a long wait? Because when it comes to a machine I work on, I can’t risk some exotic problem leaving me without my main work tool. That’s why I always waited until all the problems were known or had some solution, or else waited for a window of time to run the obligatory tests and check that my whole development environment worked correctly. Even so, I don’t recall ever having had serious upgrade problems, but you never know.

This time there was an extra difficulty, because I also needed a hardware upgrade. That 1.6GHz Pentium Dual Core, which was more than enough for the web and listening to music, now fell short for developing software (Java/GWT/VMs, etc). To the upgrade ritual was now added the ritual of the price quotes: look for reviews, ask friends, see what’s available on the local market, compare prices and, in the end, make sure everything ended up better than before. As a Linux user, that search also meant checking that the hardware was well supported, that the video outputs worked correctly, that it had no power management problems, etc etc. That search is not so complicated when it’s a laptop: you just find some Linux user who has the same machine and you’re done. But when it’s a desktop machine like the one I was looking for, it was no longer that simple.

I didn’t want to go through all that again.

That was how – while I kept putting the finishing touches on the application, and with some alcohol in my system – someone told me that Joel Iturra was over in Yankeeland and was bringing back some tablets for some friends. I contacted him and, expecting a no, asked if he could bring me a Mac Mini. When he said that was no problem at all, the conflict began.

A Mac Mini had enough power for my tasks, it solved a large part of the problems of the upgrade ritual not only this time but in the future as well, and as if that weren’t enough, in Yankeeland it cost almost the same as the upgrade I needed. I had already tried OSX on my desktop before and it worked well enough; the typical development tools were available. Since it was an additional machine I could try it out and at the same time keep using my development desktop, and in the worst case I could sell it if I changed my mind. The purchase decision was pretty easy, unless… your name is Franco Catrin.

Some of my friends will think it’s an exaggeration, but I was troubled about no longer using Linux as my main desktop, for several reasons: several projects I was working on were directly related to Linux, and for those a virtual machine is no good. On the other hand, moving away from daily use also meant falling behind on new developments around Linux, one of the things that set me apart from normal users. And worse still, migrating from Linux to Mac OSX sounded to me like jumping into the lifeboats to flee a platform that seemed never to have taken off, even though I actually knew that wasn’t so.

What reassured me was knowing that many developers from the Linux / open source world were using Apple machines, with and without Linux. If they, who were far more involved than I was, could do it, why couldn’t I? What’s more, just yesterday Miguel de Icaza published an article on how he no longer felt guilty about using Mac OS X instead of Linux, and he is the founder of GNOME and Mono.

Fast forward in the story and here I am, writing from Mac OS X Lion, my main desktop for almost a year now. Adapting from Linux was not painful, but it wasn’t simple either. That story is enough for a long article, something I’m saving for my blog, which is still hosted on the arealinux.cl domain. I can only tell you in advance that the much-trumpeted ease of use isn’t all that, and that some things are even much easier on Linux than on this system, which to me speaks very well of those who still work on improving Linux as a desktop system.

I’ve thought about going back to Linux on this same hardware, given that my wife’s notebook, with more modest hardware, runs much better with Linux than this Mac Mini does with OS X Lion. I’ve made so many jumps already that maybe it doesn’t even matter; few people know that before using Linux I was a well-known Windows user/developer/advocate on the newsgroups. Maybe someday I’ll want to go back to the upgrade ritual, somewhere between 2 and 3 in the morning, with a little alcohol.