What I miss about Mac...

Okay, so, I sold my PowerBook. It was a bit long in the tooth, and I have some other things I could use the money for. Incidentally, I decommissioned my Airport Extreme which is a fabulous router, minus the proprietary configuration interface. Then, I fried the router I replaced it with... an old wired-only Linksys.

It is a bit funny, because I grabbed it out of a drawer, and grabbed the power adapter to my spare DSL modem, rather than the power adapter to the router. A few minutes later, while fishing wires from under the table, I hear a hiss, then a pop, and see smoke. Oh well, that router was crap anyway. Unfortunately, the death was a bit untimely. I don't have anything to replace it with. I guess with my airport, it always seemed obvious which power adapter went with what. Apple saves you from being dumb.

Windows Vista's default Aero interface is relatively ugly. I'm sure you can hack it into a more pleasing aesthetic, and then there's that whole "eye of the beholder" thing with beauty, but, meh... I think I actually like my usual Gnome desktop better. Actually, all I miss is the compiz bling that got copied from Mac OS X, namely expose and the dock... The dock recently got patented, so maybe I'll have to actually use a Mac to get it now. LOL.

What's really wrong with Fedora 9?

I like Fedora, but there's always some crazy voodoo I have to learn or figure out, or learn from someone els who has figured it out already to get my stuff working.

Recently, with Fedora 9. I'm using two 8800 GS video cards in SLI on a dual opteron workstation board, and I can't get into the GUI when I install the kmod-nvidia driver. My issue seems to be described by this post:

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=190393

Basically, I get the text login prompt, flashing like 30 times. I can log in, but I can't start X. Apparently, I need to read the log file to find out that I have two video cards, and that X can't start because it doesn't know which one to use. Then I need to specify one card.

That pretty much seems like a functionality regression to me, since it worked fine before. Then again, it worked fine *until* I installed the proprietary NVIDIA driver... Hmm...

So, is the evil closed-source driver at fault, or is the bad choice of Fedora to launch with the new X server at fault? I don't know. I guess I'll be happy if I can go home today (I read this on my lunch break at work) and get my box up and running with Linux again.

The real question is, "why should I have to use my google-fu to solve this problem?" It either needs to not happen, or there needs to be some kind of "safe mode" gui with a VESA driver so I can at least look at a FAQ distributed with the software, or get online to look up the solution to the problem. I'm lucky enough to have another computer to get on line and search for the answer, but lots of people aren't.

I didn't even try, I just switched to another Operating System, on a different machine. Maybe that's what's wrong with this whole Linux thing. It doesn't seem like there's any incentive to identify and solve "hard" problems. Just incrementally (though rapidly) improving with small easy problems until the hard ones become easy or go away. I suppose it is a different development model, but I think I'd actually pay for a Mac, just to get rid of these insane quirks.

Now to find a portable media player I can live with in Linux, and ditch this Mac, LOL.