I do think that at Mozilla there are too many people using macs. Even though it’s a good way to virtualize all three OSes, many if not most developers end up using Mac OS X as their main OS, making people focus more on that OS than it rightfully deserves. At least 80% of our user base is on Windows, and I daresay that a significant portion of our community is on Linux, so the attention to Mac OS X is at least partially undeserved. All in my humble opinion, of course.

To me, switching back to Linux feels natural and exciting, and doing that on a PC is a lot smoother than on a Mac.

In any case, I recognize that your gripe was about Apple, and I fully agree. However, my comment was directed against comments, not your post — and there the responses contained not even the faintest hint of disapproval of Apple or any acceptance, however, slight, of the resultant need to have Apple hardware to support the OS choices of Mozilla users. Even a little bit of, “I see where you’re coming from, too bad you have to do what you’re doing”, would have been sufficient, but almost never do I see any such empathy ever expressed. *That’s* what frustrates me — not that Apple is evil (they are in this instance, not in others, as of course no one is wholly good or evil), but that no one really mentions it or acknowledges that this forces us to make tradeoffs, rather than simply taking a Manichean view of the matter.

My Mac died and was out of warranty and come to find out there was a recall and it was fixed for free.

Might as well check.

Sean Hogan: Your memories are really old and outdated. It’s going better every half year.

I’d rather be without Mac OS X altogether, but then again I’m not a developer.

I’m a little annoyed that the responses so far are mostly anti-Mac knee-jerk responses (overstating it, but still). If you want to hack on software that runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac, Mac systems are simply all that’s out there to support that (usually not multi-boot but rather through virtual machines, actually, to the other commenters here). This is not a personal preference; this is a fact. Further, so long as licensing makes it harder to virtualize OS X (need the server edition, can’t virtualize except on Apple hardware), and assuming you can’t have it as a guest OS on non-OS X even if on Apple hardware (I would love to know if this is possible but assume no), you’re forced into running OS X if you want to be able to have access to all operating systems without a tedious reboot. I wish this were otherwise, but it’s the way things are at the moment.

I would also suggest to go with a 9-cell battery despite the extra space it uses.

I as well used a MacBook for a few months last year but gave up in the end as I found learning all the new stuff (and I love learning) wouldn’t get me anywhere farther than I was already on Windows. I finally sent it back to the eBay.

Ricardo: I might try KDE out but I’m so used to Gnome I’ll probably use it instead.

Sean: I find Ubuntu’s upgrade system to be working fairly smoothly, although I agree with you about driver issues in the past. This particular PC seems to struggle with graphics even though it’s an Intel chipset which Linux supports natively. It’s just sluggish. I hope the T400s won’t have the same problems.