davidb dives in

This week, I took the plunge. While I’ve been using macs for years now, all this time my main work environment was Linux. I was very used to developing on Linux, and it was hard to justify changing. This week, I finally switched to full-time mac use (a feat that Grumpy accomplished some time ago).

I’ve been exclusively traveling with my personal powerbook for a while, so I was probably 80% here already. I’ve been browsing, reading email, blogging, etc. on the mac for years. What I hadn’t been doing was developing (not necessarily for the mac, just on the mac). My main Java development environment has become eclipse, which runs on OS X, so not much of a problem there. My main perl/python/C/etc. development environment is emacs, however, and I needed to tweak that a bit (more on that later).

I had three factors that encouraged me to jump:

1. I was becoming increasingly annoyed with the disconnect of browsing and IM’ing on two different machines, and
2. a work powerbook became available when knitbot left for greener pastures, and
3. I was starting to feel a little claustrophobic in my office being surrounded by screens and machines. Consolidation was in order.