Goodbye shiny iMac
The new gig provided a shiny current-model iMac. I have in the past been something of an OS X advocate, and honestly, if you’ve got the money and don’t have some overwhelming need to be running something else, it’s a pretty good choice. I’d still recommend it to my parents.
But I’m vision-impaired, and ever-increasing display size and resolution has made OS X pretty uncomfortable for me with all the tiny text. I’m sure it all looks just great on a 20″ display at 1680×1050 if you’ve got normal vision, which is presumably where Steve Jobs is coming from, but I either have to use the zoom mode a lot or run in a non-native resolution, and while modern LCDs do handle that a lot better than they did five years ago it’s still not so great.
As a final bonus my particular vision issues make high-contrast light-on-dark much easier to read than dark-on-light, and the low-contrast stuff found throughout the OS X interface makes it just plain unpleasant.
At home we’ve both switched from Windows to Ubuntu, largely because we’d been trialling Vista, decided not to pay up for it, opted to give Ubuntu a go before reinstalling XP, and liked it enough to stick around.
So today I grabbed an old PC (a HP d530, so we’re talking Pentium 4, 512GB RAM, 40GB disk, low-end Intel integrated video) with a 17″ display, and once I got Ubuntu running on it I became far more productive almost right away. A slightly-tweaked version of the “High contrast - inverse” theme makes everything so much easier to deal with.
Ironically, under load this PC with half the memory, half the (slower) cores, and barely a GPU is performing better than the iMac under similar circumstances. And this is with “desktop effects” enabled, including the cube-workspace stuff.
My colleagues thought I was nuts at first, but my boss understood pretty quickly once I explained it in terms of vision impairment. A nice thing about the place is that nobody is particularly religious about computing platform. We have a mix of Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops and our infrastructure is a mix of Solaris, FreeBSD, and Windows. While there’s the occasional snarky remark about Exchange, that’s as often coming from the Windows guys as anyone else.
This willingness to engage and to see the value in things that aren’t part of your own little niche makes for a refreshing change.
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