Over two years ago, I swore off Apple computers. I purchased a G5 in January 2004, and sold it by October 2004, after months of being in and out of service. Its been a pleasure to operate at work and home with a 100% Linux environment.
Unfortunately, my needs have changed quite a bit over the past few months. My interest in photography has changed my personal computer use. On the work front, I find myself doing a lot of graphical work for projects outside my day job. Running Photoshop in VMware is fine for the occasional Photoshop session, but its agonizing if you use it on a daily or weekly basis.
The real turning point was my purchase of the D80, I’m shooting over 200 images a week. F-spot is my favorite photo management tool, but it can’t do much with RAW besides view. While basic printing in Linux is great, try printing say a set of 3×5’s on photo paper.
In order to print a photo the right way, I need to do the following:
- Export the image out of f-spot
- Start vmware with windows XP
- Launch Photoshop
- Launch Photoshop Album
- Import the Photo
- Print the photo
Its simply too much of a pain the ass. So I’m probably going to purchase the next “Macbook PRO” thats announced in January (maybe the slim one). It pains me to do this yet again, because I hate Apple users, for the most part they are obnoxious, and I dislike the company’s methods (proprietary, closed, secretive, FUD, hype). Unfortunately, for semi-serious graphics and photo work, desktop Linux is simply not there.
The nice thing about the x86 switch for Macs, is that I can dual boot with Ubuntu quite easily, or even triple boot with Vista/Solaris/etc. I will still be using Linux on the desktop for 90% of my tasks, but soon I will be toting around a Mac laptop. Hopefully Steve Jobs will come to his senses and stick a trackpoint in the keyboard. 🙂