FrankenComputer

Ok, the unthinkable has happened.  I've been a PC person for ages, and I probably will continue to use Windows in some capacity for the foreseeable future.  But I've taken a plunge.  Some might even argue that I've taken a plunge off the deep end.  I've switched to a Mac.

However, I didn't actually buy myself a Mac.  I bought the operating system and some carefully researched hardware and built myself a "hackintosh."  The system isn't quite as slick looking as a real Mac, but it did cost me a lot less money and runs pretty smoothly.

I used to make fun of Macs for being just a little too user friendly.  In some instances, they are still a little too user friendly.  Sometimes I really do want low level control of all the details.  But I'm finding myself enjoying the computer tinkering less and less these days.  Time is not a commodity of which I have large quantities.  While I like to tinker (it's the nerd engineer in me), more often I just want things to work so I can get stuff done.  Macs in their current incarnation (built on top of a Unix core) give me the famous user friendly Mac experience while still exposing tools that still allow me to poke around and experiment.

What's the experience been like so far in cheery, happy Mac land?  Surprisingly pleasant.  My biggest complaints at the moment are having to re-learn keyboard shortcuts.  The home and end keys behave differently (jump to beginning and end of documents, not just lines).  I have to re-map a lot of CTRL+key combinations to OPTION+key.  But the OS itself is gorgeous, hibernating the OS works a heck of a lot better than Windows, and things (so far) seem to just work.  I'm sure I'll find stupid little things that irk me as I get more familiar with Mac OS X, but so far I like having this fresh start on a new computer.