that sucks man. sorry to hear it.

Decius wrote:
The hard drive, as well, has a small metal tray attached to it with "security screws." I have no idea where my "security" bitset went.

Which ones are "security"... not Torx, I assume, since everyone's got those. If you do manage to get the drive out, I have a USB enclosure for laptop drives.

As for linux as a main machine, the last time i did it (granted 3 or so years ago now), there was a HUGE difference between linux on a desktop machine and on a laptop. by their nature, laptops are a different beast, and the hardware support was, as you imply, wonky at best.

the too much shit issue is usually configurable, at least on the distros i used, where you could (usually! see below) install and uninstall and choose packages with a pretty decent gui.

I'm fucking sure it's still ugly as sin (unless a new Enlightenment has come out since then, which is doubtful given raster's release schedule [e.g. never]). And I'm even more sure that it's still a fucking maintenance headache. I can't even contemplate how many times i HAD TO recompile my kernel in the years i used linux without becoming enraged. Most often X would just flake out, periodically, and without warning stop working at all. XF86Config, i typed thee sooo many times. And god forbid i should want to do something like use some new fonts in a graphics app. Jesus, that was the End of Things. And by "Things" i mean "everything i had planned to do for the next week". Occasionally some nice circular dependencies in the installer packages made life fun, like Mike's adventure where he couldn't upgrade libc (which is, well, *sorta* important) because the installed version depended on itself or something. The system wouldn't remove it and couldn't upgrade it. If i recall, the ensuing shenanigans eventually resulted in a reinstall from a new distro checkpoint... possibly after rendering the system unbootable.

I have very little reason to suspect that any of these issues are more than marginally better than they were in 2004.

Linux as a real user system is a romantic notion, and one i pursued for a long time (i used linux almost 100% for personal machines from 1998-ish through 2004), but i'll have to see some impressive fucking success stories before i even go back down that dark path.

I'm genuinely sorry about your Mac woes... my G4 powerbook is still going strong with only one notable issue, being a recall-covered screen problem (the white ghosts, caused by uneven pressure behind the LCD), and i've dropped it about 4 or 5 times, a couple times from desk height. I reckon I'm already on borrowed time, based on that. Needless to say i'm fairly backup crazy these days as the machine ages, but I can't say enough about the thing's reliability. I have, otoh, known others who had recurrent problems, partic. with the mobo. Perhaps i'm Captain Lucky.

I certainly agree about the macbook keyboard, that thing is fucked top to bottom, though still better than most keyboards, sadly.

[EDIT] Seeing the other posts, I can only hope that my vitriolic rant above turns out to look stupid, because it sounds like maybe Ubuntu or someone has finally got it right. I'm still not holding my breath, but I suppose it's not impossible that that shit works.

RE: Desktop Linux