Home > Thoughts > Day-to-Day with Linux > A Feisty MacBook Update 3

A Feisty MacBook Update 3

2007.10.09

Linux on the MacBook continues to impress me. I've been stress-testing the hfsplus driver and everything looks good, though I thibk that hfsplus' ?case aware? behaviour may come back to bite me. As was recommended on the Gentoo howto, I've disabled journaling on the HFS partition.


Linux and Mac OSX are now sharing a common home directory. It looks like hfsplus might some day replace the venerable fat32 as a common filesystem for my machines. Hooray, it's about time.


I haven't set up common profiles with Thunderbird and Firefox yet, but I can't think of any reasons for that not working. It's nice to once again have a common spot for documents.


Having the shared directories on the same machine gives me a great chance to compare the two operating systems in a totally fair manor. It's interesting, Mac OSX is much slower at some things. Starting applications, for instance. Most applications in Linux spring forth almost instantaneously. Not so in OSX. Not that this is a big deal, but the seconds do add up, or at least they make it feel like a heavier OS. And then there's X11. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Apple includes X11.app (though I wish it was in the default install. There are several GB of printer drivers and locale files, so I can't imagine that they don't install X11.app to save the 50MB it takes up.) However, Apple's X11.app isn't the same as using Linux, where X apps, local and remote, just work. I always miss that when in OSX.


Anyway, it's really nice to have a machine that is both a great Linux box and a great Mac OSX box, and it's nice to have my files in one spot either way. Actually, because I tend to use the same apps regardless of the OS, switching between systems is no big deal at all.