The History (and Confessions) of an OS junkie...
In the last two weeks I've compiled more software than in the past ten years.
A decade ago I was at the peak of my Linux mania; I remember it well. Back in 1995, having newly started work as an intern doctor and having a new income stream I decided to buy a beige Power Macintosh with its PowerPC architecture and with the promise of Copland around the corner.
A year later and Copland was still nowhere to be seen and I had since installed BeOS on my machine and was writing code in C++ and learning about object oriented programming for the first time with Metrowerks CodeWarrior. This led somehow to me getting interested in OpenStep which was Steve Jobs' creation in NeXT. I found a distributor in Australia and purchased an OpenStep 4.2 box set and then bought a custom built machine specially designed to run the software. This was in the very early years of the net here in Australia, and dialup, 28.8k modems and obscure websites were the norm. I used that machine for a whole year and dual booted it with Solaris (with CDE and its Motif windows etc). To be able to run the same OS as universities etc was a real thrill for me. The Mac had been passed onto my father who had started a community newspaper and together with QuarkXpress had been the start of the desktop publishing scene at his press.
That's when I finally succumbed to the offerings of Microsoft. Windows 95 was maturing and in 1997 I bought an IBM ThinkPad which served me until 2002; one of my longest lived computers. I had started with Windows XP in '97 and had moved onto Windows 2000 Server and so on preferring their server and enterprise grade OS to Windows 98 and their consumer line.
In 2002 I bought a Sony Vaio which started the Linux mania. I had used very early versions of Slackware, RedHat and Debian as early as 1996 but Gentoo in 2002 is what overtook me and for one whole year I started with the most minimal of core systems and ended up compiling an entire distribution into existence as was the whole principle behind Gentoo. I swear that machine must have spent more of its time compiling than doing actual work. In the end, the excitement and thrill of build it yourself wore off and the convenience of ready built binaries won out.
That's when my attention turned back towards the new breed of MacOS X laptops that were being introduced. Titanium case, aluminium, very intriguing, and running a modern version of the OpenStep I had toyed with back in 1996-7. They were expensive and my Vaio was still going strong so I continued to use Windows, Linux and toyed with BSDs of various flavours.
The next years were filled with the inevitable switch back to Apple, and that continues to this day; but importantly I feel that Apple has abandoned those who had higher hopes of their Server and enterprise level products. Apple has gone the way of consumerism and their wildly successful iPhone and iPad have steered them towards making MacOS more like iOS than continuing to innovate in the desktop OS area.
And that is what has led to the birth of this journal. My disillusionment with MacOS Server as its dumbed down Lion version has resulted in a move away from using my humble MacMini Servers as central devices to the last of these now doing nothing but serving iCal calendars, and iTunes media to the house's client devices; when at one time the MacMini served files, email, DNS, AddressBook, web pages alongside those. A very steep fall from grace.
The truth is that Apple's GUI setup tools which have become schizophrenic in Lion, requiring two separate tools to fully control, have a habit of messing configuration files and completely borking working setups. Property lists, xml, and hidden files everywhere with opaque structure make managing the machine difficult and finally I gave up on it. When the only way to get it all working is to do fresh installs, it reminds me too much of Windows and MacOS Server was beginning to cause me more grief than I could handle nowadays.
That's where I stand today. In the process of moving away from MacOS X Server towards Solaris 11. More on that story to come.