I use awesome wm on my debian laptop, but I prefer Unity and Gnome Shell to the old gnome 2 or kde or xfce. They are really starting to come together as coherent interfaces instead of having mismatched UIs.
Some tweaking tools are around anyway and more will come with time. Gnome shell extensions are pretty good and they'll mature with time.
I recently got an ASUS Transformer and I was pretty happy that I could use something like ConnectBot [1] to ssh into a virtual machine I was running on my main laptop. I was coding in django/python, and I could test the website using Firefox Mobile- I could actually use this for work!
... 30 minutes worth of typing on that keyboard and bad support for alt-tabbing between apps and the tiny screen, I was back at my comfy ThinkPad. Even for other types of work, such as when doing research, I find it cumbersome to swap between my browser and note taking application. The selection of apps (compared against mac, windows or linux) is just not powerful enough. It gets tiring after a while. A good ultraportable (say the MBA or x220) offers much better value for me. I find tablets are good for reading, surfing etc, with some nice apps to let you get work done if needed. But certainly not something that you'll want to be using for a while.
[1] A small footnote on how good the user experience is when the software that you use is open source. It didn't support some of the keys on the Asus transformer (for e.g. using the back key for 'esc' in vi). I was able to fork and fix that pretty quickly and was on my way.
There's always promise for the future in minimalist mobile device setups like this, but always pain in the present too.
I'm sure our kids will find exercises like this with our early tablets to be laughable.
I'm jealous you got django/python on the tablet! Even if the keyboard proved unworkable.
I'd love to be able to write even a little Objective-C from the iPad. Also, I would find a certain humorous irony to have the xCode IDE simulating an iPhone on my iPad. Oh well.
I'm often surprised that the value of OSX and its built in conveniences is not factored into a comparison. Preview, built in file extraction, TimeMachine (which does not really have any comparable alternative on windows IMO), Calendar, Mail etc.
Some of these apps are built into windows (but not with the same modern feature set) and most are available for free, but OSX seems to have hit a good selection of apps that you can use out of the box.
Edit: Also that I upgraded/time machined from my 2008 white MacBook to my current generation MBP on Lion without loosing any performance, apps or data was a remarkable time saver.
I recently picked up a ThinkPad T420 with a dock for around $1000. Adding in an mSata 80 gb ssd for $200. i5-2540, 1600x900, 8 gb ram, 2 batteries (9 cell for 9-10 hrs working in a VM, 6 cell gives around 5-6 hours).
Like you, I enjoyed OS X and the fact that everything worked so well. But it came to a point where MBP's hardware limitations just got too much (no dock so I had to plug and unplug peripherals 2-3 times a day, battery not swappable so 5-6 hrs was the maximum I could get, no way to have two hard drives (SSD + HDD) without voiding the warranty etc) and I decided to switch.
So far so good, the flexibility and build quality are great. Lets see how long before Windows 7/Debian start to become annoying though ;)
I have been working on a hackintoshed Dell for the last year or so. Initially, I tried to work with Windows 7. It really is not bad at all, but my brain seems to be hardwired to use a Unix command line (and Vim) at this point, so after a while, I had enough and sought refuge in Linux-land. It didn't last long though. After fiddling with the Nvidia drivers for a while to get a multi-monitor setup working, I decided that I could just as well invest that time in getting it hackintoshed. Amazingly, that worked flawlessly (nearly: network and sound didn't work. A USB-ethernet adapter and a USB sound card did the trick, though). Then came Lion and that broke my App Store on the hackintosh. So it's back to a genuine Mac for me.
It nearly worked, though. I wish you the best of luck.
"Initially, I tried to work with Windows 7. It really is not bad at all, but my brain seems to be hardwired to use a Unix command line (and Vim) at this point, so after a while, I had enough and sought refuge in Linux-land."
Have you tried Cygwin? I've been using it for years, with no problems. Unix command line goodness in Windows.
Also, you can install vim from the Cygwin packages, or install native Windows vim. Both solutions work well.
I have used Cygwin for a while, yes. However, I found it to be slow and just... alien, from a Windows perspective. My main gripe with it was a different thing though: Its package management is atrocious. Packages are outdated and there is no simple way to fix them. Also, it installs its own versions of common software, that are only usable from within Cygwin, but not from CMD. Honestly though, I never bothered to investigate further after being annoyed by it a few times, and just used a Linux VM instead.
Gvim works fine on Windows, though. Also, ViEmu has had my love for many months. It's not like you can't work productively in Windows. It's just that I am more comfortable elsewhere.
I suggest running a VM in Linux when developing. It kills battery, but not as bad as you'd think unless you're doing intensive work. It has been the best of both worlds for me on my home projects.
Check out the various threads on slickdeals.net. There are literally over a thousand pages (split among multiple threads) of people scrambling to buy these at the discounted prices. Very few of the people there are geeks, mostly just normal folks trying to jump in on what is seen as a huge value (~75% price drop over a single day).
Seeing those forums will also show you why you will never be able to buy one of these online at the new price unless you are extremely lucky. The item is selling out in seconds every time the price drop is noticed at a new retailer, and these people are tracking all of them.
I tried to jump in on this last night and put an order in for the 16gb at Microcenter's online site less than a minute after the new pricing went live there. The order made it through their website and I even got a confirmation email and a precharge ding on my credit card, went to bed thinking I'd be playing with WebOS on a tablet sometime next week but woke up to an email saying my order was cancelled due to insufficent stock.
I purchased one at 12:40 PM PST today from Amazon, at full retail price. Four hours later, they promised me to issue a refund so the price was the $99 HP price.
It wasn't incredibly difficult to get one, if you really wanted to.
I don't think the issue here is (just) optical drive vs no optical drive. Its the implications that are pointed to in the article, i.e. Apple controlling the hardware, software and content on the device.
Of course, Apple will not do this completely overnight, but it does seem like we're moving in that direction one step at a time. I think Apple/Steve's long term vision has always been for the PC to be like all other electronic devices; you buy it configured, and for fixes/upgrades you always go through the manufacturer or manufacturer-approved process. It is a complete opposite to something like a Lenovo ThinkPad where a lot of the stuff is user replaceable and serviceable (hence making it a little more future proof and much cheaper for upgrades).
As a MBP user, I am happy with where Apple is right now but I'm not sure I'm completely happy with where they're headed (and Apple doesn't care about customers like me who are probably < 5% anyway). Even if we look at Apple's website (for e.g. about battery), the terminology changes from 'User replaceable battery' to 'Battery that you should not replace yourself' etc. Apple could very well make the next major iteration of Mac OS similar to iOS (i.e. Apple is the only App store, no side-loading). Minor upgrades (RAM, HDD) could cost a lot and could only be done by Apple.
Something to think about before investing a lot in Apple products and becoming tangled in the ecosystem.
I've been hearing this for a couple years, and I even had some people mistakenly telling me they don't get a MacBook because they think it only runs Apple-approved software.
I don't really think it's gonna happen. "It runs Windows" is a major selling point for a lot of people I know.
But I'll be the first to jump ship if this ever happens.
The MBPs are still pretty good and parts that I want to replace are still user serviceable (RAM, HD, optical drive - everyone should replace theirs with a 2nd HD).
The Mac Minis still have user replaceable RAM but the HD is not super easy to get to.
The iMac is pretty bad. You need suction cups to remove the screen from the body to service it.
I don't think they are going to bother too much about what software you can run. But hopefully they make basic parts like the HD and RAM MORE user serviceable.
A second HD in place of the optical drive? I never thought it was possible. Sounds like a plan for my recording rig: the SSD plus a bigger mechanical drive.
Magic can come to haunt you when you get stuck. For e.g. flask has thread locals where the request variable gets populated with the current request's context dynamically.
For the most part though, Flask is very magic free and the source is small enough to quickly figure out whats going on.
You said it is "good hardware". Do you mean that the build quality is good? Is it on par with a MacBook or a ThinkPad? I have heard recently that their laptops are fairly plasticky and battery life isn't great either. Comments?
My two complaints are that the keyboard isn't the sort that I like, it's of the chiclet variety, and they only offer shortscreens (16:9 rather than 4:3). On the first complaint, this is really just my preference on keyboards. I'm a dvorak typist and so I'm a bit picky about keyboards; from my point of view, every laptop keyboard is bad, but I'm holding out hope for Thinkpads. On the second complaint it seems, unfortunately, that no manufacturer makes 4:3 laptops in 12"-15" sizes.
I have one of the ultra-thin models "Lemu1" and the body is plastic while the inner chassis is metal. It reminds me of the build on an iBook G4. It does feel a bit flimsy, but this model is about the size of a MacBook Air and so I figure some of the flimsiness is partly just physics.
Why does development on windows suck? For the most part, development on any platform (windows, osx, linux) seems to be about the same. Its the other stuff that can get annoying; mostly driver issues I would guess. But again, that's something that isn't a challenge on windows anyway?
For me it's mostly the ease (or lack of ease) of managing tools and dependencies. Homebrew, RVM, Pow, zsh, MacVim (or TextMate if that's your thing), et al. are amazing, not to mention all of the built-in packages.
I'm aware that some things are usable via cygwin, but in my experience it's a huge pain and doesn't work with a ton of stuff I need anyway. I really don't like spending time futzing around with things if I don't have to, I just want to be able to "brew install redis" and be on my way.
Arguably, tools and dependency management is better on a linux platform.
I've found (recently) that working in a VM is the right thing (tm) to do even on a *nix platform. It helps keep your development environment completely segregated and your "desktop" OS clean as well. Since nautilus has built in support for mounting a drive over SSH, and it is very doable on os x using something like MacFusion, the desktop OS just becomes a window into your development environment and becomes mostly secondary.
Some tweaking tools are around anyway and more will come with time. Gnome shell extensions are pretty good and they'll mature with time.