April 18, 2002: In October 2000 I wrote an article all about my experiences with OS X Public Beta. It didn't make me Rich and Famous but many found it helpful so I'm adding this as an update to that page.
First off, I'm going to confess that I absolutely love Mac OS X. I've been running it as my primary OS since the first non-Beta release and no longer boot into Mac OS 9 for any reason. The first release of OS X worked well but as many have said was pretty slow and lacked some essential features. Fortunately since then things have just got consisently better.
Each successive release has made OS X faster, added new essential features, and grown more on me. As all my favorite apps arrive (Palm Desktop, Appleworks, MYOB, Graphic Converter, BBEdit, Fire) on OS X, my reliance on Classic mode is waning rather quickly. The only apps I still run in classic mode are DreamWeaver & Street Atlas.
However, the true test of how great the OS is whether it makes my computing time more or less productive. I run OS X exclusively at home on my B&W G3 and my G4 TiBook after retiring my FreeBSD server. I just don't need it any more with all the functionality of OS X under the hood. Just today at work I made The Great Switch. By trade I'm a Unix Systems Architect so I spend a lot of time building, maintaining, and designing large computer systems. For the last couple years I've run FreeBSD as my desktop OS and had either a Windows or Mac OS system as well. The FreeBSD system is my "primary" system that I get work done on and the Win/Mac is my "talk to the company" system that I run Microsoft Office and Outlook on to be a good corporate citizen and read my email.
This setup has worked out very well for me in the office. Over the last six months I've had three systems, my "primary" FreeBSD system, a G4 with Mac OS X on the left, and a Win2k server on the right. These days, the Win2k system is powered down 90% of the time, I only fire it up when I need to run DreamWeaver as I don't have a license for DreamWeaver for MacOS at work. I run Outlook on my Mac for corporate email, Mail.app for my personal email (now that it supports SSL I'll use it), Fire for chat windows, and, of course, terminal.
The Great Switch came about because I finally noticed that I was spending more time on the console of my Mac than I did on my FreeBSD system. So, today I swapped around the systems, put the Mac keyboard in the center and turned it into my primary. As a result I now spend 80% of my day in Mac OS X land instead of FreeBSD. Is that good? I like it. :-)
The test rig: (updated)
Blue/White G3/350 upgraded to G4/500 (xlr8)
896MB RAM
Sonnet ATA100 IDE controller
IBM GXP75 30GB internal UDMA/100 drive (replaced due to failure)
WD 10GB internal UDMA/33 drive (factory)
Adaptec 2930U SCSI card (removed)
Iomega external SCSI Zip (given away)
Umax Vista SCSI scanner (given away)
WD 30GB Firewire external hard drive