le_bebna_kamni (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
le_bebna_kamni) wrote2008-06-14 10:18 am
le_bebna_kamni) wrote2008-06-14 10:18 am
Entry tags:
Getting Rid of OSX
For anyone who recalls my October 13th post where I purchased a Mac, my initial observations of OSX were neutral but leaning slightly positive. However, since then my opinion has changed significantly.
The first indicator that Mac and I weren't going to get along was how restricted I felt in my desktop and software choices. Mac comes with some cool stuff already built in -- Garage Band was fun to play with, I'll admit -- but most of the software just isn't stuff I care about for the day-to-day. I'm a power user or a gamer, not an artist.
There are ports of some games I like to Mac, but for the most part there is still very little game development for it (at least for the games I like to play). Besides which, I've already purchased the Windows equivalent, and since my Macbook runs XP just fine under Boot Camp and/or Parallels I feel no reason to re-purchase all my software. So there went my initial intention forego Windows completely for a better operating system.
As for power use, I was originally thrilled by the fact that OSX is Unix-based and even has ports of certain software from Linux. But I was held up by the difficulty I had in getting many of the ports to work properly, and when it came down to it, Linux still has more available. It occurred to me that if I was going to rely heavily Linux ports, why not just stick with Linux in the first place?
I wasn't particularly thrilled with the OSX desktop environment -- one of the features a lot of people I knew fawned over. Linux has far better variety, and I don't particularly care about eye candy (this is coming from someone who, even for Windows, sets it back to the clunky "classic" theme ;P). Time Machine was *nice*, but frequently popped up annoying messages when I didn't have my external hard drive perpetually plugged in (which is usually the case for my mobile laptops). So very little incentive was left for me to keep it on my computer.
Also, as I used it, I became vaguely aware of the DRM policies that Mac institutes above and beyond the issues I've encountered with Vista. For example, in addition to the DRM that comes with iTunes and that makes it impossible to copy music from your player back to your hard drive, they institute DRM with their actual software disks and hardware. I was thwarted in my attempts to make legitimate backups of my Tiger and Leopard disks. And when I put CD compilations of music that I *own*, but burned outside of iTunes, it actually spit the disk back out at me. These are disks that I have played successfully in other [PC] computers and CD players. This doesn't happen with all burned disks, mind you. Mac can somehow tell the difference between data files I've burned to CD and music files that were ripped from a proprietary disk. And it does this whether I'm in Windows or Linux or OSX, so it's got to be some kind of hardware thing.
And this ticks me off. I can't do anything about the hardware DRM, but I can decide not to purchase a Mac in the future and I can certainly decide not to use their OS.
But one thing that has stumped me was how to completely get rid of OSX. Back in December I tried what seemed to me to be the simplest and most logical thing: delete OSX from my system and reformat the hard drive with MBR (simple explanation: the PC version of formatting, as opposed to GUID which is Mac's formatting) and put Windows and Linux on it with my standard PC configuration.
But Mac's hardware hasn't been particularly happy with that. The BIOS searches high and low for a Mac operating system, and only after it is *absolutely* convinced that one doesn't exist will it bother to look at the hard drive. I can't use the Mac trick of pressing "Alt/Option" to select my boot device (not that I want to have to do that every time I boot), and I have to wait an unreasonable amount of time before I even get the Grub boot menu.
I've tried playing with rEFIt without much success, so I had pretty much resigned myself to the trade-off of a long wait for booting vs. taking 10-12 GB of hard drive space for an operating system I don't use, just so I can boot quickly and effortlessly.
But recently I decided to make the attempt again. And I'm pleased to say that not only is OSX completely gone from my system, but I've figured out how to make it go directly to a boot menu, thanks to the help from an article on triple booting by Squinks and some calculated modifications to the instructions on my part.
And for those of you who want to know this trick, I hope to be posting my version of the instructions in the next week. I would post it today, but I have one of those semi-required "family picnics" to attend for work.
The first indicator that Mac and I weren't going to get along was how restricted I felt in my desktop and software choices. Mac comes with some cool stuff already built in -- Garage Band was fun to play with, I'll admit -- but most of the software just isn't stuff I care about for the day-to-day. I'm a power user or a gamer, not an artist.
There are ports of some games I like to Mac, but for the most part there is still very little game development for it (at least for the games I like to play). Besides which, I've already purchased the Windows equivalent, and since my Macbook runs XP just fine under Boot Camp and/or Parallels I feel no reason to re-purchase all my software. So there went my initial intention forego Windows completely for a better operating system.
As for power use, I was originally thrilled by the fact that OSX is Unix-based and even has ports of certain software from Linux. But I was held up by the difficulty I had in getting many of the ports to work properly, and when it came down to it, Linux still has more available. It occurred to me that if I was going to rely heavily Linux ports, why not just stick with Linux in the first place?
I wasn't particularly thrilled with the OSX desktop environment -- one of the features a lot of people I knew fawned over. Linux has far better variety, and I don't particularly care about eye candy (this is coming from someone who, even for Windows, sets it back to the clunky "classic" theme ;P). Time Machine was *nice*, but frequently popped up annoying messages when I didn't have my external hard drive perpetually plugged in (which is usually the case for my mobile laptops). So very little incentive was left for me to keep it on my computer.
Also, as I used it, I became vaguely aware of the DRM policies that Mac institutes above and beyond the issues I've encountered with Vista. For example, in addition to the DRM that comes with iTunes and that makes it impossible to copy music from your player back to your hard drive, they institute DRM with their actual software disks and hardware. I was thwarted in my attempts to make legitimate backups of my Tiger and Leopard disks. And when I put CD compilations of music that I *own*, but burned outside of iTunes, it actually spit the disk back out at me. These are disks that I have played successfully in other [PC] computers and CD players. This doesn't happen with all burned disks, mind you. Mac can somehow tell the difference between data files I've burned to CD and music files that were ripped from a proprietary disk. And it does this whether I'm in Windows or Linux or OSX, so it's got to be some kind of hardware thing.
And this ticks me off. I can't do anything about the hardware DRM, but I can decide not to purchase a Mac in the future and I can certainly decide not to use their OS.
But one thing that has stumped me was how to completely get rid of OSX. Back in December I tried what seemed to me to be the simplest and most logical thing: delete OSX from my system and reformat the hard drive with MBR (simple explanation: the PC version of formatting, as opposed to GUID which is Mac's formatting) and put Windows and Linux on it with my standard PC configuration.
But Mac's hardware hasn't been particularly happy with that. The BIOS searches high and low for a Mac operating system, and only after it is *absolutely* convinced that one doesn't exist will it bother to look at the hard drive. I can't use the Mac trick of pressing "Alt/Option" to select my boot device (not that I want to have to do that every time I boot), and I have to wait an unreasonable amount of time before I even get the Grub boot menu.
I've tried playing with rEFIt without much success, so I had pretty much resigned myself to the trade-off of a long wait for booting vs. taking 10-12 GB of hard drive space for an operating system I don't use, just so I can boot quickly and effortlessly.
But recently I decided to make the attempt again. And I'm pleased to say that not only is OSX completely gone from my system, but I've figured out how to make it go directly to a boot menu, thanks to the help from an article on triple booting by Squinks and some calculated modifications to the instructions on my part.
And for those of you who want to know this trick, I hope to be posting my version of the instructions in the next week. I would post it today, but I have one of those semi-required "family picnics" to attend for work.