Well, after reading about the new features in OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) (they f’ing ported DTrace to Mac!), as well as seeing that superficially, the new Macbook Pros are perfect for Linux; Intel chipset, Atheros wireless, and nVidia video. That and with the Intel VT extensions that come with the Core 2 processor and VMware Fusion, I can run all three operating systems with absolutely no problem! Well, turns out there are a lot of problems – I’m sure I’ll resolve them eventually but right now my setup is pretty broken right now.

The Good:

• Mac OS X is pretty polished, their animation and widget library is really nice and the icons and fonts are really nice
• Mac’s bootloader, rEFIt looks better than GRUB and is fairly easy to get working – it also has a “fix my GPT” tool built-in
• Spotlight and Quicksilver make using the OS much better – I don’t even have to remember where stuff is anymore whereas Beagle is often too slow / doesn’t show enough to be usable
• Mac’s got a halfway decent terminal, and rsync+ssh still works like gangbusters

The Bad:

• I hate window management on OS X; I can never make the windows do what I want with the keyboard – maximize does this strange “I’m not really maximize” behavior and it’s really annoying.
• The solution for getting actual command-line tools on Mac is via MacPorts, but you have to build all your programs from source. Am I back in Gentoo again? You also have to add all these command-line flags too
• XCode looks cracked out, but it could be just because I’m not used to it.

The Ugly:

• Despite this machine looking as if it would run Linux really well, it in fact is far too new to run anything properly. The nVidia driver displays a completely black screen when it tries to use the nVidia 8600M, even the current Gutsy kernel doesn’t support the CD-ROM drive, and in general everything is far too new to successfully run Linux on the actual hardware. Looks like I’ll be using a VM and running the
• I still haven’t figured out a solution to sharing filesystems / what-I’m-going-to-put-where; supposedly the HFS+ driver sucks for Linux and despite being built on FreeBSD, Mac OS X doesn’t support any Linux filesystem, even ext2. Why? FreeBSD 7 will have ZFS support as well as Leopard (for which I have come into possession of the WWDC preview which I’ll install), so I might be able to create shim virtual machines that will take care of these problems.

Conclusion

Well, until I can figure out a solution, my laptop setup is pretty much in flux until I can find a setup I like. I’m really excited about all of the cross-platform possibilities that the Macbook can do, as well as seeing how Mac people do development.