Hi, everybody. So, for my first blog, I thought I’d discuss my laptop, and preemptively explain my choices. This is especially important because in some of my website photos, you can see me using a Mac.
I’ve known quite a few technical people in my time on this Earth, and several have had some rather disparaging things to say about Apples. Of those, most were of course talking about the fruit, which is much feared in server rooms for what I hope are obvious reasons.
But others have a serious concern about the Mac line of computers, even to this day. There are technical reasons (some insist that they killed the security inherent in UNIX), others think that it’s just an overpriced style thing. Some might point out that as I’m interested in doing what I can in open source, choosing a relatively walled garden on expensive hardware may send a different message. And you know, what, fair enough. Believe what you want, and think of me what you will.
Personally, I do a lot of artistic and musical things on my real life (you know, the part of existence that takes up less and less of your time every year), and so I’ve gotten very comfortable with Macs over the years and enjoy using them – but that’s not why I chose a mac for business purposes.
I chose the machine I did because of flexibility, and ironically to a certain extent lack of flexibility. You see, first off, I needed to be able to potentially use xcode for iOS app rebranding. Apple is the only OS I can do that on. So my workaround would have been to not do iOS app rebranding, but that’s not an ideal workaround.
Secondly, I needed something lightweight with enough RAM and decent speed processors. At 1.37kg (or 3lbs) the MacBook Pro is pretty light, and 16 GB of RAM does the job. I considered the lighter MacBook which also has a 16GB of RAM option, but… the processors, man.
Thirdly, I needed to be able to run just about anything. And luckily for me, virtualbox runs on MacOS.
On this laptop, I have Mac OS, of course, but also a virtual machine running Linux Mint, and one running Windows 10.
I’m a big fan of Linux Mint. I was a Redhat/CentOS guy for quite a while, then used to be a Lubuntu (not a typo – I don’t mean Ubuntu, I mean the lightweight variety) user a few years ago, and I have a few Raspberry Pi’s kicking around, and like Raspbian a lot, but Linux Mint is currently my distro of choice. In getting everything set up, I briefly gave another try to to Arch and Ubuntu, but honestly, I guess I just like the Windows-like interface that Mint provides. This is ironic, because…
I have Windows 10 because I need to have Windows just in case, and for certain software. I’d prefer to avoid it, but it’s as much of the technical world as in jokes, or fruit blocking security protocols in server rooms.
As for what I have on the computer – I’ve put whatever tools I can get for business intelligence, data, and general technical need. Freeware and open source where possible. And I’ll be using this blog to go over a some of those tools one at a time.