So I have been using my new Macbook Pro 6.2 for a while now, mostly under OpenSuSE 11.3. Thought I’d post my opinions, note that a lot of these are not about the MBP:
- Windows 7 (64bit) is better than vista, but the font on it absolutely tanked. I had to turn off every trace of ClearType, and some parts are still blurry (mainly system menus etc). The whole OS otherwise feels smooth and well polished. But seriously, just that font is going to annoy me to no end since I have to stare at text every day
- OpenSuSE, and linux in general has come a long long way. I don’t recall the last time I reinstalled an OS to a version up and thought oh wow! 11.3 is absolutely brilliant! Font is smooth, animation is now integrated into KDE 4.4, everything looks well refined and the overall user experience is very high. Oh and BTW sleep now works!
- Given the above, Linux is still not for the average user. I ran into a number of problems during installation, and many steps used to solve these problems is probably outside what a normal user would consider. But man once its running its awesome
- Thoroughly impressed with KDE. There were alot of bad publicity about KDE 4.0 and 4.1, but thats really unwarranted. 4.0 was for developers anyway, but I think the move to promote 4.0 over KDE 3 a few releases back put alot of people off. It’s now running very well, fast and stable. Gnome in comparison is definitely showing age.
- Some weird quirks still remains on my linux install:
- The speaker makes a sparky sound when the machine is turned off (or the instance that its turning off). No idea what it is, and I don’t really feel like finding out
- Every now and then, GRUB would complain that it cant find sda3 (where my linux is installed). Restarting the machine works fine. I think this is just a common problem. Windows sometimes also do not boot because of the same error. Just happens alot more on opensuse.
But yeah, everything is now up and running, have VMWare, MATLAB etc installed on Linux, a XP Virtual Machine, Windows 7 64bit native via bootcamp, and Mac OS (for updates.. otherwise it would be gone). Just got my bash and vim profiles migrated so now i have the same alias and hotkeys too 😀
Oh and on another note, the shiny screen doesnt seem too bad.