I am an Apple fan boy. No - was an apple fan boy. Okay, in some ways I guess I still am. The hardware pleases my aesthetic sensibilities far more than any other gear out there. I love my iMac and I'm still thinking I'd like an 11" MacBook Air just for the sheer portability of it but...I no longer really care for the software side of Apple. I don't like the direction things are going in especially when it comes to OS X and the convergence with iOS. I really don't like how my 2011 quad core 12GB RAM iMac can feel so sluggish at times despite having nothing more than firefox open, yet I can see OS X eating whatever memory it can.

Just recently as an experiment I bought a Dell Inspiron 15 7537 laptop with the sole intention to put Linux on it to see if it would be possible to make the transition permanently. It's a decent spec with 16GB RAM, a core i7, a 1080p touch screen and a really crappy touchpad (one thing Apple just cannot be beat on). I swapped out the hard drive for an SSD and boy, is it fast. It has a MacBook-ish look about it but in truth it ain't no MacBook. The keyboard flexes in the middle, it's bloody heavy and therefore not particularly portable, and their appears to be a wide-spread problem with the wi-fi losing connection! However, all things considered it's still good enough (I'm tehtered to a desk with it most of the time and therefore ethernet too). And it's even better once the ridiculous Windows 8 is removed from it and replaced with Linux Mint XFCE.

Now I have a machine I can live with and feel happy about. I love how frugal Linux is with resources, how customizable it is (Compiz is awesome), and how rock solid stable it feels. After a month or two of every day intensive development use (Go, if you're interested) I feel ready to leave OS X behind for good and I'd slap Linux on my iMac in a heartbeat if I could just find an alternative for the one obscure piece of software that I use on it. The moment I do, the iMac will be getting the Linux treatment.