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Bye-bye Mac Pro, Hello Ubuntu?

In preparation for moving, I'm selling my trusty Mac Pro that's served me well since late 2008. Initially, I was going to replace this with an iMac - much cheaper than a new Pro, and after using a 27" version at work for a while, I'd gotten used to the large screen that would otherwise cost a fair bit to match. I do still use Windows occasionally via dual-booting, mainly for IE testing and gaming. I still have a Macbook Pro to use as well in the interim, but I much prefer having a desktop as my main machine.

As a bit of background, I went through a phase many years back of trying out Linux at home, but I have this bad habit of not sticking with one route and so I was reinstalling a different distro every week. I went through the big three at the time - Fedora, Mandrake (before the rename), and Suse, and then had a play with Slackware for a while. I think at that point I got my first Mac, and to me Linux didn't really seem ready for the desktop yet. I've been happy using the Mac for a number of years; the software in particular kept me on the platform, and I was still able to use the command line to keep some of that feeling of when I used Linux.

After some exposure to recent versions of Ubuntu at work, I decided it was time to see if a modern Linux distribution, running on higher spec hardware (cheaper than a new iMac) could meet my day-to-day needs. I started by grabbing the newest version of Ubuntu and installing it onto a VirtualBox image, and I was definitely impressed. With new additions like an App Store ('Ubuntu Software Center') and native versions of software I use (Sublime Text 2, Crashplan) the hold that OS X had on me was dwindling.

So after playing around a little and testing out just how easy it is to get setup with a LAMP stack, and even getting Minecraft running inside the VM, I started doing some reading up and found out about the big backlash over Ubuntu's new 'Unity' interface present since a few versions ago. Personally, I didn't find it all that bad, but some things weren't the best. For example, the launcher - 'Dash' has way oversized icons for my taste. Additionally there's no way to move the 'Dock' to different edges of the screen, which may prove problematic with multiple screen setups. Minor things, but aesthetics are important to me having gotten so used to OS X.

This is where I started reading about a variation of Ubuntu called Linux Mint, with articles such as this one praising it for its usability and familiar features. I grabbed the latest version of Mint and installed it on another VirtualBox image and did some of the same tests as Ubuntu - installing bits of software, reading the forums for common headaches etc.

And now I'm back in 2005 when I'm again torn between multiple Linux distributions, with the addition of Mac OS X, and not a clue what's next. One thing's for sure though, Windows won't be making a return. I'll write a new post once I've weighed up the pros and cons to see what I've gone with.