===== About Me ===== I've been an Apple //aficionado// since the Apple II in the late 70's, and one of the early adopters of the Macintosh (128K) in 1984. Since then I've been using Macintosh machines and closely followed the Mac OS evolution. To cut a long story short, let's say that the OS X migration at Apple ravished me, giving me the opportunity to discover the underlying, NeXTSTEP based, partly FreeBSD/NetBSD environment. In the early 2000's, it was my first introduction to the UNIX like systems. As I specialized in web development, I got acquainted with Linux servers, and slowly but surely got a working knowledge of these machines (mostly CentOS at that time). I then discovered and appreciated Debian that I regularly use in servers configurations. In recent years, Apple's trade policy started to remind me more of what Microsoft had in mind when they though they were ruling the world, than what they denonced in their [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA|1984 Commercial]]. It seems that they become what they thought they were fighting against.\\ I started to consider switching my whole working environment to a "real" Linux one. But which one? After an short endeavor with Ubuntu, I finally decided to go for Linux Mint. Especially, the fact that a "Debian" version, known as LMDE, is available seduced me. ==== From OS X to Linux Mint (and not back) ==== To be honest I must confess that my current workstation isn't a top-notch machine. I currently use an Apple MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz (P8600) 13-Inch (Unibody), with 4GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM, dating back to 2008. Did I mention that Apple's pricing policy is also an element that pushed me towards the Linux world? I stopped updating my OS X at version 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard), having a complex custom setup, with many developer specific tools configured, did not push me either attempting an upgrade to benefit from the few new recent changes to the system.\\ Some additional goodies were also running on the system like LaunchBar, IStat Menus and TotalFinder just to name a few.\\ My typical working environment would need PHPStorm (IDE), Photoshop, Google Chrome, Thunderbird (not counting apache, mySQL and php) and a few more applications running at the same time. The system eventually became so slow that I regularly had to quit some (sometimes even all) running applications to free enough memory to get a reasonably acceptable reactivity from it. This last fact convinced me that it was time for a change: enter Linux Mint. I knew the Linux desktop environments were offering a wide range of free, open-sourced products, and although I didn't had any certainty that everything I needed would be available I decided to take the plunge. Up until now, I have not had to regret any application that fails to do my job, in addition they are all free and I don't infringe any rule while using them.\\ The only exception being my IDE of choice (PHPStorm), which I bought a license for. But I could very well use Eclipse instead. Anyhow, the bottom line is that the system is incredibly more responsive using the Linux Mint OS than it was under OS X, that is already enough to convince me to stay with my new configuration. Not even mentioning that, for obvious safety reasons during migration, I initially installed the Linux Mint system on an external, USB 2, hard drive (even an USB Key at first), keeping my internal 500MB SATA disk intact so I can access my legacy files straight from LMDE and even boot back into OS X whenever needed. Looking forward buying a replacement internal SSD ;-)