Having purged myself of Facebook and not missing it in the slightest, I turned to another even bigger Corporate, Apple! I have been Mac since purchasing an original Apple Macintosh back in 1987 and marvelled at how easy it was to achieve graphical output in particular from its 9″ Black and White screen 12mHz processor and a whole 20mB of external hard drive… I was hooked and it has been Apple all the way… until now!
What was a computer company of innovation under Steve Jobs and miles ahead of anything MicroSoft could produce, it has turned into something far worse through sheer greed! It has enough cash in the bank than many small countries and acquires it by hooking you into its products and then ensuring you are stuck with them by building in obsolescence that leaves your iMac or MacBook or iPhone with no software or Operating System upgrade path! Never mind regularly changing what cable fitting or adaptor you will need to charge or connect them all!
My beautiful silver iMac’s video card died a while back and (all credit to a MicroSoft computer) you can’t just whip it out and replace it as it is hard soldered into that slimline case. The price we pay for a slimline Mac I’m afraid! Then my much older white iMac’s upgrade progress was halted at Mac OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). Couldn’t even run a modern secure browser on that now!
Rather than dump it, I discovered Linux! Linux powers many of the big Company servers out there and probably much of what Social Media runs on and you can install it on personal computers too! Because it is Open-Source, a whole host of flavours or distributions as they are known, have sprung up depending on how you prefer your computer experience to look and behave! Behind it all though is rock-solid Linux which the Community regularly tweaks and updates so you are never left behind! So I installed Linux Mint on that white iMac and it runs like dream… fast with little drain on the Mac’s limited memory! All the Software you will ever need is either built-in or available for download within the system and its all FREE! Forget MicroSoft Word… LibreOffice is almost identical and with all the Office-type components for spreadsheets, presentations and drawing. It also saves as Word and Excel formats too!
So, what about my MacBook Pro 2010? I had already switched to LibreOffice on it (available for Macs too) but Apple left me behind at Mac OS High Sierra… perfectly great operating system and regularly updated with security updates. But no Catalina or Mojave or whatever next for me! Even getting up to High Sierra broke some third party peripherals that needed Firewire inputs (Apple abandoned the interface so more expense to switch!) The MacBook does a great job even at High Sierra and I would argue that Apple, having created a superb operating system can only tweak the experience in newer versions so I’m not fussed about upgrading but there is a principle at stake here! I like technology and innovation and increasingly feel that Apple is holding me back from experiencing other ways of doing the job and perhaps doing it in a better and more enjoyable way!
So, after backing up absolutely everything on at least two other hard drives and having Apples Time Machine on hand just in case, I wiped the MacBook’s internal Hard Drive (actually an SSD which makes your ageing computer run 10 times faster!) and installed Linux! The flavour I chose was Fedora as it has many features that imitate a Mac OS and yet at the same time is completely different! It is fast, gorgeous (not often an adjective I would use for a computer Desktop) and incredibly tweakable!
Now don’t get me wrong, there are elements of its installation that might require some command-line input, something Apple completely removes from its platform but in learning my way through it, I have become accustomed to what is going on behind the scenes which Apple shields you from and again, that is a big plus for Mac OS!
However, there is a vast Linux community out there more than willing to help if you get stuck along the way! Once it was up and running, I copied across thousands of files, photographs, music and home videos and let the appropriate software Apps manage them into their libraries! Goodbye now defunct iTunes and hello Lollypop, cheerio the very rubbish Apple Photos and hello gThumb or Shotwell. Even video and music making have their own perfectly respectable and free Apps on-board!
Apple left my iPhone 5s behind just recently at iOS 10.12 and I have no intention of going beyond what is a wonderful piece of kit but what about backup now that iTunes is gone? No problem, back up to Apple’s iCloud (had to keep that), send your photos up to Google Photos (there are some very good aspects about Google that can’t be dismissed easily) or plug your phone into your Mac and you can copy photos in directly!
In conclusion, if Apple delivers for you and keeps you productive with what is a superb operating system then don’t change! If you have an older Mac and you would like to revitalise it then a Linux Distribution is the way to go (I haven’t really mentioned Windows as it has its own issues and Linux would definitely sort that out!).
If anyone reading this feels inspired but is apprehensive about taking the plunge then just contact me via the website and we can discuss!
