The Operating System I Always Wanted
During the dark days of Apple, before the second coming of Steve Jobs, I had hovered over a PC that was a little too slow to run Windows 95 and the hard a little too small to fit the operating system comfortably. A colleague of mine in graduate school explained that I should switch to Linux. Linux ran faster than the average installation of Windows 95, took up less hard drive space and performed well on old hardware. One day he showed up with the disks for Red Hat Linux.
I joked for years who cares about new features, I wanted an operating system that was faster, took up less hard drive space and less RAM. “That’s an operating system I would pay for”, I’d say smiling.
My brother-in-law decided to return to graduate school as well. The old PC sitting in a corner at our apartment in Princeton suddenly changed from junk I wish you’d get rid of now please to the valuable word processing box for my brother. At my wife’s request, we upgraded the ram, boxed up the PC, and shipped it off to Canada. I’d have to wait a few years before finally installing Linux. Of course, over the years I’ve collected numerous PCs some running an iteration of Windows and others Linux, but neither Windows or Linux felt fast and beautiful.
Once Steve Jobs returned to Apple, I decided to delay the switch to Linux. Each iteration of the Mac operating system got better under the scrutiny of Steve Jobs, but, unlike the days of System 7, upgrades from 8.1 to 9 to nearly every version of Mac OS X left a wake of obsolete hardware behind. The latest version of Mac OS X 10.6 Leopard will finally cut off the legacy processor architecture of the PowerPC. The PowerPC is the descendent of the original Motorola processors in every Mac going back to the 1980s.
Since Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard stopped using the NetInfo database for user authentication, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard represents a break not only from the legacy hardware, but in many ways a break from part of the legacy inherited from NeXt.
Apple claims that Snow Leopard will take less space. It will take 7 GB less space. Considering that I’ve owned a number of hard drives that were less than 1 GB, 7 GB sounds a like a lot of disk space to me. Even of these days of enormous drives that’s about 6% of the total hard drive space on my MacBook Air. Waking from sleep will be up to twice as fast, shut down 80% faster, icons showing up in the file system will be up to 80% faster.
My pre-ordered copy of Snow Leopard arrives today. If, as promised, it runs faster and takes up less hard drive space, I’ve gotten the operating system that I’ve always wanted.
