Wavering
November 9, 2019
I've been wavering.
I needed to replace an ageing Windows 7 laptop used by my wife. The January end of life for 7 fast approaching. My plan had always been to replace it with a MacBook Air, but amazingly for the last few years Apple seemed unable to build a laptop with a working keyboard.
And so I looked further afield. In the end I did get an Air, keyboard risk notwithstanding, & I won't change my own MBP set-up for another year. But for a week, almost a whole week, I wavered about both.
It's not like there aren't temptations. Both push and pull factors as they say, especially once I looked at building a desktop again. The difference in the hardware my dollar bought, and it's not like Catalina is so great, and those keyboards, and there's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) now with Linux running in a virtual box of its own, and… (you get the idea). So I gave Windows 10 a whirl.
WSL (ridiculous name) turned out to be crucial, because it's pretty much the only way to do web development on a windows box for me, and it turned out to be just too slow to use. I got simple Ruby and PHP scripts to run, and MySQL installed, and while it was slow in places mostly it seemed ok, right up until I tried to tie it all together and install Drupal, then it all ground to a halt. Hours later I was still at step two of forty something. So no Windows for me. For now.
In another year it might be different. WSL 2 is in the works and it might get better faster than Catalina does, last time I looked Catalina was still pretty horrible. And the rest of those push and pull factors and a dozen others besides might change in a dozen different ways, so we'll see.
But I wavered. Not a bad thing, don't want be the kind of person without doubt.
Update:
After all that the 16" MBP was released just before the Air arrived, so I got a 16" instead. Because of course I did.