macs can support 2 button mice, you just have to plug one in. 

mac is really not that hard to learn and if you are any good at computers in general, you'll pick up the finer points of the UI fairly easily. if not, just google it and there's a lot of info out there. likely you'll be frustrated with the backwards setup on mac for a while, but you get used to it.

the biggest thing about mac is that most applications don't open up as a full screen the way windows applications do. for example, when you open up Photoshop in windows and maximize it, you get a big grey window with a menu bar on top and the tools on the sides.
on a mac, when you open photoshop, you see only the toolbars show up and the menu at the top of the screen is REPLACED with the photoshop menu. basically, application windows 'float' around on your screen instead of being bound inside a 'master' application window. that's really the biggest difference right there.
so sometimes you can open an application and not realized it opened because no window immediately pops up, only the menu bar at the top changes. 

Macs are pretty easy to get used to, but I lack the bar at the bottom of screen and not being able to maximize windows still irks me after all these years alternating between osx and windows. 

Apple also makes the worst mice known to mankind. Remember these?

http://cdn3.pcadvisor.co.uk/cmsdata/blogentries/108160/iMac-mouse-360.jpg

I had to use these at school, drove me fuckin nuts. 

oh god...

ironically, the oval classic mice were really good (except they only had 1 button); comfortable and easy to hold. 

but if they are really buying you a PowerMac, I'd ask for a computer from this decade. 

Doesn't Mac support Windows dual booting via Boot Camp? 

And, against all good advices I received here on creating a proper dual boot, I use my home iMac with Parallels and I happen to play HL2 or Doom3 (on Win2k) and simultaneously have a Photoshop session + Firefox + Itunes open in Osx no problem. 

I do have a dual boot setup with Windows 7, but I rarely actually boot into Windows 7. I play most games in the Parallels VM.

RickyT, regarding Mac vs Windows. I have switched to the Mac in 2005, and I have to say that I really prefer it to Windows. The switch can be hard for a couple of weeks, but then it became smooth sailing and I began to see how the OS X gui is superior to the Windows GUI in subtle ways. One example: The shortcuts are triggered with Cmd+SomeKey, and due to the positioning of the Cmd key (next to the spacebar), you use your thumb and your index finger for most shortcuts. This puts considerably less strain on my fingers. Huge win.

However, if your boss is offering a PowerMac (provided he's serious about it), I would be weary. The PPC architecture has been replaced with Intel CPUs about seven years ago, and is unsupported since OS X 10.5. Many programs simply won't run on that computer.

Some things of note:

- Forget about the one button mice - all modern macs have two button mice, and you can plug any USB mouse into a Mac. There are 3rd party drivers which allow you to configure the mice.
- If you're like me, you'll start using your Windows machine less and less because OS X works better for you.
- Use Parallels to run Windows in a VM if you still need it (or Boot Camp for games)
- For programming, the Mac is superior to Windows - there are great tools, a shell with all the goodies included, and its easy to install Apache / MySQL etc.
- I don't know about the stability of recent versions of Windows, but OS X is fucking rock solid. I can count the number of times I have seen the Mac equivalent of the BSOD on one hand.
- The hardware owns. I know you like to build your own computers, but let me tell you, just buying something off the rack that just works has its perks too. No more worrying what components will work together, no more fucking about with beta drivers etc. Downside: It's more expensive and you can't easily upgrade components. But I usually keep my Macs for at least two years, and I can see that I will keep my current machines (iMac and MacBook Air, both 2011) for several years to come, as they are just amazingly fast.

One more argument that was my original reason to switch: I found that using OS X has made me think differently about how I use computers and how I write software. Switching to any OS forces you out of your comfort zone, and allows you to learn something new. But this only works if you are interested in such things - if you just want to get your work done, and fast, then you're probably best off if you use what you know. 

In 15 years.

It's a lot scarier on OsX though, 'cause it's not the Blue Screen Of Death, but the BLACK Screen Of Death....

Muahahahhahhahhahahahh! 

http://www.wirelust.com/img/blog/20071031/osx_kernel_panic.jpg 

were much less of a problem after I switched to NT and its successors, but I still remember having much more trouble and reboots - but maybe that's my subconcious trying to rationalize the fact that I spend twice as much money on hardware now ;-) 

I am a long-term user of Windows, and Windows 1,2,3, 95, and 98 all had regular BSOD events. XP had a minimum number, most of which were involving me trying to do things that I probably should not have.

Re-installs of 95 and 98 were a regular event and at one stage I had cloned drives ready to swap in and out of the box just to speed things up.

I have been using Vista on a desktop since RC1, and Win7 on a laptop also since RC1 and have never seen a BSOD. I am one of those users (weirdo) who have been quite happy with Vista, and I have never even re-installed it once.

I have Win8, which I bought direct from MS, ready to install on the laptop but have never got around to it because Win7 works just fine.

I have never felt minded to even try a Mac, as I am deleriously happy with Windows, and consider Bill G to be my long-lost benevolent uncle. 

mac is fine windows is fine just use whatever makes you happy as long as it's not linux because that is shit. 

Win8 is shite. win7 works fine for me, I havn't seen a BSOD in years.

I've been tempted to go to linux but being my own sysadmin doesn't sound like much fun...

I've used Mac but don't really see the benefits, at least with what I use the machine for. And the Stalinist control over data (via iTunes) is a ballache I can do without. 

I have seen a BSOD, but that was hardware damage - a snap, crackle and pop, and the little whisp of smoke that is a few hundred quid saying goodbye. 

by 'someone'. 

On Linux I do not have to do the boring "sysadmin" jobs of hunting for drivers or updating all the software individually. 

 

http://25.media.tumblr.com/9477e6ddcca315f6e82c99a841dad76c/tumblr_mmnblnOuVZ1raaf5co1_500.jpg & http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcipqk1F261raaf5co1_500.png 

http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/32200000/Alpaca-Out-Of-Nowhere-random-32254509-201-251.jpg 

apt-get is nice on linux... until it doesn't work.

took 20 minutes of googling just to realize i had to change some servers in some files somewhere. :\ 

Yeah, that personal repository stuff seems quite bad. In Archlinux you don't use that kind of stuff, instead you have https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ for everything that is not in the official repositories. Works easy and well. 

 

Anybody have a suggestion for a decent program for editing textures for Quake (256 color)? I'm not having much luck so far. I've been using an old copy of PSP (4.0) that I've had for years but it's palette manipulation capabilities are very limited. I also have some version of Photoshop Elements and I downloaded GIMP, but both those are massively bloated overkill for what I need to do. To me GIMP seems to have an incredibly confusing and unintuitive interface, but maybe I just haven't given it a fair chance, and seriously - over 3,000 files in the GIMP folder?

I just need basic editing capability, copy/paste, palette editing with the ability to see exactly which colors are used and how many of each color, pixel by pixel drawing, that sort of thing.

PSP actually does most of what I want except the palette window can't show which of the 256 colors are actually used in the image and how many pixels of each color.