I'll be getting a new machine at work soon as a result of a "N-year old machines are automatically upgraded" policy we have here. So, I've been thinking a lot lately about what to get next.

Thought 0: the latest Dell Dimension boxes may not have Athlons, which is annoying, but they are insanely fast, and more importantly, they're dead silent. I could run Windows (either 2000 or XP, not sure on that yet), and continue doing what I'm doing now, which includes running Linux under VMware, and displaying my apps with XWin32.

The problem with this Win2K/VMware/Linux mess is that nothing is ever quite right. The virtual desktop manager I'm running (SDesk) works well but not quite well enough. Likewise, cygwin makes it feel almost Unix-like, but not quite. Likewise, cut-and-paste from X to Windows and back occasionally flakes out and I have to restart the X server. This is annoying.

Thought 1: I've been thinking for a while about switching to Linux. The applications that I use regularly are all there except for Microsoft Office, Quicken, and (occasionally) TurboTax. All the software I ever write is in Java, which has perfectly acceptable Linux support. I could run VMware the other way around (Win2000 on VMware on Linux), I suppose, but that doesn't seem right somehow (Linux can run quite happily on a small VMware environment, with no X server, etc., whereas Win2000 is a pig and would require a huge VMware environment).

Thought 2:You've seen them. The smiling, smug Macintosh bigots. They get real Unix, they can compile all those X apps and run them natively. They also get native Mac applications and real Microsoft Word (which they'll claim is better than the versions that ship for Microsoft's own operating systems). Heck, I'd even get to run real Quicken.

So, I've been racking my brains to answer the question: exactly which things, that I'm utterly dependent on now, would potentially break if I switched away from running Windows altogether (i.e., going pure Linux or going to MaxOS X). The tricky bits seem to be:

- Microsoft Outlook: I don't use it for e-mail, but I'm hooked on it for my to-do list, contact list, and calendar. Furthermore, it happily synchronizes with my Ericsson T39. Despite the fact that the phone speaks SyncML, and there are SyncML toolkits everywhere, I haven't seen any other applications / plug-ins that claim to support my phone. If I get Office for Mac, then I get all the contact management stuff, but I don't get the phone synchronization.

- emplode (I haven't tried jemplode yet, though)
- MP3 Tag Studio (are there Mac or Linux tools that come close to this thing?)
- EAC (Linux has grip, which rocks, but is iTunes on the Mac as good?)

- Quicken / TurboTax: these are available for MacOS, but not Linux

- Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint: Again, the Mac seems to solve the problem, but Linux isn't quite there yet (OpenOffice, from what I can tell, needs another year or two of work)



So, thinking this all the way through, Apple starts looking good. Really good. They still have the stupid one-button mouse, and Apple inexpicably refuses to make a sub-four-pound notebook. Still, the Apple fantasy has a grip on me. Am I crazy? Will I be pissed that Apple has this weird DVD-R drive when other folks seem to be going to DVD+RW? Is there something else missing that I'm forgetting?