Last week was the first time I had to do a hard shutdown on my Powerbook. It was a strange feeling. There I was, doing something that used to be a regular occurrence in the Windows world, and now it really bothered me that I had to hold down the Power button for 5 seconds and wait for my Mac to commit temporary suicide. And I was apprehensive for a good reason.

After powering back up, I discovered that my desktop (lowercase) was gone. No icons, and I could not drag anything to the background at all. I still had ~/Desktop folder but it seemed to be disconnected from the actual display. No one I asked about this has encountered the problem before, but I had a hunch it had to do with a corrupted preference file or something similar.

After much muckying around (creating a new user, making sure its desktop was operational, running Preferential Treatment over all .plist files, doing a binary sieve on the .plists to find the offending one) I narrowed it down to com.apple.finder.plist. A bit more yahoo'ing revealed that the culprit was a "secret" preference called CreateDesktop. If set to false, it tells Finder not to display the desktop. Brilliant. Somehow this got turned off during the hard shutdown and my desktop got lost at sea. Anyways, if you ever get sick of your Desktop (or want to restore it, like I did), you can change the setting via:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool <false or true>

Until later. I am going to go click on all the icons.

UPDATE: Fixed the HTML escaping of the command (the bool arguments were hidden).

I've switched.

For the last 3 years I have been using Linux on a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop. It's been working fairly well, but lately the age of it has begun to show. The laptop emits loud fan noise, has problems with shutting down occasionally, and it's a pain to switch between wireless networks. Linux is great to develop on, but I have not come across any desktop environment that I would feel it excel at.

So, having looked around, I narrowed my decision to IBM ThinkPad and Apple Powerbook. Rasmus has recently bought one of the former (T42, I believe), but read his posting and note how much time he had to spend to get certain things working (like suspend and wakeup). That is exactly the sort of thing that I am sick of. More and more of my friends and co-workers have been praising their Powerbooks. And why not? It's Unix under the hood after all, with a sexy GUI on top, all glued together with tight, usable, fast desktop glue, ready for coding, multimedia, connectivity - whatever you want.

As of last Friday, I have a beautiful 15" aluminium Powerbook in my hands and I love it so far. Put it to sleep? Just close the lid. Wireless? I go to a coffee shop with free wireless connection and Powerbook discovers it and connects automatically. Development? I have full power of BSD, X11, gcc, vim, and all the rest at my fingertips. Mutimedia? Don't even get me started. Now I just need a list of cool apps/tips/tricks to make the laptop even better.

I have switched and I am not going back.