Good question. Software-wise, short-term I’m thinking Windows with Linux as a VM guest. This gets you an accessible app ecosystem but you don’t have to lose access to a productive working environment like the Unix CLI. I’d pick Windows 8.1 plus Classic Shell because I know it works, and will do until 2023. Win10 is off the cards because privacy, and I don’t much like it anyway. And Apple hardware that’s Haswell or lower will work just fine, if you can get your hands on it, with the added advantage of getting you OS X for when you’re in the mood or want to run some particularly helpful Mac app that won’t run in a VM elsewhere.
But long term, I really would love to run Linux full-time. High-quality commodity hardware works well for desktops rather than laptops on Windows or Linux, but you’ve always got the problem of hardware configuration needing external sighted help. And of course this only works if Linux accessibility actually improves to the point you can do this. Still, absent any alternatives for building and/or using servers, it seems the likely outcome. Other options provide interesting side opportunities: I quite like ChromeOS and have reasonably high hopes for it, and I really don’t mind Apple’s vision of the future as long as I can delegate anything I need to a server. I could take an iPad Pro if it had SD card slot, Ethernet, the ability to fully utilise the keyboard and external network or disk file systems like other cloud document providers, and allowed us to run a Unix environment and/or development tools in sandboxes. There might be a baseline to what we could actually do with our own hardware, and there would always be a compelling argument for eliminating Apple’s control over it, but if it’s all we actually need to do, I could probably embrace it well enough. If I could work at Apple, I’d beat some sense into the bastards (with a large, heavy mallet made from the purest gold) on the merits of the Mac as a platform, as long as I could somehow transition the iOS app ecosystem into sharing code bases with it. The problem with Mac now is simply that it’s coasting, and can’t benefit from changes in iOS. This is, somewhat ironically, unlike the situation on Windows, where the chunky universal apps platform does at least encourage developers to build for both modalities. And in the (probably quite likely) event that I couldn’t affect this change, then I’d insist that they build an appliance that would provide the back end to any number of computational and server tasks, for which the front end would be an app in the store that people could deploy easily, thus turning even the relatively inhospitable realm of servers and computation into potential markets. JMO, of course. :) -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at [email protected] The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
