I'm not quite certain of what happened, but something interesting has occurred between me and Mac OS X in the past week. Since I took my 19" monitor home from the office and hooked up a mouse and a keyboard to my PowerBook, it's stopped feeling like a Mac. Well, that's not quite it... It's lost it's essence of Mac-ness. Previous versions of the Mac OS felt quite restrained -- WYSIWYG. No mystery, excitement, or sense of possibility. I mean, I liked it, but it was the total opposite of Linux. I've been using Mac OS X for a year now, and I've never really had any particular excitement for it beyond an intellectual pleasure at The Ultimate OS Combination -- *nix and Mac OS X. But somehow -- perhaps related to the peripherals perhaps not -- Woot (that's my system's name) has taken on an entirely new persona. It seems so open, so grand...like the wonder that Linux elicits when you first realized "wow, this is huge," when you discovered that it was a whole world that you didn't know about. I feel guilty saying it, but Mac OS X makes Linux seem so unnecessary. Why bother when I've got Mac OS X?
Anyhow, this seemed worth sharing. I've seldom had such a fundamental emotional reaction to software before. I don't know what to make of it, frankly.