I’ve been using my girlfriend’s iBook recently and am very impressed by it.
The Good
Things I love include the fact that it feels like unix, the build quality of the hardware itself and the failsafe reliability of its sleep/resume.
(I’ve long forgotten the number of hours I spent a couple of years back disassembling then recompiling the buggy DSDT on my old IBM Thinkpad T20 to fix all the warnings and errors before linking it against a patched kernel in order to get ACPI working. Sure it gave me a taste of the days “when men were men and wrote their own device drivers” but sometimes it’s nice when things Just Work.)
The Bad
Things that niggle include the lack of right-mouse button, the unfamiliar keyboard layout and the absence anywhere on the keyboard of a hash/pound key which makes writing bash scripts a little tricky (it’s ALT+3 but for some reason this isn’t printed on the key itself).
The Ugly
Things that seriously annoy include the monolithic, closed nature of the operating system that requires you to upgrade the whole damn thing in order to use a more recent version of Java.
Early observations aside, connecting to my Ubuntu box using NxMachine was pretty straightforward.
The mac client is straightforward to download and install. Apt-get makes setting up the server on the linux box utterly painless. The instructions on the site are more than sufficient for getting the connection up and running.
Getting the key mapping right takes a little longer – out of the box several keys did not behave as expected.
Anyone looking to save a little time is welcome to use my keyboard settings. To apply them use xmodmap:
xmodmap keyboardsettings