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Hi all. I thought I would share my Windows to Mac journey and back again. It started at the end of 2013. Me and my dad went laptop shopping and found a nice laptop for $700AUD. I was going to save my money and get one like that. At my previous school, we used 2010 MacBooks as our computers. They were going out of lease and going up for sale for people to buy. My parents bought one for me for my birthday because they were so cheap ($280AUD cheap to be exact). It worked fine and started to get extremely slow after about 3 months as I had accumulated about 150GB of Steam games. It would be fine BUT on a laptop that has 250GB and there was 10GB free and it took like 5 minutes to turn on, I had to put a stop to it. Once I finished school at the end of 2014, I stopped using it immediately. I started using an old laptop that had Vista/7 on it (can't remember). At the start of last year, I bought a gaming PC, transitioning back to Windows. I started using the MacBook a bit more midway through last year as I needed it for school this year (I live in Australia and we still are on holidays!) and I thought I might as well mess around with it. I purchased a 120GB SSD for it to get more speed. More speed it brought. I decided to conduct a teardown of it to clean the insides. Never do it unless you know what you're doing/you have the money to fix stuff-ups. I damaged 2 of the 3 AirPort antenna connectors and damaged some of the pins on the display connector beyond repair. My dad went halves in buying me another 2010 White MacBook A1342 (Look up that model if you want specs) and it came with 4GB RAM rather than the 2 I was running in the other machine. I put my SSD in it and it ran like a beauty. My comments on MacBooks and OS X. The MacBook is an engineering feat and still is, 6 years after release. I love it to bits as it just slips into my backpack and I can take it anywhere. It does have some outdated hardware like a Core 2 Duo which I'm fine with (all of the computers I had before the MacBook all had like Intel Core Duos or one had an AMD Sempron single core. I know right!). The C2D does everything I need from a laptop and surprisingly quickly. However, it would have been good if Apple had still used Aluminium for this model as the polycarbonate isn't exactly the most durable. My comments on OS X now. I was an idiot and didn't do a backup before I upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite. Mavericks ran fine on 2GB RAM whereas Yosemite beach-balled everywhere (only Mac users will get that ). Yosemite is still a very demanding OS but I am lucky as to which MacBook I have. There were 2 versions of this model. A 2009 model at 2.26GHz and mine at 2.4GHz. The 2.26GHz model can only support 8GB of 1067MHz DDR3L RAM whereas the 2.4GHz model can support up to 16GB of RAM. It is amazing how good 6-year-old hardware is (just look at the Power Mac G5 (the RAM can be upgraded to something like 16GB on the quad 2.5GHz model)). OS X is nice and streamlined, Finder is nice and has all of the features I need and El Capitan became better on older hardware like this Mac. The only issue I have with El Capitan is the absolutely HORRENDOUS Disk Utility. I cannot stand it. I have been unable to do what I wanted on it for the past 2 times and have had to use Disk Management on Windows. Yeah, that bad. Apple, don't pull a Microsoft and change something that works absolutely perfectly. Am I glad to be back on Windows? Absolutely. Gaming is so much better on Windows and my gaming PC is so expandable. I can add so many more drives than I could in a Mac Pro/Mini or an iMac. Would I go back to Mac? God no. I am back on team Windows and I'm here to stay. For real this time. I have been using an iPod touch 4th gen for a few years and I will be getting a Samsung tablet in the next month. Let me know if you want an iOS to Android discussion as I know iOS inside and out, at least iOS 6. Thanks, Alpha. (Be sure to leave your switching journeys below. It truly interests more people than you think).

So. For this past week i have been using Fedora as my one and only OS because windows was being a dick and i just did not feel like re-installing it. And surprisingly the lack of windows has not been too bad. There is still plenty of light.. huehuehuehue. Alright i'll stop.. Now. I'll preface this by saying that i have used Linux before as a sort-of-daily. But i always had Windows standing by when i felt like i was in over my head. And i was always distro hopping. Trying out all the popular flavours like Ubuntu, Mint, ElementaryOS (when i had a Sherlock avatar on this forum) etc. etc But this time i really went for it. I could only use Fedora and nothing else until i got an SSD. So armed with a few basic terminal commands and interest in open source software i set my Linux drive as my boot drive and formatted my Windows drive. I'll cover installation too even though that came before i got fed up with Windows. Installing Fedora 21 was as simple as 1.2.3 Much like most distros i have used. 1. Put ISO on flash drive with either pen drive linux or linux live usb creator. 2. Boot from USB 3. Follow installation guide. No extra faff required to just use it. But a quick sudo yum update is always a good idea. Other than that everything works right out of the box. So what does it look like? Well after i grabbed a nicely detailed wallpaper it looks really pretty. I could get used to this no icons on desktop thing. And the Activities menu is a really well done grid with good overview. Switching between programs is also a very pleasant experience. Just bump the top left corner with the pointer thing and you are presented with a very easy tile arrangement with all the open programs. I really like this. And the search function is easily accessible and seems to work as it should. The first thing i did was install Chrome. Since i really don't like using firefox. And that was pretty simple too. All i really had to do was download chrome from the download page and install it through the software suite. And it automatically got all of my settings and my theme that i had on windows. I could start using it within five minutes or so. I also ended up getting Clementine to play my music and KMP to play my movie files. Although neither KMP or VLC would play MP4 files out of the box. And still won't. Then i installed DOSbox and Wine. But i have not gotten around to trying those out yet. And i haven't managed to get Steam to work. But that will probably be sorted soon. And i had to get Redshift to replace F.lux. But that isn't working yet either. So so far it's been mostly positive. But not entirely without roadblocks. What do i like about it to far? Well. KolourPaint is a really good out of the box paint program. It is extremely snappy on my system. It has not stuttered, paused, flickered, crashed or even lagged in opening a program during the entire week. The screenshot camera animation is pretty neat. The terminal is a really great way of doing things when you get used to it. Although exe files are more convenient. I'll continue working on this as more things pop up that i want to add. But right now i need to go get my SSD before the store closes. Until next time *Tips fedora*

NCIX: N/A Amazon: http://geni.us/ZcG What... an iMac... on Linus Tech Tips?... Yes, we decided to check out if the grass really is greener on our side of the fence. So come along with us as we explore the... extremely pricey... world of Apple computers.

Ok, so its been a while now and I'm just about to switch off my old trusty iphone to a 32gb nexus 5. I have never used android before although I am quite a tech enthusiast so figuring it out shouldn't be that hard. There are some welcome things coming off iOS (WIDGETS, BIGGER SCREEN, customization, sideloading) that i think i'm going to love but also theres alot of things im going to miss mainly airplay, mac integration, quick charging, and the weight and the premium feel. I just wanted some input on the switch. fanboyish comments aside, switching platforms is not easy, espicially when you are half invested in the google ecosystem (and frankly its kind of scary how much social integration they are pushing, since im not a social network guy) and half invested in the apple ecosystem. it even took linus a while to move off of ios (and im deeper rooted than he is). Also, from nexus 5 owners, how is the battery life, i've heard mixed inputs from all over the internet (I grind my iphone 5 pretty hard, usually in a day I go 100% - 10% in by 5:00, top it off to 60% and then grind it back down to 10% by 1:00AM). I'm usually ok with the terrible battery life of the iphone because it charges extremely quickly, but with a nexus (and how little current mico usb draws) I really need this phone to last the entire day. Thanks guys

Should Linus or Slick do an iSwitched on a popular Linux distribution like Mint, Fedora or Ubuntu followed up by an iSwitched to OSX?

So as a few people were interested in me doing an iSwitch I decided to go ahead and do it. I've only done some basic bits so far (Installation, first impressions and getting software).

Linus has mentioned a couple of times in videos that he's tried out Ubuntu. Wondering if there is any interest in doing an iSwitched to Linux video. With the news on SteamOS (also being linux based), this might be an interesting thing to give a review on. Maybe Slick & Co. can weigh in if there are any open source options they would consider using for video editing, etc.... Thoughts?

I really think Linus and Slick should do more phone reviews Linus can do some more iswitched series but instead of 30 days, just do a bit of a vlog each day for a few minutes. And Slick can do some of the ROM reviews and things like that I think this would be cool and hopefully Linus and Slick see this. Linus just announced on the WAN show that LG will be sending them a G2 to review, can't wait to see that and hope more videos like that surface What do you guys think about this?

Since I’m a college student, being able to do all of my Powerpoints and endless Word documents is a must on a weekly basis so I had to get some kind of alternative for Microsoft Office 2013 that I have been using on Windows. So I started off with the obvious choice being the Libre Office. Sadly I have never liked it and it also turned out that I have ran into quite a few compatibility issues to do with the layouts and looks of the work previously saved using Microsoft’s Office software. So after some time researching I have found the Kingsoft Office. Just as the name suggests... It is a clone of Microsoft’s Office but quite honestly I must say it is a very good clone. Both in terms of looks and compatibility it is spotless and looks, feels and is able to save in the formats that the standard Microsoft Office suit can. I guess the only disadvantage is that it only comes with alternatives for Word, Powerpoint and Excel but for me personally that is enough since I will never need to use any other software from the Office suit apart from the main three. As you can see in the image below it looks identically to the Office 2013 at least with the skin I use since you can also make it look like the 2007 and 2003 version if you wish to do so. (Click on the image to see it in full size) In terms of comparison... I can’t really do much since they are nearly identical and Kingsoft’s Office suit 100% compatible with the formats that Microsoft’s Office produces so there has been absolutely no problems for me to us the documents and edit them. Note that you can also save in the standard Microsoft Office formats so that the documents will work on it. I guess this is the best alternative until some day Microsoft ports Office to Linux and it really isn’t too bad considering that it is FREE! Alright so carrying on with the comparison today I will say a thing or two about the SMPlayer compared to Media Player Classic - Home Cinema. But wait what about the default movie player? To be honest I didn’t even bother using it any longer as soon as I realised that MKV formats don’t play then I instantly downloaded VLC despite the fact I didn’t like it on Windows before. Again without surprise I didn’t like VLC because of how it managed the subtitles in my anime and a lack of simple functions such as click to pause/play. After some minutes of research I have found SMPlayer and instantly installed it. All of the formats that I have played so far which are: MP4, AVI and MKV worked out of the box; assuming that the 3rd party software that I have installed after installing the system contained the required codecs. Note that I have later on installed the latest codes separately just to make sure I have the latest once. So to the comparison... After using SMPlayer for a longer period of time I can say full heartedly that in my eyes it is the MPC-HC but for Linux. It has all of the functionality that you would expect from a media player and more. A feature that popped out to me was the ability to change the skin of the player which I instantly changed to the one found on MPC-HC because of the simplicity as pictured below. (Click on the image to see it in full size) I also love the fact that you can click the screen to pause/play... YES I KNOW it is like the lamest of features someone could possibly be excited about when using a media player but I really got used to it on Windows and I valued it so yeah... The interface highly resembles the one that is in MPC-HC so I surely felt home here and found it easy to navigate around with. One thing that I have notice and mentioned before is that I do very rarely get slight stutter every 10 minutes or so and I think that the cause is either on the players side or the graphics driver. One way or the other it’s nothing major or disrupting to a level that I would notice it as much so it isn’t much of a deal. Just to lastly mention I did throw different types of videos at it starting with some 720p anime and ending with 1080p Bluray films and both ran as you would expect. Perfectly fine.

Right so I got this idea from a unit that we are doing in college and we are required to set ourselves a goal and write a diary about what we did to achieve it for aprox. 30 days. So one of my ideas is that I should give Linux a shot. My plan is to switch from Windows 8 to Elementary OS Luna as a daily driver (apart from gaming) to see if I can do it for 30 days and what I will gain out of it. I will try to compare both of the systems and application alternatives that they both offer and give advantages and disadvantages. Now my question is would you read the whole article if I would create one stating my observations and what I did every day for 30 days updating it daily? also which sub forum do you thing I should put it in? Please leave your vote above in the poll and any suggestions bellow in the comments EDIT: keep in mind that I've had brief experience with Linux a while ago and I will be dual booting both systems. The topic is up:https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/65626-iswitched-from-windows-to-linux-for-30-days/ I have decided to put it in the Member Reviews sub forum since this will be more like my personal review and comparison between the two systems and it seemed like a good place to put it.

A few months ago on the WAN Show, I remember Linus and Luke tossing around the idea of an iSwitched to Linux, where Linus would switch to Linux as his day-to-day OS for a month. I got super excited when I heard them talking about the idea, but they haven't mentioned it since. Are there still any plans of actually doing this or no?

So, on the stream today, Linus and Slick mentioned (semi-humorously) whether they should do a Mac OS X iSwitched series. I have some OS X experience, and think it would be very interesting if Linus and Slick tried it out for a while. Should they? What's your opinion? And, please, don't flame. PLEASE. This is not about whether OS X or Linux or Windows is superior. This is about whether Linus and/or Slick should do an iSwitched series. Edit: P.S. Please DO vote. It is your duty as a denizen of the LinusTechTips forum.

NCIX: N/A Amazon: http://geni.us/ZcG Did Linus' OS X software experience surprise him in a positive way, or did it put a damper on the beauty of that 5K retina display?