Last week my laptop crashed. For a long time several programs were crashing randomly. I didn’t had time to investigate this, but it was becoming a very big problem lately. Firefox was crashing about every 5 minutes. Last week I couldn’t even start Mongrel or Tomcat.
A disk check revealed a lot of problems on file system level. I started to backup everything I could, but some parts were already too much corrupted.
I was afraid it was a hardware problem, but after doing a clean Debian Lenny install everything looks okay. Even my random crashes are gone!
But I’m not completely convinced the problems will be gone away for good, so I’m starting to look for another laptop anyway.
And now I must make a difficult decision: Will my next laptop be Linux based or MacOSX based?
I use OS X on my laptop, CentOS on servers, Windows XP and Fedora on my old desktop, maintain a couple of other Ubuntu, Debian, Windows XP and OS X systems (family, organizations, etc.) and OS X is just king if you want to *use* a computer. If you like tweaking things constantly and compiling a lot of stuff, then you might want to go with Linux again (though that’s possible on OS X as well).
I have to say Apple’s hardware is pretty sweet stuff and with OS X 10.5 Leopard coming out next month, I’d say a MacBook (Pro) is really something you won’t mind having around you all the time. :o)