So more than one reader has asked me what I thought of OS X and/or why I hadn't written anything up about it yet?

If you've been a long-time reader (read: over 6 months or so) you remember that I was an avid purchaser and installer of the OS X Public Beta and, though I loved the potential, I eventually removed it from my machine.

I've been waiting in the wings, watching those of my friends who have been panting for OS X and installed it immediately. After reading the press, playing with it myself, and hearing the reactions of friends, I've pretty much confirmed my initial instinct: Mac OS X is really, really cool. If I had a second OS X-able mac I'd install it in a heartbeat. As it is I'm meticulous about my mac, and whenever something doesn't work just-so I find workarounds and hacks to make it just-so. If I was using OS X right now there would be so many things that break a little that I wouldn't be able to get anything done, not because the system's unusable, but because I'd have a compulsion to fix every small thing before doing actual work.

I have a Powerbook and a Linux box on my desk, and I basically use the linux box for 'net' stuff (serving this website, browsing, having 9 shell windows open at once, all that) and the Mac for actually making things (writing papers, reading and writing email, photoshop, even coding using BBEdit). I basically rely on a small suite of applications, and until those applications are OS X native I'll probably hold off. I had several bad experiences with the 'Classic' mode in the PB version, and I'm a little gunshy about throwing in and giving it another go until Apple's confident enough to install it on new machines.

So in a nutshell, I'm totally excited about OS X, I'm really looking forward to installing it, I'm really looking forward to Mac OS X apps coming out, but I'm not going to dive in just yet.

If you want a thorough report from those who have used it, I'd recommend the Ars Technica Review of Mac OS X.