For all you Linux and Mac heads out there, you should go snag a free copy of Crossover. It's normally $40, but it's free today because of a rather interesting bet made by their CEO.
It's coming up again, and registration is now open. You should be able to use the code DKV41883 to get free registration. We'll see if this year they have something more interesting to me than the iPhone lovefest. (New Macs, perhaps?)
When my wife's laptop broke, we opted not to pay to fix it or buy a new one. The newest Ubuntu had impressed me, and I was pretty sure that I could use my work laptop running Linux, and let her use my MacBook Pro most of the time. This worked ok for a couple of months, but as time went on, I started to notice more and more things that I missed from the Mac. I've found that I've really gotten used to the feel of Apple's keyboards, and even more importantly, the screen on my Mac is so much easier on my eyes than the LCD in the HP laptop I got from work. Perhaps it's the way Mac OS X draws fonts, perhaps it's something else in the Mac OS X rendering layer, perhaps the MacBook Pro simply has a better screen. Whatever the case, my eyes are vastly happier when using the Mac.
Then there are the many things in Mac OS X that are simply more polished than in Ubuntu. Perhaps I should be a good open source citizen and take the code and fix the things that are broken, but I simply don't have the interest. There are way too many other things I'd rather be hacking on than trying to fix things like Ubuntu's network configuration application (I probably should write a future post on how this is broken, so maybe someone with interest could fix it). So while I don't have an addiction to any of Apple's other crack (I rarely use my iPod, I don't own (and don't plan to own) an iPhone or an Apple TV or what not), I do, despite my best efforts, have a Mac OS X (and Apple hardware to a certain extent) addiction.
Now all I have to do is find out how to get another Mac laptop for our household, preferably free... (sometimes it's annoying working for a company that makes computers...)