I am a bit scared of Gnome 3.0 which is said to put lots of little useless things into Linux. I hope what I saw are only mockups, and they are gonna stay mockups, because otherwise I’ll have to go to XFCE/LXDE and learn stuff all over again.

A little trick for you there: at UDS-L, I noticed a sticker on a girl’s
laptop saying: "This is not my boyfriend laptop" (great one Ursula, take
that you machos).

So, get yourself a sticker with: "This is my girlfriend laptop", even
FOSS people will sympathize with you at this point

I’d be quite happy to use my wife’s laptop actually, though it’s a desktop replacement so lugging it around would be even more of a strain on my back than my usual bag of bits is already.

And as for the sympathy vote, I don’t think I need to have a sexist sticker to protect me. Maybe a "Yes, this is my laptop. WHY, HAVE YOU GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT?" sticker would work better for my purposes…

Yet, be aware that Macs have been configured with not enough RAM for a
long time (less so recently, but still) so plan for more right now but
don’t buy it from Apple. Having more RAM should also help you dedicate
some more to a VM for Photoshop and Lightroom, so go for 4GB or even
8GB, you will pay for that, but you shouldn’t have to worry anymore
thereafter

Agreed. It’s about 100 quid cheaper to get an 8GB kit from Crucial, say, than it is to get the upgrade from 4GB to 8GB from Apple.

Plan for an SSD too, there is no more reason to not buy one these days.
This one is little bit tougher to get right (the ones proposed by Apple
are clearly not the best not the cheapest), but you should still be able
to find one (there are even some hacks to replace the DVD drive with an
SSD (and keep your original HD) if you feel adventurous).

Also agreed, though I quite like having a large hard drive, too… One to save for, this one.

Oh, and the rumor is that new laptops are going to be announced next
Tuesday (~13 April)… if nothing else, that should lower the price of
the actual models.

I’ve heard that one too, and I’m not looking to buy until at least the end of the month, which should give me plenty of time to find out what it’s best to spend my money on.

MacBooks are the Jaguars of notebooks

Come on, they are the snow leopards of notebooks !

Tell no one in the FOSS community that you have a Mac

A little trick for you there: at UDS-L, I noticed a sticker on a girl’s laptop saying: "This is not my boyfriend laptop" (great one Ursula, take that you machos).

So, get yourself a sticker with: "This is my girlfriend laptop", even FOSS people will sympathize with you at this point

About the price, well, since you use your laptop a lot, quality matters, Apple hardware is not that expensive once you take that into account.

Yet, be aware that Macs have been configured with not enough RAM for a long time (less so recently, but still) so plan for more right now but don’t buy it from Apple. Having more RAM should also help you dedicate some more to a VM for Photoshop and Lightroom, so go for 4GB or even 8GB, you will pay for that, but you shouldn’t have to worry anymore thereafter

Plan for an SSD too, there is no more reason to not buy one these days. This one is little bit tougher to get right (the ones proposed by Apple are clearly not the best not the cheapest), but you should still be able to find one (there are even some hacks to replace the DVD drive with an SSD (and keep your original HD) if you feel adventurous).

Oh, and the rumor is that new laptops are going to be announced next Tuesday (~13 April)… if nothing else, that should lower the price of the actual models.

The trick is to to know your laptop’s beat down capacity.

I like Macs, for their simplicity and ease of use. Then I met KDE

Yeah. I love the Gnome desktop (I just don’t work well in KDE – I get distracted too easily) and happily live in it day in, day out. If Photoshop and Lightroom worked with WINE I wouldn’t even be thinking about this.

Sorry for the mistake.

Tell no one in the FOSS community that you have a Mac as they will turn into twelve year old’s and say the usual stuff, Mac’s a expensive toys, They are for stupid people and now they use Intel chips they are just PC’s.

Yeah; rule one of working in the FOSS community: People can’t express an opinion quietly; they’re either all in strident transmit mode or they don’t have an opinion to share.

… can you have VMWare machine use an existing hard disk as its root partition?

Allegedly you can with VMWare Fusion, but I came to a different conclusion when I tried. There’s a newer version of Fusion out now that might make it work.

Nice, thanks. I’ll look into it (assuming I do actually go ahead with this whole venture).