My peculiar love/hate relationship with my Mac

Journal MC Negro's Journal: My peculiar love/hate relationship with my Mac 1

Journal by MC Negro on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @12:35AM

I have an iMac G4 workstation. It's one of the cute ones with the little swivel flat-panel monitors. I've been using Mac OS X, off and on, for about a year and a half and must say that I think that, if Apple would market it better, it has serious potential in the desktop market. For me, anyway. And that's all I'm concerned about.

First, allow me to tell you a bit about my computer preferences and experiences --

I use Windows XP/2000 Professional as my primary desktop. I dual-boot XP Pro and Linux on my laptop, and all the workstation at my college are Windows 2000 Professional. I've made several attempts at trying to migrate over purely to Linux but simply couldn't because a few apps and "gotchas" (ACPI, etc...) were just keeping me in Windows.
I prefer BSD-style UNIX. Maybe it's because I was introduced to UNIX with SunOS4, but I prefer BSD-style UNIX. My server runs a hand-tuned FreeBSD 5.2.1 distribution and acts as a Samba primary domain controller, an NIS+ domain authentication service and a file server (and my testing grounds for all my mod_perl stuff under Apache). Current uptime of 50 days :-)
I prefer a minimalist window environment. Whenever I'm in Linux or doing some admin work on my BSD server, I use Blackbox. I originally used KDE, but it just got too cluttered and too memory-hogging.
Work != play. One thing that I want to make clear is that what I want in a FreeBSD server or Linux slave is not really what I want in a desktop. I don't want to run Apache from my desktop, nor do I wish to hack up my X install to play 3-D games. I boot in to *NIX because I want to get work or code development done. I boot in to Windows to play a round of UT or Q3A, do web design, write papers or use Photoshop. So I'm not looking for the utopian "all-in-one" package.

That said, here's my interesting relationship with my Mac OS X workstation

What I like About OS X

Eye-Candy. Mac OS X has eye-candy in spades. From the genie effect to transparent windows, anti-aliasing and smooth-dock, this environment comes decked out with more eye-candy than you can shake a stick at. I know much of what is done in OS X can be done in KDE or GNOME with some themes, some X tweaking and some patches, but that's the thing - why would I want to invest that much time in eye-candy when I could get it out of the box in OS X?
BSD-style UNIX at its heart. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy this. There are some caveats, but it's mostly good. File structure and library path follows the traditional path of BSD-style UNIX, and utilities behave how they should. Again, this comes with some problems, but it's mostly good.
X11 + Quartz WM = LUV. One of my favorite features of OS X is its ability to integrate X11 applications in to the native environment. The Quartz WM blends the X11 applications in seemlessly, even applying the genie effect to the windows. I can now run GIMP alongside Dreamweaver without having to use an emulated environment or a half-ass port of the GTK+ framework to Mac OS X. It's really nice.
Commercial Acceptance. It's nice to run native versions of applications , like AIM, Office, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. It's also nice to have things well-integrated within the operating system without any hacks needed. I've never been able to get Java working with FireFox under FreeBSD or Linux, and I've only been able to get it working once under Mozilla. Java works out of the box in OS X, as does SMB networking.
Community Acceptance. Perl, GCC, X, MySQL, Apache all have been ported to OS X. Thanks to the Fink project, programs can now be fetched and compiled in a pseudo-APT-GET kind of way. At the moment, my Mac OS X is compiling a KDE application called 'Kaptain'. Dependencies are resolved ad-hoc. I can now run gAIM, XMMS and GIMP , compiled from source, on my iMac. Pretty cool :-)
Security. Speaks for itself. Mac virii are few and far between, and most services are turned off by default.

What I Dislike about OS X

Abstract Mouse. I hate the "Apple Pro" mouse. Well, initially I did, anyway. I've gotten use to hitting the control-key whenever I need to right-click, but it's still annoying. This is more of the "different for the sake of being different" bullshit that Apple seems to love so much. A single-clicker mouse has no visible advantages over its multi-click brethren, save for maybe catering to those who lost 9 fingers in the Vietnam war. I wouldn't even so much mind a single-clicker mouse if it had a middle wheel or button. I've grown accustomed to copying and pasting with this little button, and its absence is very noticable to me when I use OS X. And yes, I know third-party mice can be used, but that's not the point.
Mythical Tales of Hardware Compatibility. I'm sure everyone remembers when Apple paraded their "switched" ads a year or two back. The commercial was contingent on the presupposition that everyone believed Windows would instantly lapse in to a the computational equivalent of an epileptic seizure if you even thought about installing a new piece of hardware. Enter the iMac - A utopian environment where hardware will not only work out of the box, it will also make you coffee, raise your children and find a cure for AIDS (and look damn snappy in the process.) So with this commercial burned in to the crevices of my cerebral cortex, I decided to put it to the test, which is to say, use a generic piece of hardware. I have a D-Link DWL-120+ USB wireless LAN adapter. It works plug-and-play in Windows, *BSD and the various flavors of Linux I've used. I was really expecting this to just work out of the box. I plug it in to find not only does it not work, OS X doesn't even see it. No device listing whatsoever. This pisses me off, because Windows at least lets me know when hardware is connected, even if it can't configure it. So I go on the Internet, looking for answers. I find some drivers from the Darwin project and various other projects on the net. All must be compiled from source. Needless to say, none of them would ever get past the initial compilation phases. Even after dependencies being resolved, they still wouldn't compile. Apple touts that Mac OS X "just works". Well, certainly not in this regard. It couldn't even configure or even FIND one of the most generic pieces of hardware avalaible.
File Structure. While a great deal of the file structure is compliant with the BSD way of doing things, some things are just plain not. I don't really understand why Apple did things this way. It would be very easy to just sym link /User Applications to /usr/local/bin/ or /Users to /usr/home/, but instead you end up with this mish-mash filesystem.
Simple Things Made Diffictult Apples control-panel is severely lacking. If anything beyond basic changes are needed, you best look elsewhere. I prefer the more traditional approach of just editing config files, but I can't really do that in OS X, because certain config files have been moved or aren't there. It's very annoying.
No Clear Upgrade Path for Carbon Apps. Migrating older Mac applications with the carbonlib layer really doesn't do much in the way of upgrade path. Migrating a Win32-based application to the .NET framework is a fairly trivial task (relatively speaking) for a seasoned programmer, but migrating from carbonlib to cocoa can be quite daunting, depending on how large the application is. Hell, migrating ANYTHING to cocoa is a task. Just look at the OOo Aqua project if you need further proof (delayed till 2006, by the way).

Those are my primary concerns with Mac OS X, but they're mostly non-existent for the non-geek. I think OS X could go somewhere beyond the journalist's desk or the graphic-design artist's table if Apple could highlight more of these benefits to the average consumer.

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