timothy's Journal: OS X nearly ready for the desktop

I'm a fan of a lot of Apple's hardware, have owned a few of their machines over the years. About six years ago, I bought an iBook (my mom and sister each got one at the same time, and it was helpful to be able to look at the screen on mine to do the occasional phone-help attempt), and of those iBooks, two of them are still around and active (a pretty good ratio for 6-year-old laptops at the low end of the line).

Now I'm using (as of last week) a MacBook Pro, which
came loaded with Mac OS X 10.5.2, and some software added by the company's IT dept. Robin Miller (Roblimo, that is) advises me that VMware Fusion is a nice way to run Linux on the machine, and I shall check that out today.

However, in the event (sadly likely, given my winning ways with computers) that it doesn't jell the first time, I want to outline a few of the things I wish that OS X did or had which make me wish I had a nice Gnome desktop on here. (And perhaps OS X easily does all of these things -- note, some of them are about defaults rather than possibilities! -- it's just that I haven't yet played with the right settings.)

- virtual desktops by default. I know of Spaces (it's in the dock, clicking on it invites one to set it up), will check that out.

- a show-desktop button. When I first encountered such a thing, I wondered why anyone would use it, thought it was a silly idea. Then I got used to it, and now I crave it even on OS X.

- screenshot utility not stuck on "stupid." I found out that taking a screenshot while the Apple DVD player is active is disallowed by the operating system. Setting aside whether it's reasonable, smart, necessary or any other positive adjective to make this so at all, this is true even when the DVD player is completely obscured by the app of which I was trying to take a snapshot.

- Reliable OpenOffice.org. Note, I wish it worked better, but I am not laying blame or feeling ungrateful. I'm glad it works at all! Starting OO.o (v. 2.4) on this machine seems to lead to a timeout error when I first try to start it, and then it will finally, painfully start after another attempt, or sometimes two. (Once going, it seems to work as expected, though I have give it no special stress tests yet. I hope 2.4 crashes less than 2.2 on my LinuxMint desktop.)

- Tomboy notes or equivalent. Maybe there *is* a good equivalent in here ... for now, Stickies will do. The searchability and linkability of Tomboy's notes has really gotten addictive, though.

- The GIMP. Yes, there is an OS X version, but it seems this involves installing a bit of software from the installation DVD (not included with this laptop by the IT dept, and not worth bothering anyone about merely for this). From http://darwingimp.sourceforge.net/guides/install_leopard/:

"important: If your are installing the X11.app for the first time from your Leopard Install CD (containing MacOS 10.5.0) on MacOS 10.5.2, you have to reinstall the 10.5.2 Combo-Update. Otherwise GIMP will crash. !!!"

I'm sure there's more to add, but I have other things to do today.

timothy

Re: OS X nearly ready for the desktop

[NoseyNick]

Spaces is really rather nice, it's "real virtual desktops" which have been all appled-up, give 'em a try and you'll probably reasonably quickly be missing them in Linux.
Show Desktop can be done with Expose. Expose and Spaces are both configured together, so give 'em a play.
NeoOffice has been OpenOffice for Mac for a while and is quite dependable until OpenOffice itself gets sorted properly.
I don't do screenshots, gimp, or tomboy really, so can't help with those.
... and I never thought I'd hear myself be

GIMP

[DisownedSky]

I run the GIMP under Leopard. All you need is X11, which you need to run most other Unix apps anyway, and is a breeze to install. For example, I run XEphem a fair bit using X11 under Leopard, and it works well.

There are a number of Unix package managers for OX X, BTW. Fink is pretty good.

Re!

[pudge]

- virtual desktops by default. I know of Spaces (it's in the dock, clicking on it invites one to set it up), will check that out.

I used Spaces for awhile. It kinds sucks IMO. Nice at first, but then you run into annoyances. Maybe they've cleaned some up since I stopped using (I think in 10.5.1).

- a show-desktop button. When I first encountered such a thing, I wondered why anyone would use it, thought it was a silly idea. Then I got used to it, and now I crave it even on OS X.

Press F11 (or maybe Fn-F11).

- Tomboy notes or equivalent. Maybe there *is* a good equivalent in here ... for now, Stickies will do. The searchability and linkability of Tomboy's notes has really gotten addictive, though.

I use (payware) Yojimbo from Bare Bones.