Thu, 04 Feb 2010

OS X Fails to Please

I’ve been using Apple laptops for a number of years in order to have access to some specific capabilities, but I have always found it hard to come to terms with the limited functionality of OS X as a work environment. Nevertheless, when I acquired my MacBook Pro recently, I decided to just go with the flow and learn to use Snow Leopard as it was meant to be used. And that has worked out quite well for the purposes that I normally use the MacBook for—email, IRC and web browsing while on the road.

But I recently had a reason to use it for my normal work stuff. I had needed to visit a Mac retailer for some minor item and stopped to look at the 27-inch iMac, where I became entranced by the display and, to a lesser extent, by the neat overall package.

This led to thoughts of possibly buying one of these things, which in turn led to thoughts of discomfort with OS X.

So I decided to try out OS X on a decent-sized display instead of the teensy thing on the 13-inch MacBook. I hooked the MacBook up to a 24-inch display to see how things might work. This brought me into contact with Apple Fail Number 1—the ability to get stuff onto the display you want it on is a black art and in some cases it’s only possible to start an application, see where it lands and then drag it to the desired display. That was hugely unimpressive, but wasn’t the point of the exercise, so I tried to ignore it while doing my testing.

I believe I succeeded in applying my attention to the factors that would be relevant with a single large display running OS X. To give it a fair go, I used this setup for three days as my desktop environment. But that was as much as I could stomach. Gnome—whether under FreeBSD, or OpenSolaris, or Linux—is just so much better to work with than OS X that it’s really not even a contest.

The upside of this is that I’ve saved $3k that I had put aside for the iMac which I could now partly apply to the bicycle that I’ve been thinking about buying as part of my fitness program. Another upside is that I won’t be constantly chafing against all the annoying little restrictions that Apple impose on their customers. So, although I will slightly regret the decision not to add something shiny to my desk, I think I’m probably more pleased than sad.

Posted at: 17:41

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