My Mac

I’ve been using a Mac now for a week. This is the first time in my life that I’ve actually used a Mac for anything serious or for an extended period of time. I vowed to give it a chance for at least a couple weeks before I install Ubuntu.

The hardware is exceptional. I have a 17″ MacBook Pro with 4G ram and about 300G disk. The screen is beautiful, the touchpad is the only touchpad I’ve every gotten along with, and surprisingly the chicklet keyboard isn’t as bad as I expected. The aluminum case is a thing of beauty.

I am getting used to it. In fact, I could probably exist in the Mac world OK. That is to say that it is tolerable. Tolerable requires a good shell (that rules Windows out) and a good scripting environment including such things as Python and Perl. Those come bundled on a Mac. Tolerable also requires something like Spaces (something that Linux/Unix has had since the early 90s). While Windows doesn’t come bundled with something like Spaces, I know that there are add-ons that can do something similar. Tolerable requires easy access to tools like ssh, ftp, sshfs, etc. While that doesn’t quite rule Windows out, most of the Windows based tools that provide that functionality are sub-par and barely tolerable.

So yes, I can get along on a Mac. That does not mean it’s ideal.

I have 3 chief complaints with Mac OS. One, easy access to open-source software is poor. With Ubuntu almost any open-source package can be installed with a few clicks. Fink and it’s clones are sub-par. Two, it is relatively uncustomizable. That is to say I can’t set short-cut keys easily to do the things I want them to do; I can’t make the finder open files with a single click instead of a double; I can’t make the window focus follow the mouse without clicking (without buying a $15 add-on that still doesn’t work the way I want it to), etc.

And now for the biggest complaint, three, the basic premise of the UI is a throwback to the 80s. In the 80s desktop computers were a single-tasking deal. You could only use one application at a time. So at that point in time it made sense for Apple to put the application menu bar at the very top of the screen unattached to the application windows itself. That simply doesn’t make any sense anymore and it causes problems when you want to have things like focus follows mouse. Come on Apple, even Microsoft figured that one out.

So yes, I will give this Mac OS thing another week to see if I can somehow tolerate this broken UI, but I’ve already downloaded the latest Ubuntu in anticipation of my install next week. Supposedly this thing came with bootcamp…

First Day

Today is my first day at the Naples Daily News. It’s 88° here today.