So I bought a Mac ...
March 27th, 2009
A Mac Mini, actually. For occasional development work.
Many things are quite nice and well done. Others, annoying. It looks very nice, but I was amazed that my choice of simple desktop background colors was limited to one of 8 shades of melancholy. There’s a difference between subdued and drab, and while I would really want a gradient background (as I have on my Kubuntu laptop), even a solid shade of a vibrant rust or golden green would be nice.
Likewise for “spaces”, the Mac version of multiple desktops. KDE3 lets me give each a unique color—makes it easy for me to place myself. Puzzling that the Mac, which seems to otherwise excel in UI goodness, falls down here. And one more “why isn’t a Mac more like
When I switched from XP to Kubuntu a few years ago, I had a similar experience. I liked XP as a general OS, and there were a number of apps that did not have suitable counterparts in Linuxistan, but one BSOD too many made me decide that, being a developer, I needed the stability more than the pleasantries. I had been using Linux via VMware for a while so it wasn’t a sudden radical leap, but making it my daily OS (with KDE3 as the desktop manager) was jarring.
I first tried the stock Ubuntu install, which uses Gnome, but I was not able to tweak the UI as I liked. I could not, for example, give each desktop a unique background, and the menu system seemed hard to customize. KDE was more to my liking, but it, too, had a fair share of quirks.
I think KDE3 gives you Dolphin as the default file manger. Dolphin seemed heavy on white space and icons and weak on more useful information, and I ended up using Konqueror instead since it seemed to have more of the better features of the XP file manager. While spending time getting things “just so” I was thinking about the little things that worked or didn’t. Changing your OS + desktop manager seemed to entail swapping annoyances more than a clear move to better or worse. What was annoying depended on what you were used to. I figured someone moving from KDE to XP would be finding the same number of nits to pick.
Over time I just got used to how things worked. I also found things that were so much better on KDE. For example, to move a window, you hold Alt and click anywhere, and drag. Very nice. I sometimes do this on my Vista box with amusing effects. (I tried this on my Mac; no luck.)
I need now to get acquainted with various Mac tools and keyboard shortcuts. I imagine that over time I’ll stop gnashing my teeth over funky Mac UI decisions, get used to the Mac Way, and be enjoying the good parts while ignoring the bad.
I have Synergy running, so I can use the Kubuntu laptop as my base and switch over to the Mac or the Vista boxen as needed. Very handy. Now I just need to install all those extra dev things …
4 Responses to “So I bought a Mac ...”
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March 27th, 2009 at 10:43 PM
Both of the problems you have mentioned in the first paragraphs of your post can be solved:
http://hyperspacesapp.com/ http://coderage-software.com/zooom/
Hope this helps!
Maik
March 27th, 2009 at 11:03 PM
Maik: Thanks for the pointers. Sadly, neither of those apps is free, so I have to decide if I want to pay for something that should Just Work (weighing the cost of not having those features).
March 28th, 2009 at 03:40 AM
I bought a Mac a little over a year ago since I was completely ignorant of the platform. It was a difficult struggle at first. I was determined to work through the initial pains to give it a fair shake. The result was I began to like it.
The keys were actually the hardest part for me. Command instead of Control everywhere. Window management wasn’t at all for some reason. Neither was spaces. I don’t use it, even though I used it on Linux all of the time. There are different UI paradigms in place on the Mac. Leaving apps always running. Hiding apps (command-H) instead of minimizing. That’s why I tend to not use spaces.
I think everyone on the Linux side should spend time on a Mac and give it a reasonable shot, not approach it with the viewpoint that it doesn’t have the exact thing they’re used to. It’ll make Linux a better platform because they can pull out the best of the Mac.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:51 PM
I use Linux as my daily operating system, and got a Mac Mini for Christmas (same reason as you, development stuff).
I’m very very picky about GUI software. I hate it when I have to install a million different dependencies just to get one thing to work. That’s why I switched from Kubuntu to Zenwalk Core. apt was getting on my nerves. (apt-get nerves?) netpkg is so much better, and lets me opt out of installing dependencies if I want. It also doesn’t form a suicide pact with the rest of my computer and commit seppuku if something goes wrong.
I also hate it when distro makers try to soften this effect by already having all that shit preinstalled. I don’t want my distro to come with all this useless crap that I’m never going to use or need.
That said, I am enjoying my Mac, because it comes with everything I need to have a fair test environment if #{client} wants #{app} compiled for OS X. Also, it’s far easier to do UI scripting on OS X, so I wrote a script that will actually go to school for me so I don’t have to wake up at 10:30 am just to listen to weekly announcements.
Besides that, I do almost everything on my Linux box. It’s still my main computer, and it’s where I take care of real business.
Safari is my second favorite browser, behind Dillo, so I use the Mac for general web browsing when it’s practical.