Agylen

I know this is something that is apt to quickly turn into a religious argument. I’m also probably the last to comment on this, as everybody and his sister already did. But this is a slow day, so bear with me.

Russell: “I’ve been using Macs almost exclusively now for about 7 months - since just after I joined Yahoo! and got my PowerBook to go with my mini at home. Now that I’ve been using Macs for a while, I’m wondering if they’re all that special. The hardware is nice, but OS X can be as slow, buggy, non-standard, frustrating and annoying as any other operating system. Also, I don’t really use most of the included apps, so most of what makes OSX so special doesn’t really apply to me.”

Personally, I haven’t had a Windows machine on my desktop for the last six years. So, should I decide to switch back, it would be to Linux. The only thing that really makes Linux a better desktop system when compared to either OSX or Windows, apart from price, is stability. Linux is really solid, OSX is respectable and I can’t really say much about Windows, except that from my occasional usage of it, it still doesn’t seem to be on a par.

It’s true: OSX isn’t perfect, but what is? To me, it’s the best compromise between a nice, usable and intuitive GUI and a solid UNIX foundation. I can have my bash shell, GNU utilities and desktop candy. Well, the Finder sucks, but who cares when you have cp, mv, find, less and the full power of bash scripting at your fingertips? The real killer app of OSX, for us longtime UNIX geeks is the Terminal!

Moreover, I can use OSX for all my software development tasks, mainly using Java (even Java 5 on Tiger) and Eclipse, so it’s not that I’m missing something. I have all the usual collaboration tools (CVS, Subversion, IM, email) at my disposal and most of them are on the web anyway.

I just want to address one specific point made by Russ:

17. What is the friggin’ deal with the .dmg files? The install process is so broken. Unzip .dmg.gz, mount .dmg, copy to Applications, unmount .dmg, delete .dmg, delete dmg.gz. Bleh.

The install process is anything but broken! Double-click on the compressed image (assuming it is compressed: it would be better if compression was applied at the HTTP level and you got an uncompressed file to begin with), double-click on the .dmg file, drop the bundle in the Applications folder and you’re set. What’s the alternative? A GUI installer with a wizard interface that asks you lots of irrelevant questions like where should I install the damned app, which components should be installed and whether it should keep the original version of WMFC32.DLL or overwrite it? Come on!