i for one have never had so many problems with an os as i've had when i finally got a (used) g4 and went to os x (coming from a 9600/350 running 8.6)
(i reformatted the drive when i got the machine and started with 10.3.2, then 10.3.8.)
I'm sorry to hear of these problems. I have been using OS X for at least 3 years and have hardly had any problems.
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for one, i hate the interface. i'm not a fan of the "soft toilet seat look".
text is harder to read on the interfaces and i feel like i'm peering into the mist.
things don't seem as well defined.
I'm not sure what you mean about the "soft toilet seat look," but by "harder to read" you might be talking about font antialiasing. I hated that at first, too, but I have since come to really like it. I expect yoy will too.
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i also get a feeling of things going on behind my back when i install a piece of software - it installs things in places that i'm not sure where it's going. i don't understand the concept of the system and the "home/user folder(/volume?)
they both seem to have a lot of identical directories in them, and when i install a piece of software (i use a lot of music apps) it seems to install plug ins sometimes in the system folder lib, and sometimes in the "home/user" plug in libs.
why?
OS X is a full-blown Unix system. Software installation on a Unix system requires things to be put into specific directories. In this sense, OS X is not as "simple" as OS 9, but it is just as elegant, I think, but in its own way.
Preference and other settings are now stored per-user, not per-system, which is why each user has a "home" directory. Your files go in your home directory, and other users' files go into their respective home directories. There are also system-only files, such as network preferences, and other settings; these go into the system directories.
When you install an application, it might put things into /Library/Application Support (for all users), or into ~/Library/Application Support (for only your use). Often, you can configure where things get installed - look for installation dialogs that ask "Install for all users or just current user?"
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i've also notice there a lot of instances of apps "phoning home" when i launch certain things like stuffit expander. (why does the free version of stuffit expander need to "phone home"?)
(there's a great app called "lil snitch" that tells you more about this..)
Many OS X applications automatically check for new versions. You can usually disable this functionality in the app's preferences.
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i hate trying to navigate to different folders on a volume when i'm trying to move a file in a specific place.
if i have 2 folders in the root level of a drive and i want to move a document from one to the other, the view keeps changing and i have to jump through hoops trying to get one file from one folder to another.
i can't open both folders up in the same window and move the file from one place to the other (like i could in os 9 and other older os') it seems you can't have more than one folder open in a window on the same drive.
(this is productive?)
You can quite certainly have two Finder windows open to the same directory! Just open a second Finder window and point one to the source directory and point the other to the destination directory. Then, a move is as simple as drag-and-drop.
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also, when i'm downloading a file, i can't put it in a specific folder, or navigate to certain folders on a drive.
it can only save to the root level of the drive i select, then i have to go and move it manual to the place where i need it to be. (or is this a netscape thing??)
That might be a Netscape thing. I use Safari, and I download everything right onto my Desktop.
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the last problem i had was opening pdf files. i'd click on the doc, and it would launch adobe acrobat, then acrobat would ask me if i wanted to configure this to be the default app for opening pdf files (i always click Yes) but then the next time i open another pdf i get the same dialog. wtf?
I'm not sure, but I would recommend using OS X's built-in Preview application for viewing PDFs. Whenever I come across a PDF that wants to open Acrobat Reader, I always reset it to open in Preview.
i looked to see if i had 2 instances of acrobat on my drive somewhere and search revealed one in my word processing folder and one in a folder called mac os/contents.
i trashed that instance of the app and then i couldn't open pdf files anymore (even after a restart), so i had to download acrobat and reinstall it. (and i could not seem to navigate/find that "mac os / contents" (folder/volume?) to move that particular acrobat i found back into it.) where the hell did it go and why couldn't i find it again? and why did it show up in the "find" window when i initially did a search on "acrobat"?
Applications on OS X are actually "application bundles." A bundle is a directory ending in .app and containing a bunch of directories and other things necessary to run the application. The .../Contents/Mac OS/Acrobat Reader file that you trashed was the actual application executable, so when you trashed that, you hosed the Acrobat Reader installation.
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every once in a while when i'm moving a slider and scrolling a document and move my mouse off the scroll button, the slider will still move and scroll the document until i click back on that button and it "releases" it.
why?
I haven't seen this behaviour, so I can't explain it.
---OS X, because it is a version of Unix, has file permissions. Unix file permissions are actually quite simple, but to someone new to the OS it might be confusing. Every Unix file has permissions for the file's owner, the file's "group," and everyone else. This is commonly known as User/Group/Other, and each class (User/Group/Other) can be set individually; that is, a file can be readable by everyone on the system, but writable by only the User (file owner). The permissions allowed for these 3 classes (User/Group/Other) are the same, and they are Read, Write, and Execute. These define the access that the User/Group/Other has to the file, whether User/Group/Other can read the file, write to the file, and execute the file (the latter being mostly useful for shell scripts and applications).
i'm also having problems not being able to shut down from the power button on the keyboard anymore.
it asks me if i really want to shut down, i say yes, it seems to shut down, then it restarts or goes into a sleep mode or something. (i've checked all my prefs for this (unchecked "allow power button to put into sleep mode" wherever i've found it, etc.) -- i've also changed the battery and reset my pmu, checked permissions, etc. (i find the disk utility baffling....) what the hell are "permissions"? sometimes it tells me it's fixed things, but the info it gives is so cryptic and meaningless it's useless to me. i have no idea what it just did.
On OS X, somehow the permissions can get corrupted, so you might need to run Disk Utility to repair the permissions of the OS X installation. I recently had to do this when my iMac's DVD-R drive quit mounting video DVDs - it would mount CDs and data DVDs just fine, but no video DVDs would mount, whether I had made them or they were studio discs. I repaired permissions and rebooted, and found that I was able to watch DVDs again. In my case, Disk Utility found a problem with the permissions on the DVD filesystem driver, and repairing those permissions restored my ability to mount video DVDs.
Hope that helps.
Eagle
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