I wonder which version you were running. OS X started off pretty badly at 10.0, improves tremendously for the subsequent 4 releases until 10.4, improves far less but still quite a bit for 10.5. 10.6 is expected to improve only the backend. Anyway, my comments on 10.5:
On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 9:39 AM, Anand Vaidya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I would like to share my experience with Mac vs Linux. I bought a MacBook, ran > OSX for a while , but mostly linux (dual boot). > > After experiencing OSX , I took the first opportunity to jump out of the Mac > bandwagon to a HP laptop recently after less than stellar experience with > Mac and OSX. Here are my complaints: > > - Single mouse button It's not necessarily single button, MacBook can be configured to use hand gesture for right click (in this case hold two fingers, and left click). I agree that I hated the single-button-ness at first, but I grew to like the "two-finger" right click nowadays. And there is the scrolling gesture to mention (and more recently the hand gesture). These are great inventions that have eluded other hardware makers. > > - The ever shifting Menu bar It does? I don't get this one. > > - The laptop was definitely sluggish with OSX (2.2GHz, 2GB, 250GB !) and linux > ran pretty fast on the same machine.. Before 10.4, the speed of OS X was horrible, 10.4 improves the speed quite a bit and 10.5 improves it another notch. There are quite a bit of difference in the comparison, Linux does not has much eye candy; when run with compiz, Linux could run pretty slowly on speedy hardware. I completely agree though that Linux in general runs faster than OS X. I've never had complaints about speed though.. Then again my machine is 3.06G dual-core (and the laptop loaned out to me by my company is 2.4G dual-core). > > - The 5418 atheros driver for Linux was a problem for a long time (only > recently the svn version works fine) > > - Only 2 USB ports and they are so damn close that both can't be used > simultaneously with many non-apple USB devices. It has changed in more recent iteration (at least for MBP, not too sure about MacBook). > > - Complete lack of any (native) support for open formats (ogg, odf etc) Oh yes. Though odf is supported when you install OOo. OOo 3.0 will be natively available for OS X. True that preview could not view odf though. > > - No clean way to get apps (eg: apache, ldap, gnu toolchains, latest JDK etc), > I know fink etc. They have their own problems....(such as missing package > that I need, old versions etc etc) But clean way to install and uninstall. Most software is just drag and drop away to add and remove. That is insanely nice. > > - Nonavailability of free VMware Server (fusion was still in beta then). > Parallels was not suitable for what I do/did then. (iSCSI disks etc) Now Fusion *2.0* is in beta. (: > > - You mean you have pay for updates?? Even MS gives updates free... Erm. Aren't they free? I got 4 consecutives updates (10.5.1, 10.5.2, 10.5.3, and 10.5.4 for free). And they fix faster than MS. If you're talking major version, the upgrade price is still much cheaper than MS and the differences between 2 versions are usually great enough to warrant the money (plus according to some calculation I've read somewhere, the price of all major OS X upgrades that happen between XP and Vista is cheaper than Vista Ultimate--not sure the accuracy though, didn't calculate myself). > > - The proprietary VGA dongle. > > - No clean way to encrypt entire harddisk or atleast partitions ( I always > protect my /home with DM-Crypt , so losing the laptop means only loss of $$ > but not critcial data.) . On Linux it is trivial to get this setup going. 10.5 has FileVault built in. I do have complaints on the Firewall though. But on the plus side, OS X has, built-in, Apache, FTP server, samba support, bluetooth sharing, ssh server, and bonjour. Bonjour still remain the plug and play networking king (of course, we would prefer to be able to configure everything ourselves yah? But for average users, Bonjour is immensely useful). > > - Each and every "made for/by apple" addon has a hefty premium added to it. But the many free software for Apple has great utility values and great UI. Even the paid softwares are usually amazingly good when compared to all those dump shareware for windows. > > But the major complaint I had , apart from the "lack of freedom to do whatever > we wish with our hardware and sofware" was this: > > When OSX is set to mirrored VGA config, an external projector would completely > messup the display on the Mac screen. This experience is in various > departments in NUS, I guess some of the projectors are old. but.... I expect > OSX to "just work" and it didn't. My current laptop with kubuntu works fine > with the same projectors. (And I can tweak xrandr to get exactly the res I > want...) Never had problem with this. I've been doing presentation with my OS X from the old, laupok ADM building to SOC1 and the newest of the new COM1, and it works great. Plus the dual-view is a great, great plus (especially when combined with Keynote presentation, again IMHO the greatest presentation software available right now.) > > Maybe OSX works for some. But not for me. So, I will stay away from iPhone > too, wait for a sufficiently Open phone (android? openmoko?) If the preview is anything to peg my expectation on, I'll have hard time choosing between iPhone and a good Android phone (Android will depend a lot on the hardware; if you have lousy hardware, you can't have too high an expectation, but on iPhone grade hardware, looks like Android gonna shine a lot). Cheers, -- Chris [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
