Mac dosage

[vakkotaur]

I tried the Mac laptop today and didn't get very far. I did get Opera installed and started fiddling with it and found that everything that had been a single key action (or one key and a click) was now a two-key (or two-key and click) action. There was a two-key and click that still is two-key and click, but the keys are now awkward, even for a laptop. Unfortunately while that might be a Mac standard, it's non-standard for, well, everything else. And when I was lucky the two keys could be reached by one hand without contortions. I wasn't lucky very often and gave up quickly. My wrist wasn't hurting, yet, but the weird precursor feeling was starting in.

I think that's a less than subtle hint that I should look at the new Wolvix or maybe Xubuntu.

Comments

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

If the laptop had the cycles to spare, then I might. As it is, XFCE is the most I think it can reasonably take for a Desktop Environment. I've been considering dropping from XFCE to IceWM for the laptop, which would lose a few nice things admittedly, but would result in snappier performance.

On the desktop I've been reasonbly impressed with PCLinuxOS. Maybe that's because I started with Mandrake, went to Fedora, and now am back at a Mandriva derivative. Almost everything works without my having to fiddle with it. I know {X,K}ubuntu makes the same claim, but I found I had to make a lot more changes to get to where I liked it. Maybe that's changed. I almost put Kubuntu on the desktop machine, but PCLOS won partly from simply not having all the annoying animations of KDE left on by default. Still, at least with any KDE (or XFCE, or IceWM), I can make the adjustments.

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... have you considered Enlightenment? e17 has admittedly been hovering in "beta" or something like it for years, but is actually pretty nice and usable.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I've tried it from time to time, when it was the default for some distribution I was checking out, and found it irritated me as it was always trying too hard to be "kewl" rather than getting out of my way and simply being usable. I have never been able to think of Enlightenment as light at all. I neither need nor want a bunch of gimmicks cluttering up my screen. If that's not Enlightenment doing that, I have yet to see it nice, plain, and actually usable.

Fluxbox, on the other hand, goes a bit too far into being spartan. IceWM seems to strike a good balance. There are certainly things I might like to have that are not there, but when a 90 MHz original Pentium becomes snappy or at least close, I get impressed. The laptop is 266 MHz, I think, fwiw.

The one issue that so far is in favor of the Mac is WPA. NO linux distribution I've tried (including *buntu) has let me simply enter the information for the network and simply start using it. Annoyingly, some have even said to get wireless working, first I need to download something... see a problem? Sure, most places (hotels) don't use WPA, but at home the wireless network uses WPA. WPA has been around for a few years. It shouldn't be this hard to get it working.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

This is apparently how to get WPA/WPA2 working under Ubuntu (perhaps Edgy or Feisty? The post is from June 2006).

NO THANK YOU!

I only hope it's not this hairy under Gibbon.