Is OS X ready for the desktop?

[vakkotaur]

I was ready to answer that with an emphatic NO! yesterday. It was getting physically painful to use the laptop's trackpad and though that's hardly an OS X issue, being hardware, the solution of using an external pointer was at first almost as bad. The default mouse acceleration curve is messed up so that the pointer either moves at warp speed and is barely if at all controllable, or it is stuck in molasses slow. That slow might be great for getting to exact pixel in an image editor, but it's lousy for everything else. Fortunately the Logitech tool bypassed that acceleration curve issue.

The color thing was (and still is) an irritant. Today I finally managed to find and (mostly) successfully modify a skin for Opera to get my soothing gray backgrounds back. Alas, the address/URL field is still white and I'm not sure I can change that. I've posted a question regarding that on the Opera forum. It seems a strange omission. It's not an issue on KDE, but then KDE lets me set the system colors to my liking.

Opera now works about how I expect, though it did take the different trackball and I'll need to use what to me are unusual button presses (I am that used to third button emulation in X now) and changing both (Mac) Opera and OS X so that F5 and F12 do what I expect them to do.

For IM I now have Adium at least partly set up. I have the AIM part going. I haven't tried to get the Yahoo, Google, or LJ messaging going yet. I have a tolerable color scheme, though I can see further changes ahead. Shading and highlights might be "in" but I'd love to kick those out and have nice, crisp flat colors. ADDENDUM: I also would like to have some of the events not have any notification. No sounds, no bounce, no pop-up, just quietly do nothing. Amazingly, there seems to be no such option.

For IRC, Colloquy seems pretty good. The colors have been made sane, and Jay found how to solve the deal-breaker issue: If I have to use "/me" instead of "/a" (I know, nonstandard, but it's how I do it, so there) it's not an IRC client I'll use very long. It would be nice to lose the weird "justification" and use a full line and keep <nicks> in angle brackets. It would also be nice to have actions (where /a came from) be in a different color than "spoken" text. Nits? Perhaps, but I know what I really want. ADDENDUM: The in-program use of "chat room" instead of "channel" is another nit, and one that makes me wish x-chat aqua was a real option. I understand the developer's reasoning, but I vehemently disagree with it. It's IRC. It's a channel, dammit.

iTerm, at least, seems to be right as it is. The only issue I've had with it wasn't iTerm's fault. It was just how OS X (and MacOS before it) does things. It's going to be some time before I'm used to having the program controls away from the program and up at the top edge of the screen. I understand the consistency thing, but oy, that makes for an awful lot of (time consuming) "mousing around" to do simple things.

Smultron (text editor) is also pretty good once the colors are made sane. Again the only real issues I had it were not the editor itself but OS X.

yakko mentioned Xee for an image viewer and it seems pretty good. I still haven't settled on an image editor. I might to have to wait for a new version of GIMP and/or for Apple to fix its X11 implementation. I did see that the absolute latest version of GIMP was available - for a price. Typical Macintosh. ADDENDUM: With the X11 fix, GIMP no longer crashes as soon as I try to make it actually do something.

Granted, this is a new (to me) OS, so new programs and all the time spent whacking things into (rough) shape the first time is probably to be expected. I haven't had to do that in some time. For the last few years, I simply copied config files and was done. That's very easy to get used to. I now have a system I consider usable. Not ideal, but usable.

So, is OS X ready for the desktop? I am not sure if I can answer that with "Almost, it just needs a system color configuration tool that really is one and not something that only changes the trim between two nearly identical choices." or "Yes, but you need to use third-party applications wherever you can and whack things into shape." I cannot answer with an unreserved and emphatic "yes" as I spent far too much time getting things tolerable and no time really getting anything done. And getting out of the way and letting people get things done is supposedly OS X's claim to fame.

I used to wonder why anyone would take recent Apple hardware and put Linux or BSD on it. Now I know why: to have control and familiarity.

Comments

[yakko.livejournal.com]

How does iTerm perform on the G4 you have? Last time I tried it (which was a long time ago, I'll admit), iTerm was SLOW on the PowerPC. It was so slow on my 1.42GHz G4 that I went to using gnome-terminal on there. I should try again. It works great on the Intel Macs.

As for system color configuration, Apple have known about this for years and years, but still haven't provided this functionality. They really need to listen to their customers on this one.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I don't notice any speed problem with iTerm on the G4.

[invader-tak-1.livejournal.com]

The key here is the word "familiarity" thats like the windows boys who call OS X unusable cause its not "the same as Windows" as if Windows had the default on the GUI. Most Linux people seem to think the same way. KDE seems hellbent on recreating the Windows "experience". One of the reasons I run Gnome. Personally I'm happy to FORGET Windows. How hard is to learn a few new shortcuts and controls?

Seriously, You have put up with years of Linux issues, home built/non existent drivers, and weird hardware support issues and you are trashing on OSX for some color choices and not having the same keyboard shortcuts? Come on.

Tolerable to you apparently means "the same as I'm used to". After 13 years of Windows and two years of mixed windows Linux. I found Tiger usable out of the box. Probably because I didn't expect it to be the same down to the keyboard shortcuts. You are like someone who buys a sports sedan then gets mad when he has to modify like crazy it if he wants to pull tree stumps with with it, cursing the company all the way for not making it like his last stump puller.

Its not the same thing and a lot of us are very happy about that. :)

What makes one platforms way the "right" way eludes me. I'd be leery of the third party appearance tools though. The people who ran "Ape" http://unsanity.com/haxies/ape/ got their setup choices, they were also the only people who couldn't get Leopard to install right. You could always run Tiger and run APE if you are really that desperate. considering how your machine specs it might be better anyway. I don't know.

And lastly, a G4 laptop is so dated you still don't get a right-click/scroll touchpad. The touchpad was the only thing I didn't care for in my G4 Powerbook. I do NOT miss cntrl-click. Too bad Linux development for the PPC cpu is slowly winding down, maybe YOU would better off running it.

I think some PPC distros are still out there.

I'm sorry you are unhappy, I find it flexible, reliable and easy to use, and I'm not one of the zealots, defending it just to defend it. Like the poor sods who actually had do defend OS 9. I've only been using it a year, and I'd feel crippled going back to full time Linux, and I'd give up computing before I would ever, ever go back to relying on Windows.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

...and you are trashing on OSX for some color choices and not having the same keyboard shortcuts?

DAMN RIGHT I AM! at least for the color-scheme bondage. The buttons it actually lets me change.

This not a Windows thing or a KDE thing. I can change the UI to my liking (where MY EYES DON'T HURT!) in CDE, in XFCE, in Icewm... and so on. This isn't a huge technical issue and it's not something hard to solve. Even having a text config file to hand-edit would be a step up. THAT'S why I have to go to third party applications: So my eyes don't hurt.

I did give some consideration to Slackintosh or such, but I expect jmaynard would have quashed that one. As for the G4, it was one of the three available non-ideal choices. I went with the G4 as then I wouldn't have one technical issue: WPA. But I also found myself musing that when I was fighting Linux problems, at least I was fight actual technical issues and not a wannabe interior decorator.

I do not feel that I am asking much. This isn't trying to pull stumps with, say, a Corvette. This is expecting to be able to turn the lights on and off.

OS X stable? Yes.
Reliable? Yes.
Easy to use? At least as easy if not more so than other choices.
Flexible? No. It failed a really basic test there.