Two months on OSX
Sep. 17th, 2012 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sparrTwo months ago I wrote that my employer had given me a MacBook and asked me to use only it for work matters. This posed a bit of a hassle because I have to do work when I am out of the office, and I don't want to carry two laptops with me everywhere, or set up VPNs and passwords and such on two or three different computers. Some friends at work suggested I simply do everything on the work laptop, and I jumped into this idea. Except for dumping some photos to my desktop (a workflow I wasn't up to porting and amount of storage the laptop doesn't have), I have used only OSX 10.7 for the past two months. It has been an interesting and enlightening experience.
First, the Good. I've got a depressingly short list of wholly positive things. OSX suspends, sleeps, wakes, shuts down, and boots significantly faster than what I've used before, by a factor of 2-3 in most cases. The USB ports have current monitoring, so I get an alert if I try to run a high-current device (that should be plugged into power). The keyboard feels nice and is recessed so that setting books on my open laptop doesn't press any keys. The camera and microphone work pretty well.
The Bad. Almost none of my software is handled by package management. This means that either every program needs its own update manager (bleh) or I have to go out on the web and download new versions every so often (bleh more). The selection of external connectors is esoteric and/or proprietary. There's firewire, which I guess is more useful than not, but they give me displayport where I would much rather have VGA or HDMI or DVI (for which there are orders of magnitude more supporting hardware out in the world), and an expresscard slot that I don't expect to ever use, and no SD card slot. The huge speakers surround the keyboard where a number pad would serve much greater utility. That would also stop me from beating my head against the lack of consistency in hotkeys for home and end (both the line and document variants) and pgup and pgdn. If you think I'm crazy and it's always consistent, go open up Terminal or Finder and see what happens when you press FN+arrows or COMMAND+arrows. Throw into that same category the even-less-consistent hotkeys for changing tabs / documents / windows within one application. I'm thankful the OS at least let me remap alt+tab to change between open windows on the current Space (kinda, it fails sometimes, no idea why). The keyboard backlight doesn't know to turn off when I'm watching fullscreen video in the dark. Having to do this manually is annoying, and thanks again to the glossy screen (see below) I have to do it or I have bright lines across the bottom of the display.
The Ugly. The screen is glossy. This means that I can't use the computer anywhere that there are bright lights behind me. Half of the possible orientations of me+computer at my desk at work aren't feasible because of this. Every new revision (I upgrade from 10.6 to 10.7 a few days into this experiment and lost 2D spaces organization) of OSX makes big changes. I don't mind that, but they get rid of useful features. Of course, in typical Mac community style, those features are immediately available in a third party application for $10. The selection of software is much less than in Windows or on Linux. It's like the worst of both worlds, leaving me scrambling to try out a dozen shareware/demoware programs when I already know of good options for both other major OSes. One diamond in that rough is that I discovered SublimeText, which is cross platform and amazing.
I could have mentioned how how fast the machine is, but that's not relevant because ANY computer they bought me for $1500 would be refreshingly brisk after using a $500 desktop for three years, and I know that a non-Mac would be faster for the same price.
Also, this write-up would have been VERY different if I had been coming from Windows. Sure, homebrew and macports are a lot more awesome than any package management that Windows has, but they are weak and old hat to someone coming from Linux. Spaces and Expose (or Mission Control) are neat, but again are poor substitutes for my favored alternatives. Having a Unix-like back end means I can compile software and have a sensible powerful command line, but stupid little things like the case insensitive file system (and software that breaks if you change that option, like Adobe Reader!) ruin that sometimes. Window and desktop management is so much better on OSX than Windows, but again pales in comparison to what I've grown accustomed to. Where is my "keep this window on top" or "display this window on every Space" or "snap windows to each other or the edge of the screen when I'm dragging or resizing them"? Why aren't there command line binaries on the path for installed applications? SublimeText was nice enough to put its subl script on the path, but I've got no way to launch a video player or document editor or web browser when I'm reorganizing files from the command line (where I have tools like "rename" and inline scripting, so I am apt to spend more time there for complex reorganizational tasks).
Finally, if I still felt comfortable pirating software wholesale, I'd probably also have enjoyed OSX more. 90% of the people who I know that use OSX daily do so to use Very Expensive Proprietary Software of various sorts (music, design, graphics, etc). 50-75% of those people don't pay for that software. I don't hold that against them, but it's something I've decided to do less.
Anyway, what this all boils down to is that I can't keep using OSX exclusively. It's missing too many features that make my computing life easier, and has too many anti-features that slow me down. If I had never discovered Linux, I'd have jumped ship from Windows to OSX years ago, probably on a hackintosh to avoid paying the hardware markup. As it is, I'll be going back to Linux for my daily computing. I MIGHT keep an OSX partition on the laptop so that I can do firmware upgrades, but that's about all.
First, the Good. I've got a depressingly short list of wholly positive things. OSX suspends, sleeps, wakes, shuts down, and boots significantly faster than what I've used before, by a factor of 2-3 in most cases. The USB ports have current monitoring, so I get an alert if I try to run a high-current device (that should be plugged into power). The keyboard feels nice and is recessed so that setting books on my open laptop doesn't press any keys. The camera and microphone work pretty well.
The Bad. Almost none of my software is handled by package management. This means that either every program needs its own update manager (bleh) or I have to go out on the web and download new versions every so often (bleh more). The selection of external connectors is esoteric and/or proprietary. There's firewire, which I guess is more useful than not, but they give me displayport where I would much rather have VGA or HDMI or DVI (for which there are orders of magnitude more supporting hardware out in the world), and an expresscard slot that I don't expect to ever use, and no SD card slot. The huge speakers surround the keyboard where a number pad would serve much greater utility. That would also stop me from beating my head against the lack of consistency in hotkeys for home and end (both the line and document variants) and pgup and pgdn. If you think I'm crazy and it's always consistent, go open up Terminal or Finder and see what happens when you press FN+arrows or COMMAND+arrows. Throw into that same category the even-less-consistent hotkeys for changing tabs / documents / windows within one application. I'm thankful the OS at least let me remap alt+tab to change between open windows on the current Space (kinda, it fails sometimes, no idea why). The keyboard backlight doesn't know to turn off when I'm watching fullscreen video in the dark. Having to do this manually is annoying, and thanks again to the glossy screen (see below) I have to do it or I have bright lines across the bottom of the display.
The Ugly. The screen is glossy. This means that I can't use the computer anywhere that there are bright lights behind me. Half of the possible orientations of me+computer at my desk at work aren't feasible because of this. Every new revision (I upgrade from 10.6 to 10.7 a few days into this experiment and lost 2D spaces organization) of OSX makes big changes. I don't mind that, but they get rid of useful features. Of course, in typical Mac community style, those features are immediately available in a third party application for $10. The selection of software is much less than in Windows or on Linux. It's like the worst of both worlds, leaving me scrambling to try out a dozen shareware/demoware programs when I already know of good options for both other major OSes. One diamond in that rough is that I discovered SublimeText, which is cross platform and amazing.
I could have mentioned how how fast the machine is, but that's not relevant because ANY computer they bought me for $1500 would be refreshingly brisk after using a $500 desktop for three years, and I know that a non-Mac would be faster for the same price.
Also, this write-up would have been VERY different if I had been coming from Windows. Sure, homebrew and macports are a lot more awesome than any package management that Windows has, but they are weak and old hat to someone coming from Linux. Spaces and Expose (or Mission Control) are neat, but again are poor substitutes for my favored alternatives. Having a Unix-like back end means I can compile software and have a sensible powerful command line, but stupid little things like the case insensitive file system (and software that breaks if you change that option, like Adobe Reader!) ruin that sometimes. Window and desktop management is so much better on OSX than Windows, but again pales in comparison to what I've grown accustomed to. Where is my "keep this window on top" or "display this window on every Space" or "snap windows to each other or the edge of the screen when I'm dragging or resizing them"? Why aren't there command line binaries on the path for installed applications? SublimeText was nice enough to put its subl script on the path, but I've got no way to launch a video player or document editor or web browser when I'm reorganizing files from the command line (where I have tools like "rename" and inline scripting, so I am apt to spend more time there for complex reorganizational tasks).
Finally, if I still felt comfortable pirating software wholesale, I'd probably also have enjoyed OSX more. 90% of the people who I know that use OSX daily do so to use Very Expensive Proprietary Software of various sorts (music, design, graphics, etc). 50-75% of those people don't pay for that software. I don't hold that against them, but it's something I've decided to do less.
Anyway, what this all boils down to is that I can't keep using OSX exclusively. It's missing too many features that make my computing life easier, and has too many anti-features that slow me down. If I had never discovered Linux, I'd have jumped ship from Windows to OSX years ago, probably on a hackintosh to avoid paying the hardware markup. As it is, I'll be going back to Linux for my daily computing. I MIGHT keep an OSX partition on the laptop so that I can do firmware upgrades, but that's about all.