Geeking Out

Crisis of faith

Recently I made the somewhat unprecedented move of consolidating everything I do onto one computer — my late-2003 15″ PowerBook G4. I was getting tired of things going out of sync, of having to switch between various computers to find what I needed, of having my music in one place and my photos in another and absolutely nothing on my work computer. I’ll talk about my thoughts on consolidation, and some of the cool new utilities I’m now using, at a later time. Right now, I’m thinking about an unintended side effect of the move, which is my complete loss of confidence in Mac OS X.

In short, some of the more fatal flaws of OS X have been masked to me up until now because by jumping between various Mac and Linux computers, I would never leave applications open on the Mac for long periods of time and wouldn’t necessarily use the Mac for some activities. Now I’m running a bunch of different programs all the time on several virtual desktop screens, and the amount of instability I’m experiencing is quite unacceptable. Programs are *constantly* crashing — and these are Apple programs, not third party ones — and occasionally my entire machine becomes unresponsive for brief periods or, when resuming from sleep, just doesn’t even come back up for at least thirty seconds.

What I most love about the Mac is how everything is so nicely integrated into a good UI with global features that make me more productive. But in order to get a lot of this integration, one must use the Apple-provided apps.

Rui Carmo over at The Tao of Mac really nails it with his article Is Mac OS X Becoming Crufty?, which covers most of the issues I’ve been having with Tiger. What I most love about the Mac is how everything is so nicely integrated into a good UI with global features that make me more productive. My chat client and my mail client tie into my address book. All of my passwords for everything are stored securely in my Keychain. Spotlight search lets me find anything anywhere. But in order to get a lot of this integration, or simply because there are no viable market alternatives (as they have been driven out of business by Apple), one must use the Apple-provided apps. iPhoto, which used to stop working after you added more than a few hundred photos, has at last received a much-needed update that causes it to suck less. But Safari gets angry when you have too many windows open and starts behaving strangely. Apple Mail is just an abomination, and Spotlight’s search behavior, not to mention its UI, leaves a lot to be desired.

If I can get a cute little laptop with twice the battery life and twice the power at half the price, and run Ubuntu on it, and have a rock-solid experience, even if its not quite as shiny, maybe there is something to be said for that.

Paul has been leaning on me heavily to ditch the Mac platform with all of its flaws and move over to Linux full time, as that platform (and Ubuntu in particular), is really starting to reach some sort of desktop maturity, finally. On the one hand I really don’t want to leave behind some of the great apps and utilities I use on the Mac, and I really want the slick integration of everything that I theoretically get on the Mac. On the other hand, if I can get a cute little laptop with twice the battery life and twice the power at half the price, and run Ubuntu on it, and have a rock-solid experience, even if its not quite as shiny, maybe there is something to be said for that. My first computer was a Macintosh II. I’ve been a loyal Mac user for *years*. But I’m worried I might be reaching the end of my rope, and it might be time for a change.

Thoughts? Advice? Similar experiences?

5 replies on “Crisis of faith”

  1. My first computer was a 286 IBM Clone. My second was Mac 512k. Third a 486. I haven’t really been loyal ever. I got an iMac for Final Cut Pro, as that one application for me warranted another machine and a new OS. I have a Mac Mini too, for a Media Center PC.

    Things Macs are better than linux for:
    Copying DVD Movies.
    Burning DVD Movies from Video files via iDVD or DVD Studio
    Garageband is neat too
    Frontrow is kind of cool.
    The DVD Player works like a MCE and has a cool remote.

    That’s all I can think of. The Mac Mini I sort of regret getting now, but I think though a Linux Media Center PC would be better for me, no visitors to my house would be able to figure it out unless I spent some time setting it up for simple operation.

    The very first day I got the iMac I thought, my god this thing is slow. So I put 2 gigs of ram into it. It was still slow. iDVD crashed all the time. My airport card disappeared.

    Mac OS X is bloated (gnome is snappy). The DVD player won’t let you skip over stuff you should be able to, and doesn’t work right with a dual head configuration. And the quicktime player is an abomination. And it costs $15 to do anything.

    Linux however, sucks too. Editing text files is the barbaric way to configure stuff when shit goes wrong, and 100% of the time, shit goes wrong. I haven’t been able to successfully setup a system without editing at least one text file. It’s very close. But there’s always one gidget or gizmo that requires adding one line to a startup script or an X configuration. The boot time is atrocious. I just stopped playing video games since there aren’t really any.

    So in the end, either way, you’re screwed. Macs suck. Linux Sucks. They suck differently. Linux has the following pluses: It sucks much more cheaply, and gives you a warm fuzzy feeling in your soul while it sucks. While Macs are expensive suckage and saps your soul of moral standing. But they have style.

    Have no illusions, if you switch to linux you will be pissed off at it’s suckage. But you’re always going to be pissed off at suckage because computers suck.

  2. You finally get me to switch and now you decide you’re going to get a shiny Gateway?!? 🙂

  3. As someone who uses Ubuntu as his primary OS, I recomend against it. Not because of any inherent flaw in Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an amazing work, but there are things that are just, well, bothersome about it.

    *All the time, you’ll find yourself dragging that weird generic I’m dragging something thing. Worse, you can’t really drag and drop in Gnome like you can in OS X which makes the fact that it always wants to do that hugely annoying.

    *Media sucks. Flash player works when you install it from the unsupportted repos, but forget the nice in-browser viewing experience of .mov files and such. MP3 and DVD aren’t hard to set up from the unsupportted repos. You’re familiar with Rhythmbox (and it hasn’t improved much if at all).

    *Linux sucks power on my laptop. The fan is on constantly, it’s hot, etc. I’m always told that Linux is only 6 months away from having good laptop power management – this is since the first summer we worked together. I haven’t been able to test the latest alphas of the upcoming release because my laptop is gone right now (hopefully I’ll be replacing it with an iBook or MacBook) so it might finally have gotten nice.

    *Speaking of HW, forget a nice trackpad experience – I’ve messed with the xorg.conf tons and never gotten a nice movement like in Windows or Mac (even using configs posted which were supposed to be excellent – and it’s a standard synaptics).

    *It’s slow. It doesn’t win a speed race against Windows. Now, it does multi-task much better than Windows (think menus not locking while launching another app) which more than makes up for it since that’s the speed that really counts, but browsing with Firefox is a little sluggish – yes, even when comparing it to Safari. It feels heavier.

    As someone who has used Linux before, Ubuntu will feel amazing! The fit and finish on it are so superior. Of course, I get tired of the fact that I can’t view certain movie files, that flash feels flaky, I’m starting to hate Gaim and see that it’s going no-where, same for Firefox although less so, I want my drag and drop, I miss iTunes (you start craving it), you start missing some of the things you take for granted.

    I suggest installing Ubuntu and seeing how it fits you. Maybe people just need change and I’m ready for the Mac platform (well, to return to it after my phase of idiocy). I want my codecs just there, I want Adium, I want a nice display engine that doesn’t feel hacked/unstable/slow (talking about Xgl which has gotten usable, but not Mac OS X good), I just don’t want to have to think about the whole Linux thing.

  4. I swear I always thought drag and drop worked better in Gnome than OS X, I’ll have to investigate.

    I never got media working properly on OS X, I always end up throwing stuff in VLC. It probably works better in Safari, but Quicktime never has the codecs I need. It’s worse in Linux by far though. WMV8 support is the main killer.

    Power support is probably ridiculously crappy on linux. I’ve never really messed with it.

    Trackpad experience… two words, one button. That’s a good enough reason to kill MacBooks for me.

    It’s probably not faster than Windows.. the OS itself is Snappier IMO, but it’s definitely faster than OS X.

    Development on the 1.x branch of Gaim has halted, the development on 2.0 is going at a rapid pace. You still might not like it though. Try Amarok or Banshee for music playing you might like it better. You might want to try epiphany for a browser if you don’t like firefox.

  5. Well, part of what I meant by media were those .mov, .mwa, and whatever realplayer stuff you come across. Also, depending on when you used OS X, it’s a different experience. I remember media being really, really crappy in 10.0 and 10.1 and not amazing in 10.2. 10.3 was really the killer version of OS X in my opinion.

    I’m using the 2.0 branch right now. It’s mostly the same. It was a huge disappointment after the “Will fix everything you ever had a problem with” speech that was made about it. Adium just has the ability to be beautiful and more functional at the same time.

    Maybe I’m just disturbed by the little draggy thing in Gnome – it never seems to do what I want, but maybe I just think it should be different.

    People have very different expectations and experiences with systems. Heck, I probably wouldn’t use linux except for three things: spyware, virii and the fact that Windows seems to grow mold – it slows down exponentially from the moment you install a fresh system and it’s not something like the drive getting fragmented.

    Really, it depends on the person. Ubuntu is available for Mac and so you can try it out and see how it goes. I just know that I prefer using the Macs at Web Tech Services to my Ubuntu desktop.

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