On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 01:35:24PM +0000, Aaron Crane wrote:
> Peter Nix writes:
> > If you stick with macos as a base system you can add Fink
> > http://www.finkproject.org/about.php
>
> I used a Mac as my main machine for about a year. One of the things
> that made me go back to Linux on the desktop was the way package
> management works on the Mac.
<big snip>
Thanks for that Aaron,
Your account precisely matched my own (unpleasant) experience of package
management on the Mac ... and hopefully explained the problem to those
who haven't used or mastered apt.
I found the desktop equally frustrating, for the similar reasons, i.e.
most of the things I wanted to do were possible, but rarely in a
consistent/efficient/elegant way. For example:
1. Lousy keyboard mapping and re-mapping
- Utterly necessary
- To utilise fink/ports installed OSS apps, e.g. use a proper
META key and avoid mapping conflicts with OS X defaults.
- Because I have little use of my left hand
- Loads of keys misplaced on a standard UK PC105 keyboard.
- Criminal, given the Mac Mini's USPs
- And a show-stopper for me, because I access the Mac Mini
through a KVM
- Very primitive modifier key re-mapping in Preferences
- I couldn't find any proper documentation on how to produce an
alternative keyboard layout file (although that's not easy on
Xorg either).
2. No virtual desktops by default
The couple of 3rd party VD packages I tried had limited
configurability and bugs that regularly crashed the GUI
3. Lack of accessible/findable Window management bindings required to
comforably drive a GUI from the keyboard (it's possible, but
clunky), e.g.
- Shift focus directly to specific windows, rather than toggling
through lists of apps or their windows
- Move/resize windows
- Toggle maximise/minimize in different directions
- Toggle window raise/lower
None of the above is perfect in Linux either, but it is reasonably
doable with a bit of googling.
Dave