[Wylug-discuss] *nix on G4 Mac Mini

[Nigel Metheringham]

On 31 Oct 2007, at 15:06, Dave Fisher wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 01:35:24PM +0000, Aaron Crane wrote:
>> 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.

> 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.

Package management (specifically updates) is the worst thing about OS X
(and its pretty much the same on Windows). Its sort of ironic that the
single source controlled OSes have these problems, whereas the anarchic
Linux world has package management (and especially updates) mostly fixed
- although if you want to use commercial apps you are then into a world
of pain.

I'm using OS X as my main system now - and oddly there appears to be a
guerilla incursion of Mac systems into the technical workers where I
work. I suspect this is a case of having to live within a mostly
Microsoft ecosystem and to my mind Linux has been moving in the wrong
direction on this for a few years - for example Evolution used to be a
decent mail client with groupware capabilities and the ability to work
against exchange. Unfortunately in the 2 years up until I jumped ship it
had been becoming worse with each iteration until it was no longer a
capable IMAP mail client.

I've made a conscious decision to work within the Mac way of doing
things as far as possible, rather than using it as a standard Unix
platform (although with reliably working suspend on the laptop unlike
with linux in a post-APM world). I'm pretty happy with how thats gone
over the last year.

It does help that I've been working with what is to my mind the nicest
text editor I have discovered (TextMate) - that makes up for a multitude
of problems.

> 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

Never had problems with Virtue Desktops. Getting used to Leopard Spaces
instead - that does have a few bugs but then I know I'm an early
adopter.

The stuff that Apple has basically introduced to the desktop - ie
ubiquitous search (Spotlight) and decent backup (Time Machine) has
worked well - search is now very good without the horrid side effects I
previously saw with Beagle etc. Time Machine is interesting - at one
level it is horribly dumb, but given their target market ("80% of users
have thought about backup, 26% have backed up, 4% backup regularly" -
scary figures) building a configuration free if somewhat dumb with an
over-flashy interface backup system is a nice move. Technically the idea
of hard-linking directories is really scary.

The scariest thing has been finding that MS Word really is as poor a
system as I suspected it to be.

     Nigel.

--
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]