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by James Britt.
Original Post: So I bought a Mac ...
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A Mac Mini, actually. For occasional development work.
Many things are quite nice and well done. Others, annoying. It looks very nice, but I was amazed that my choice of simple desktop background colors was limited to one of 8 shades of melancholy. There’s a difference between subdued and drab, and while I would really want a gradient background (as I have on my Kubuntu laptop), even a solid shade of a vibrant rust or golden green would be nice.
Likewise for “spaces”, the Mac version of multiple desktops. KDE3 lets me give each a unique color—makes it easy for me to place myself. Puzzling that the Mac, which seems to otherwise excel in UI goodness, falls down here. And one more “why isn’t a Mac more like <foo>” complaint: To resize a window you have to use the One True Corner. You can’t (as far as I can see) simply grab any edge or corner and adjust freely. Makes for more work.
When I switched from XP to Kubuntu a few years ago, I had a similar experience. I liked XP as a general OS, and there were a number of apps that did not have suitable counterparts in Linuxistan, but one BSOD too many made me decide that, being a developer, I needed the stability more than the pleasantries. I had been using Linux via VMware for a while so it wasn’t a sudden radical leap, but making it my daily OS (with KDE3 as the desktop manager) was jarring.
I first tried the stock Ubuntu install, which uses Gnome, but I was not able to tweak the UI as I liked. I could not, for example, give each desktop a unique background, and the menu system seemed hard to customize. KDE was more to my liking, but it, too, had a fair share of quirks.
I think KDE3 gives you Dolphin as the default file manger. Dolphin seemed heavy on white space and icons and weak on more useful information, and I ended up using Konqueror instead since it seemed to have more of the better features of the XP file manager. While spending time getting things “just so” I was thinking about the little things that worked or didn’t. Changing your OS + desktop manager seemed to entail swapping annoyances more than a clear move to better or worse. What was annoying depended on what you were used to. I figured someone moving from KDE to XP would be finding the same number of nits to pick.
Over time I just got used to how things worked. I also found things that were so much better on KDE. For example, to move a window, you hold Alt and click anywhere, and drag. Very nice. I sometimes do this on my Vista box with amusing effects. (I tried this on my Mac; no luck.)
I need now to get acquainted with various Mac tools and keyboard shortcuts. I imagine that over time I’ll stop gnashing my teeth over funky Mac UI decisions, get used to the Mac Way, and be enjoying the good parts while ignoring the bad.
I have Synergy running, so I can use the Kubuntu laptop as my base and switch over to the Mac or the Vista boxen as needed. Very handy. Now I just need to install all those extra dev things …
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