[Tfug] The Joy of OSX, and the friction coefficient of goose droppings.

[Joe Roberts]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:41 PM, Tim Ottinger <tottinge at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bowie J. Poag wrote:
>>
>> I'm happy to leave desktop Linux in the ditch at this point, where Vista
>> can keep it company. Linux is unbeatable in the server arena, but I think
>> too many missed opportunities have gone by for Linux on the desktop to gain
>> any real traction.
>
> I came back.  There was nothing like apt to make managing your whole system
> easy.

Heard both stories, of people going to OS X, and some coming back.  I
guess I'm in a weird place with Linux on the desktop because I just
don't have any problems with it.  It does what I need it to do from
day to day (the exception being video editing and DVD authoring is
poor, still - you can do it, but it has problems).  That said, I'm
trying to get my wife to move over to a Mac next time we replace her
system because I'm sick of dealing with Windows (Vista, in this case),
which on her present hardware is full of weird quirks (she has this
chronic problem, every few weeks, usually following a video editing
session, where the system will boot and throw up a focus-stealing
error box in an infinite loop.  You close it, it pops back up, which
won't even let you get to the control panel.)

What I wouldn't like about OS X is that, while freeware does exist,
the sense of free software isn't as strong on the platform.  I'm not
very experienced with Apples, but I have an old iMac G3 here I futz
with periodically.  There is an NFS configuration tool which is
crippleware, which strikes me as odd.  I tried configuring NFS shares
manually but it wasn't straight forward and I couldn't make it work
within about 20 minutes, so I downloaded this crippleware application
to map the shares.

That kind of basic functionality seems like something which ought to
be free to me.

But some of it is personality.  Some people see all of the quirks,
inconsistencies, and "bloat" of popular, actively-developed desktops
like KDE and it really irks them, but I tend not to notice.  If you
were to, for example, flip OK / Cancel boxes around, I probably
wouldn't notice, and I'd click the right one anyway just because of
how my brain works.  I often read usability articles on osnews.com,
and they point out things I've just never noticed before.   Likewise,
if you forced me to work with some other WE/WM, I would probably adapt
in a day or two without noticing.

For whatever reason, I'm just habituated to adapting to whatever
environment I'm working with, but not everyone is.  I'd be a horrible
Usability person as a result.  I notice detail a lot with certain
aspects of computing, but just not desktop interfaces.  Might be some
kind of mental quirk, or just habit.

This also means, however, that I'd probably be fine with OS X.  My
major requirement on the desktop is a shell.  I'm pretty sure I can't
live without that, and OS X has it, so if I had to adapt to it, I
probably would.  But aside from the problems with video and DVD
authoring, I don't ever really notice deficiencies in the desktop on
my Linux box.

I do agree, though, that significant opportunities were missed.
Entire paradigms could have been changed and used to challenge
Microsoft, but mostly what has happened, owing in part to the
development model (unpaid developers scratching itches), is desktops
have aped things in Windows and on the Mac, so the feeling is you're
getting a low-rent copy of, say, Windows.  Which again is fine by me,
since to me the desktop interface is pretty boring.   I'm still on KDE
3.5.9 or something, and haven't even moved to 4.  If the desktop froze
here, it wouldn't really affect me, personally.

But it hurts momentum, especially the revolutionary momentum that
would be necessary for Linux to assert itself as a share of the
market.  And as I say, people have way different attitudes to their
desktops than I do.

Bowie and others - what is it about Linux on the desktop,
specifically, that ticks you off, that Apple or Microsoft does better?