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Mac OS X Beta Reviewed On ArsTechnica

Posted by Hemos on from the what-about-the-hairline-cracks!? dept.

scout.finch writes: "John Siracusa has just written a review of the new Mac OS X Public Beta over on Ars Technica. His thorough and unflinching reviews of previous developer releases have been the most accurate source of information on Mac OS X thus far, and this installation is no exception."

4 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. A warning about MacOS X and LinuxPPC by Bilestoad · · Score: 5

    Be careful if you decide to install MacOS X on a Mac with LinuxPPC on it - I did NOT tell it to touch my partitions, but it did, causing the partitions to become inaccessible. I didn't try to find out what was wrong, just put Linux back and put X in the bottom of the drawer.

    If you have another hard drive at all, that would be the safest place to try out MacOS X. I might install it again on a rainy day.

    1. Re:A warning about MacOS X and LinuxPPC by Auckerman · · Score: 5

      MacOS X installs a boot partition. If you had used Apples partition utility and made MacOS X PB the first partition on the harddrive, just as the instructions say, this would not have happened. Before you act surprised you should read the documentation.

      --

      Burn Hollywood Burn
  2. Apple should have... by jaysones · · Score: 5
    released this OS under a different company name. If everyone thought this was some startup company who had taken FreeBSD, put a stunning interface on it, made it very easy to use, while retaining all of the cool BSD stuff, then we'd hail them as Gods. Instead (and I'm not trying to bait), we have people who read the first 5 letters of the article (A-p-p-l-e) and respond with

    >"Why does this crap OS get so much coverage?"

    This OS is very promising and I wish prejudice wouldn't come into play. If you check this thing out, I think you'd see why it gets so much coverage. Those who most hate Apple should be the most happy. They're actually changing.

  3. Well... by Auckerman · · Score: 5
    I've been using OS X PB as a desktop OS for almost two weeks now (no reboots, no shutdowns since install). I think his UI concerns are little more than personal taste, and not as objective as he would make it out to be.

    The one that stands out the most, is that he wants a equalivent replacement for the Apple Menu. Why? The Apple menu is one of the WORST elements in MacOS. It is NOT obvious it's a menu, it is NOT obvious how to add things to it and quite frankly a clear majority of users (both Mac and Windows) I know just put alias' on their desktops. The entire GUI is point and click. It took me about 30 minutes to figure out it's quirks.

    He also left out one of the most relevent piece of ease of use info about Mac OS X. Drag and Drop installation of Applications. No Applications can install into the system folder. How novel. Uncompress the file (if necissary) and drag it to the Applications folder. This is a BIG deduction in tech support costs since the OS is locked and root is hidden, no Extension conficts, no DLL hell.

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    Burn Hollywood Burn