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Follow-up To Critique of BeOS & Mac OS X
UnknownSoldier writes: "Scot Hacker has posted a great follow-up to his Tales of a BeOS Refugee entitled Reactions to Tales of a BeOS Refugee. (Hopefully everyone involved in implementing 'Linux on the Desktop' will eventually incorporate the best ideas of Be and Mac OS X for smoother usability in Linux.)"
Next time Apple releases a new super-duper OS that requires you to buy a new Mac and renew your entire collection of software you bought with your hard-earned cash, I and my headache-making Linux box running on my PII-266 shall taunt you a second time.
buying into a hardware platform that is less flexible than the current x86 standard, is single-sourced, and thus considerably more expensive. If OS X ever makes it to the x86, it will be hard to resist.
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The funny thing I've noticed is that a lot of the BeOS and Linux types are migrating straight for OSX for exactly the reasons brought up in the article. It's UNIX, it's got a great interface, etc, etc, etc. On the other end of the coin, people who have been with the Mac for decades (me included) have yet to migrate over. I have my excuses - no photoshop, and it runs nice and slow on my 3-year old Blue G3. OSX works fine on my Powerbook, which actually came with it installed, but I downgraded as I didn't feel I had enough disk space to warrant running a 1 GB OS. That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do... hell, I'm still using a 3-year old 350 MHz box for professional web design, Photoshop and video editing, and it works just fine. Rendering takes a few more seconds, but it's not noticable. As soon as I went over to OSX, it just got really choppy.
While I think it's great that OSX is getting so much new blood into the Mac, power users at that, I simply don't find that OSX has enough to offer me yet. I won't go so far as to say I hate it, as some of my other iPod-toting hardcore-Mac friends have said, it just has a little more way to go.
NerfOnline - Because Nerf Guns aren't just for kids -
Gentlemen, light your flamethrowers.
I don't care if my software is open. Open source hase wonderful advantages, but it's more important to me that software is good. OS X is the best operating system I've ever seen. I don't care if it's closed, I don't care if they had to drive a steamroller through a kitten factory to make it. It's that good.
It's amazing how people will put up with crap software just because it's open source, and denounce great software just because it's closed. Last time I checked, the purpose of open source was to create great software, not to stick to ideals.
there's more than one way to do me.
As another poster said, it's been a -long- time since Apple came out w/an OS that made you buy a new Mac.
;)
For most current Mac users, it is only OS X that made them do this, and it even runs on a lot of Macs from at least the G3 line onward (I use it on a B&W as well as my new G4).
Seems like a lot of old Mac users complain about OS X, but I certainly like the fact that I've never had the OS crash yet
Christina
Well anyways, back to the usability myth. I propose that it is just that, a myth. People think something is easy to use because they feel familiar with it, or they "know" how to use it, that's how something ranks high on the "usability" scale. The Mac mantra has always been how easy it is to use... well.. the couple of times I tried to use a Mac it seemed confusing to me and certainly not "easy" Why???? You may be asking??? Because, all I've ever used have been Windows machines and Unix machines. Those are easy to me. But that's mostly beside the point, which is, if usability was so important than why didn't the public migrate to the Mac? Answer, besides the obvious monopoly thingy, is because usability, for the most part, doesn't matter. Period. People learn how to use a machine to do what they need to get done and it becomes easy to do when you know how to use it.
So, you can make Linux the most "user friendly" desktop OS on the planet and it won't matter at all. If you want Linux to matter then you need to come up with a reason for people to use it, a killer app or a killer tool or something along those lines.
Now before you pundits get your panties all knotted up into a bunch, I'm not saying you shouldn't try to design an interface that is consistant and easy to learn, yes, that's important, but it's not the driving force for the public when it comes to using one operating environment over another.
Thank You.
Well, looks like the site is already slashdotted, so I haven't read the article yet, but let me shed some light on a few things.
I'm a UNIX person. I've run Linux, Solaris X86, IRIX (yes I had an Indy) at home. I like UNIX. It's what I do for a living, I'm a SysAdmin.
I LOVE OS X. 10.0.4 blew dogs. It's what came with the new iBook I bought this year. 10.1 is prime time, if not ready for the masses. I recently started a new job and was given my choice between a 500 MHz Intel machine running Linux or a G3 at 350MHz running OS X. No brainer dude. Aqua is hands down the best window manager I've ever seen (I never saw a NeXT machine.) Rendering everything in PDF is just mind blowing, and the ease of application development in Cocoa is equally dope.
Here's the thing though. If you're a hardware hacker it's not for you. Plain and simple, neither was the Indy, or the NeXT, or an Ultra Sparc. There are things you just can't do with workstation class machines that you can with desktops.
However, if you're like me and could give a rip about the hardware and tweeking the hell out of it, well Mac OS X is SWEET! It reminds me of the early days of Linux when I'd download something and actually HAVE TO COMPILE IT! Hehehehe, yes i compiled bash, and the fileutils, and even vim on OS X, no problem at all. And since I can't fiddle with the WindowManager I'm not going insane trying to get the current version of Enlightenment (heh a one word oxymoron there) and all it's assinine libraries to compile. I was always partial to WindowMaker anyway, and here's the upgrade!
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Well, its a matter of your hardware becoming obsolete. Yes it runs classic really well. OSX requires a bit.. more. Fortunately and unfortunately. Newer hardware supports OSX wonderfuly. Not sure if its anyone's fault really. Just the desires of having a "really cool" OS.
;)
As for the software thing, give it time. Just like how linux and the bsd's went from a.out -> elf, it takes time.
OSX isn't unfortunately suited to the population of mac owners who can only run classic and need them. Luckily, photoshop isn't my biggest need.. yet. And office is finally out, so I'm happy.
Just think of it as X11R6 with a really neet window mangler
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I assume you're referring to the pseudo-database format of the befs? Very nifty idea, but it's more fakery than most people realize. Using a full-blown rdbms was too performance intensive, so while initially the befs did have an actual relational database, it eventually became lighter code that had a sql-like syntactical interface. Still very nice, I agree, and it'd be nice to see something similar in Linux.
For limited types of hardware, sure. When I last tried BeOS 4.5 (yes, I never tried 5), I was lucky that my nVidia TNT2 Ultra card was supported in 2D, and forget about 3D. Maybe Be's OpenGL implementation was one of the fastest software rendering implementations, but that can't hold a candle to proper hardware acceleration, and nVidia is currently the king in that area.
But not the G* PPC processors, sadly. Which meant that the PPC version was essentially dead, and Be was spending all their efforts on the x86 port.
I agree with your assessment of OS X, and I also agree that there are some nice ideas to be had from Be, but I just want to point out that Be was not the pinnacle of GUI or OS design (yeah, sure, it was good, but it had its share of problems, and quite a few of them). It'd be nice to see all the fancy features of Be on an OS with better hardware support, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
What type of machine were you running it on? I just received a new Powerbook G4 (550/512MB) and it runs great on it. Very stable and fast. It has taken me a few days to find out where everything is, but I really like it once I got used to it. I'm a PC user, but Apple really tempted me with their notebook design and the promise of a great GUI on top of *nix. I think they delivered in spades. I've already compiled Apache/PHP4/MySQL on it and have a backup of my main site running so that I can test different things. It's a great combo. Add Airport (which I did) and I can work on development anywhere in and around my house.
To test their claims, I've plugged my digital camera and digital video camera in it and was pleasantly surprised that no drivers were needed and the correct apps popped up automatically. iTunes is a great MP3 ripper and manager as well. My wife and I played with iMovie this weekend and found it to be a great entry level movie editor. It even connects to my Samba server and WinXP desktop with no add-ons. Very cool, everything just works!
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
ACK.
.. If a user can, by a few judicious choices, really improve the interface, we probably have done a poor job.
One of the major points why I don't like KDE is that they don't make any choices but make everything a user decision. Having the menu bar in the window or on the screen top does not result in having the best but the worst of both worlds.
I'd like to remind all the people working on a user interfaces of this quote from the KDE UI pages:Avoid rampant customisation.
Speaking as a recovering BeOS user/developer, I can say that BeOS is/was great software. But because it was closed source, it is now orphan-ware, getting more obsolete every day. When I to upgrade to a new machine, I most likely won't be able to run it at all anymore, since the new hardware won't be supported. If BeOS had been open source, it would still be a viable OS today, since the Be developer community would have taken over development when Be keeled over. (indeed, they are still trying to do just this, but Palm couldn't care less)
The moral of the story is this: for certain "platform" types of software that require a lot of time/money/software investment from the user (such as operating systems, APIs, languages, etc), one of the most important "features" that must be considered is whether or not the software product will continue to be supportable and developed. You can either make that guarantee by being too rich to ever go out of business (if you're Microsoft), or by making the code open source (if you're anybody else).
Or to put it more succinctly, it's gonna be a bummer for all the OS/X users if/when Apple goes out of business, and drags OS/X down with it. Users of open source operating systems have no such worries.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I've been following criticism of OS X on slashdot for a while. It seems that people here mainly reject OS X because either it's closed source or the hardware's too expensive.
Well, criticizing OS X because it is closed source is ridiculous. Choose a product based on quality, not ideology. Linux will never gain many mainstream users because of ethics- people will choose the best product offered to them. Granted, compatibility, available software, and conformity may play into this more than some would want, (perhaps explaining why my parents use MS) but it is still a matter of quality.
The cost of the hardware is a valid issue. However, the computers are well built, especially the laptops. If you're obsessed with customizing beige boxes, then stick to a different operating system. But, regardless, stick to criticizing features, not attitudes.
I'm sorry but that is the biggest MYTH.
One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.
This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.
Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.
And don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.
Would you like to have USB 2.0? I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.
PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."
P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer.
OS X is unfinished to say the least. I was pretty excited when I got a new iMac with OS X to play around with. But when I got around to integrating it into my Linux-base environment, it really fell apart.
/mnt/local", the "/mnt/local" directory disappears. The mount doesn't and you can't unmount without rebooting. There is a shareware program that makes it possible to use NFS, but c'mon folks. This is a violation of some basic trust. NFS should just work.
NFS support is severely lacking. You can't even count on a command-line mount of an nfs volume. If I try to mount with "mount server:/local
SMB is nearly as bad. At least you can reliable mount samba volumes. However, it's highly unstable. Changing files on the server will cause OS X to behave unpredictably. Updating an app binary, for example, will cause subsequent execution of that app to fail with bus errors.
NIS? Good luck. Not supported. There is an FAQ for enabling it. But my success with this has been limited at best.
Until they get the basics sorted out, it'll just sit on the kitchen counter as a nice little internet and recipe browser for my wife.
Take a deep breath! You are about to dump core, or something.
You seem to have confused expansion capability with aging, but they just ain't the same.
**As far as being widely useful for getting work done** Macs last longer than PCs. That is what I believe the other poster is talking about.
As far as Mac OS X and its interface, its nice that people used to generally weak interfaces think it is so great, but us long time Mac users are suffering a severe downgrade with Mac OS X and it Just Isn't Worth It for most of us.
Given the theory "An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters"; with the random noise it has before formatting, the drive should already have your entire MP3 collection on it.:-\
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
That's another thing... Macs don't age nearly as fast as PCs do... hell, I'm still using a 3-year old 350 MHz box for professional web design
This is a nice way of saying, "I can't upgrade my 3-year old Mac because Apple's hardware is too expensive." Right?
"And like that
Ok. As irritating as it is, I am going to have to do a point by point rebuttal here. Sorry in advance.
Point One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.
Rebuttal And this is bad why? The vast majority of people in the world out there DO NOT upgrade their computers. EVER. I worked at a computer repair firm for two years, and I would guess that not more than a quarter of PC users actually get new cards installed into their computers. This, contrary to what most people on slashdot feel, is not a limitation for the vast majority of users. Here, think of it like this. Most PC users, when they're adding new stuff to their computers, will get things that can be plugged into serial, parallel, and usb ports. Not PCI. Not AGP. Not (god forbid) ISA.
Point This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.
RebuttalAnd this is different from those microtower Dells, Compaq iPaqs, etc, in what way exactly? Furthermore, with laptops, what the hell is the point of a PC card slot on a laptop that has video out, firewire, usb, 10/100 ethernet, AirPort (802.11b), and a 56k modem built-in? I actually just bought a TiBook 3-4 days ago (it's still on its way), and I don't have any notion of what I'll actually use the PC card slot on it for. I've been using an indigo iBook for the last 14 months, and I am currently replacing it only because I am starting to find the screen size limiting (it's a pain to use Project Builder and Interface Builder in 800x600 pixels).
Point Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.
Rebuttal Ok. OS X is big. It's a dog on anything less than a 366 MHz G3 with at least 128MB RAM. The original iMac (the bondi blue variety) has a 233MHz G3 processor, and came with 32 mb RAM. The average person is NOT going to run OS X on that thing. They'd be absolutely nuts to do it. Apple knows this. That's a big reason why they will not bother writing accelerated video card drivers for the bondi iMac. No one would use them (or at least they shouldn't). If these people really want to run OS X, they should sell their Bondi iMac off for $350 or $400, or whatever they go for, and pick up the $799 iMac.
PointAnd don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.
Rebuttal Ha. Yeah right. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't afford to pick up a new computer every two or three years (the iMac will be 4 next August, and the iBook came out ~one year after the iMac) there is no way in hell you could afford an iPod. The iPod is a toy for those with too much money. Don't get me wrong on this, I'd love to have one, but there's no way in hell I can afford one until I'm out of college (I bought the TiBook because it'll serve a definite purpose. besides, I bought an AVC Soul Player a year ago). These people aren't going to go out and spend $400 on the iPod unless they could afford a new computer anyway. Besides, it doesn't matter, since everything comes built-in anyways, right? ;-)
Point Would you like to have USB 2.0? I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.
Rebuttal Yet people continue buying iBooks, with their 400 Mbit firewire ports that have devices available for the port today. What idiots! Can you even buy a USB 2.0 card yet? By the way, take a look at your P.S. statement. Hell, I'll quote it here. P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer. But wait, you still want 5 USB 2.0 devices hanging off your computer? I'm confused. It must be because I'm one of those gullible anti-windows mac users (I'm typing this on my self-built coppermine-core system running XP pro right now.).
Point PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."
Point I just did a search on Micro Warehouse for pc card, and as you can see, basically everything listed is a wireless ethernet card, an ethernet card, a modem, or a usb controller. I HAVE ALL OF THOSE THINGS BUILT INTO MY IBOOK. Jeez. About the only thing I would find useful to buy for a pc card slot would be one of those pc card hard drives (that ibm makes). Even then, I'd rather just burn a cd with the built-in burner. More people have cd-rom drives than pc card slots. Furthermore, let's take a look at the cards I have in my PC right now. 1. An ATI Xpert 2000 (AGP 4x). 2. An SB Live (PCI). 3. A Linksys 10/100BaseT Ethernet card (PCI). 4. A firewire card. There is really nothing else that I am planning on ever adding to this computer. Sure, there are a lot of people out there who need second monitors, but none of them would buy an iMac anyways. They wouldn't be served well by a 15" monitor. The iMac is a consumer machine. The iBook (supposedly) is too (although most business types would probably be fine having one). The Power Mac G4 is a professional machine. Same thing goes for the Powerbook G4. You don't hear people complaining that their Dell Dimension 2100's won't let them install a burner inside the case. If you did, you'd probably ridicule them for not buying a higher-end machine.
You know what, I will go on using my Apple laptop, my Intel/Microsoft desktop, and the god-awful Sun Blade 100 I get stuck using at school, and you can go on using whatever you want to. We'll just call it even.
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
Once upon a time I would have agreed with you on the idea that Macs have longer lives. Back in the day, I remember my friends having to get new PC's very frequently in order to run the latest stuff. My Mac Plus and IIvx, on the other hand, served me for five years with only minor expansions (hard drive and RAM) each.
:-) Aside from adding some more drive space and a burner, there's very little I've done to it.
Now that processors are so fast though, and RAM is so ubiquitous, most people don't need much faster machines. Bandwidth tends to be the key limiting factor in what people can do, especially now that CD burners are so cheap. My Pentium II is going on in to its fourth year right now, and it hardly feels aged when I don't browse the game isles
I think PC's, in general, have reached a point where they all have longer lives. Most people are still very productive with Win95, and until recently they could run everything they wanted on it. I think once upon a time Macs used to have the longer life, which made them a much more worthwhile purchase, but now that PC's have surpassed what people need they've switched to features, like firewire. I think the above poster is right to mention expansion. The capability to add a firewire card to an original iMac would add some extra life to the machine.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I'd like to reiterate what I wrote earlier in a similar thread which some moron scored down to -1.
I think people have had enough of user interfaces that are based on the twenty-some years old ideas that Windows, MacOS, Gnome and KDE are based on.
Where are the attempts at trying to create somehting exciting and radical?
It's hard enough to convince a Windows-user that MacOS makes you more productive - the interfaces are so similar that it's possible to approach both MacOS and BeOs with a Windows-infused mind and miss out all the good stuff. It's possible to build a user interface that is both obviously different and obviously better - even with Linux, but it seems to me that the Linux community lacks the competence. I would like to be proven wrong.
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
However, that rule doesn't apply if you put out a shitty product squash competition and name it windows.
Wrong. Windows is not a "shitty" product in the areas that matter, as IBM found out. IBM used to bundle OS/2 and Win 3.1 (yes, 3.1). You had to go out of your way to delete OS/2 and install 3.1. Yet almost EVERYONE did it.
The areas that Windows ruled are:
1) Backward compatibility with DOS apps,
2) Software availability (MS courted developers like anything),
3) Hardware availability
And your ignorance of why Windows is successful is exactly why Linux never will be a competitor to Windows on the desktop.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I spent quite a bit of time using it at the local Circuit City here. It's no Apple Store, but it's decent enough for my needs. I just need a computer with MacOS X on it, and no one to pester me. It's PERFECTLY useable on Apple's low end machines. Just make sure you have a bunch of ram and you'll be fine. The interface didn't take too long to learn. The most confusing aspect of it was what the red, yellow, and green buttons at the top-left corner of every window are. If you can learn what those are, then you'll do fine with the rest of the OS. The thing that really struck me as handy was the one click to all the system prefs you could ever need. It's just right there on the dock. Click, and it comes up. Can't get much simpler than that.
The software Apple bundles in is pretty slick too. iTunes is great stuff. The visuals are awesome. But then again, how hard can it be to make an easy-to-use MP3 program? I haven't seen one yet that wasn't common sense to use. The MP3s included are pretty good too. iMovie is incredible stuff. There was a camcorder already attached to the iMac when I got there. I don't think those guys at circuit city would care enough to install drivers and such. Thank god it just works at the mere action of plugging it in. But anyway, I recorded just a bunch of customers walking and I went to edit it with iMovie. I have never used it before, and within 5 minutes I had created a movie that looked awesome. Well, as awesome as it could look. Customers walking isn't too entertaining.
I guess I'm a firm believer that technology should be simple to use. It is to be there to assist you, not to work against you. To that end, Apple's the best. Taking complex technology and making it easy enough for the average person to use. It's the reason why people bother purchasing macs. It's not like they're faster, or that they get the latest and greatest in software first, and it's certainly not price or that it's the latest trend. It's because they do what is advertised. They just work.
A couple other notes: judging from the front page of Apple's website, I think MacWorld is going to be big. Very big. You can catch the live webcast on Janurary 7th on Apple's website.
not just the UI - it's Making Things Work.
I've used a lot of UNIX machines, a few variants of linux and many PC boxes between work and home. I now have a TIBook and I have to say OS X is my favorite OS thus far because more things Just Work than on any other platform... it comes with great UI tools for many networking tasks if you don't want to waste a lot of time to learn the command line (though if you already know it, it's right there for you). Multiple monitors work as nature intended them too with no fiddling. I tried video creation under PC's and found the xperience exasperating.
I get a combo USB/Firewire CD burner. Under Windows (98, admittedly I've only used NT/98 so far and not used XP so I'm not sure how different things would be) I have to install Special Software. Of course, after burning a few CD's I find that the default is to burn them under a windows format so the can't be read on a mac, and the hidden preference setting to switch to ISO has dire warnings about filename truncation.
I plug the same drive into my Mac and just burn a CD - a handy dialog box comes up to ask if I would like that HFS+ or ISO? No extra software needed.
Windows update feels klunky to me compared to the mac update, though I couldn't say exactly why. Perhaps it's that I've yet to have the mac update fail or render my mac update unusable, as Windows update has done to me in the past.
The only reason you wouldn't want to get a Mac as far as I can see is that your selection of games might suffer somewhat - but in that case just get an XBox or PS2 or Gamecube. That's what I did to stop the rediculous upgrade cycle of PC's. And there are lot of games that come out for the mac so you might not have to suffer that horribly after all (especially true for RTS games which I don't think consoles do as well, or at least the same). As for office software, the Mac version of office has been said to be better than Office XP if you swing that way!
I can boil down all my experiences to this - on my home PC, both under Windows and Linux, I was fiddling a lot more than I wanted to with system settings. With OS X I'm getting more done and fighting the system less, and that to me is usability. I still prefer Linux for servers but for a development box I really like OS X.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have a Mac Plus sitting on the desk next to me that we bought a LONG time ago. Is that "long time" enough for you? I have used MacOSX exclusively since the Public Beta. I dread having to boot into OS9 because of its weak interface. I fully respect your decision not to upgrade (yes *upgrade*). I am however sick of non-converters claiming things like "OSX is good for beginners but us power users need more". If you don't want to use it fine, but do realise that you are being left behind. I'd wager that a lot more people are currently happy with OSX than people who have *tried* it and given it a decent chance but still prefer OS9. It is not the next version of the MacOS, it is the first version of MacOSX. If you keep that in mind and stop trying to turn it into OS9 (like I did after about the first month), you'll have a much better experience with it.
If you've done this (with 10.1, *big* difference) and still aren't happy with it, I'll accept that. I believe that MacOSX cured a lot of the long lived problems with the classic MacOS. Yes, it introduced a few annoyances of its own but with each (free) upgrade that apple puts out their numbers are diminishing quickly. Apple is listening to user feedback. If you have a gripe with OSX, besides "Please kill the Dock", tell them about it.
You stop where apple stopped, with case. "Test" and "test" are the same but "One_two" isn't the same as "One two". Apple isn't the only one to go down this path and at least they made it case preserving. "Test" stays as "Test" and will never be printed as "test".