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Pros and Cons of Switching From Windows To Mac
It's been a couple of years since Apple ran their Switcher ads — but folks are still making the switch. Rockgod writes to point us to his list of pros and cons after he switched from Windows to Mac recently. From the article: "It took me a long time to be convinced that Windows 3.1 was a better program launcher than X-Tree Gold, but it happened eventually. Since then, I have been a sucker for every upgrade — 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000, XP... I bought the cheapest Mac available, a Mac Mini with a single-core Intel chip and the minimum of RAM — 512 MB. It cost me AU$949. Since plugging it in, I have barely used my $3000 Windows desktop... All this time later, I have almost exclusively switched to the Mac."
I'm assuming he means $3k AU since he mentions how much the mac cost in Australian dollars earlier in the blurb. 3k Aussie dollars is about 2275 USD, still a bundle but....
Monstar L
"The GUI: It didn't take me long to get used to it. It is super smooth, even on the cheap Mac Mini .. It makes Windows XP look very late-nineties."
.. I don't run as an administrator. This simple action protects you from about 99% of malicious software. It is a simple fact."
"It's Unix!: You've got a very, very nice GUI but under the hood is good ole' Unix"
"It is only when you open the Terminal and get to a shell that you see all the ancient Unix directory structures, combined with Apple's more hip and happening directory names like Applications, System, etc"
"Notice I didn't say anything about viruses, trojans, spy-ware? I haven't been infected in three months on the Apple
"unless you are a rabid freedom-fighter it is a step above any Linux distribution out there. KDE and GNOME are still a long way away from achieving the polish that Apple has delivered with Mac OS X"
davecb5620@gmail.com
To solve the Apple's mouse acceleration problem, install a utility called SteerMouse or better yet, buy a third party mouse like Microsoft and Logitech and use their driver. Then your mouse acceleration will be just like Windows. Switchers are always complaining about this and rightly so, it's a pain if you aren't used to it.
I installed Ubuntu this Monday. I really had to hammer at it to get the programs I wanted installed and get settings the way I wanted them. Linux still has a way to go before the average Joe will be able to pick it up and use it...
My first problem resulted from Ubuntu's installer assuming my system clock was set to GMT and not asking me. When I corrected the clock +4 hours from the LiveCD's meddling and installed Ubuntu, it adjusted my clock +4 more! I didn't notice until I had worked with Ubuntu off my hard drive for a bit. When I set the clock back -4... I was locked out of SUDO! This restriction would have to be lifted or at least EXPLAINED to the average user who is not going to understand why he must wait 4 hours to perform any administrative actions. Not to mention the fix is not intuitive... I had to adjust my clock +4 again, run sudo -k to kill my sudo timestamp, and finally set my clock correctly. Then sudo worked again. No way the average user could have done that.
Also the lack of up-to-date precompiled packages (Wine package is still back at 0.9.9, ScummVM 0.8.0) for my favorite programs was annoying enough for me to have to search out more recent binaries... now I really like the Linux idea of putting program files in /bin (which is also in the path env... ooh Linux has Windows beat on this!), settings in /etc, user settings in ~, etc etc. But most precompiled binaries aren't like this! They just throw everything in one directory... so if I want these "distributed" files, I need to compile from source and make install (right? well that was my solution >.>).
Also Linux will need out-of-the-box support for Windows apps. This is critical for it's success, I believe, as if you tell a Windows user he can migrate to Linux without having to give up any of his favorite programs while gaining all the advantages of Linux... well I think that would help alot.
Currently Wine seems OK, but it still has some problems with XP profiles (it tries to use hardcoded 9x profile paths... I can't figure out how to override them) MDI dialogs (they don't work quite right, fooling around with them crashes wine) and fonts (I can't get a font dialog to pop up, font changing doesn't work in my favorite app...).
Furthermore, I still haven't gotten some things to work QUITE right (Cedega overwrites Wine when I make install it! And it's broken... it complains a SO can't be found. I'll probably figure this out eventually). Also when I built Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2, they ended up with the internal names "Bon Echo" and "Mail/News Client"... bah... plus Ubuntu's Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5 have different program names than my compiled versions, so the old ones still occasionally pop up when another program runs them...
Overall I'd say OSX is an excellent choice for Windows users who want the advantages of UNIX without having to learn arcane lore, for Linux users who need a laptop that will just work without requiring a virgin sacrifice during a full moon and for people who need to talk to a variety of different systems in a heterogenuous network. It's a bad choice for Microsoft executives, MCSEs or anyone else who makes a living on Windows being the dominant OS in the market. If you're somewhere in the middle you should probably pick OSX for the better security. It's not perfect, but any improvement is better than nothing.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, when it comes to switching, it tends to mean that you liked the thing you switched to more than the thing you switched from. In this case, preferring Macs to Windows.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Finder > View > Font size.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I've never known anyone to consider OS X as crash-prone as Windows.
Programs are slow, crash-prone and things can be misconfigured? That's obviously the OS's fault!
The keyboard shortcuts are listed directly next to the menu option in drop-down menus. Example
It's under the FILE menu under "Make Alias" and in the right-click contextual menu under "Make Alias". I'm not sure how this could be implemented in a more effective manner.
A computer is not a GUI.
I think you mean to say "It's different from what I'm used to and it's closed-source, therefore I hate it."
You obviously didn't give it much of a chance. You can put the dock on the left, right, or bottom of the screen, AND you can have it hidden except when you bring your cursor to the side of the screen where it is located. It's a LOT better and more efficient than the Windows taskbar in pretty much every way imaginable.
1. turn on auto hide for your dock. 2. shrink your dock's size. 3. don't buy 12 inch laptops. 4. yes, finder sucks. it takes some adaptation to learn to live with it. long time mac users have no complaints about it, whereas when i switched over from pc it was waa-waa time. 5. if you're having problems with crashing maybe you should have it looked at. I was using a powermac g4 for about two months. I left it on to do some bittorrent downloading for over a week and to my shock, it didn't crash or experience memory leaks. It never once crashed on me - and this is a 6 year old machine we're talking about here.
I keep hearing this I don't get what the problem with 512 Megs is on Mac OS. My iBook has 512 Megs and runs fine. I mostly run Firefox, terminal, text editors and OOo (in X) on it (at the same time even) and never really felt memory constrained. OTOH if I had known beforehand how much disk space OS X eats, I wouldn't have gotten a 30GB model. Of course if you're going to do heavy graphics work, or simulation, or somesuch, things might be different, but it's not really platform specific...
This being said, and while OS X mostly runs fine despite a few annoying bugs (no showstoppers), I still find KDE way more comfortable to use. Notably because of much better network integration and the fact that windows don't have to be in front to get focus (none of this is really KDE specific though, more a Unix desktop thing).
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Anyone who really cares should be willing to sacrifice a few discs to burn them at different speeds, then check the results with any of a variety of programs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
(In theory, 1x write strategy should be a standard across discs of all make. So say the rainbow books and, by extention, the DVD+-* standards. In practice, not so much...)
The right answer, the one your IT guy should already know if he has a clue, is to burn at the minimum speed the disc supports. I'm not familiar with the Memorex discs in question, but most 16x discs only contain write strategies for 4x - 16x.
"Write Strategies for high performance DVD+R/RW"
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?