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How to Turn Your PC into a Mac
An anonymous reader writes "CNet is running a Mac fanboy's idea of a nightmare feature entitled 'Mock OS X: Five ways to make your PC more like a Mac'. While the idea of turning my PC into a Mac-like machine does get my juices flowing, I'm not sure the user experience would be exactly the same but I'm going to spend this afternoon trying it out anyway. "To borrow a metaphor from Spartacus, some people like oysters and some people like snails. Except what if there was a way to make your snail do some of the cool things oysters can do, like make pearls? And what if you could make your PC do some of the cool stuff that Macs do so well?"" Seems to me that this would be a lot easier if step one was install linux...
Next time I see tripe like this on the firehose I'm going to throw a negative on it, instead of just ignoring it. Get stardock and window blinds? I mean seriously ...
What makes Mac OS X special is not the glitz and glamour on the surface, it's what's underneath. The Cocoa framework for Objective C is head and shoulders above the MFC/Win32 programming approach. it's built on BSD and Mach and is now officially a Unix certified OS. It's built in a logical and elegant way. You can run Linux/Unix apps on it. X11 is included, although an optional install. OpenGl and Aqua make it beautiful to look at. There are literally hundreds of reasons why I prefer it, but won't go into them here.
Simply skinning XP with an' aqua' style skin and adding a dock does not make it anything like OS X. Any more than putting a Ferrari shell on top of a ford doesn't make it a Ferrari.
Install BootCamp with Windows XP.
However, if you're looking to keep her on MacOS because of the security or something else, then you'll need to figure out what specifically she's missing from Windows. Often, with casual users, it's just interface stuff that throws them for a loop, and that can be pretty easy to solve. Does she miss contextual menus (i.e., right-clicking in Windows?)? Get her a two-button mouse or show her the multi-touch trackpad capabilities (like two-fingered click = right-click). Does she miss the Start menu? Set up a folder in the dock with her favorite stuff.
Of course it may be that she just doesn't like using computers, and is using the MacOS/Windows thing as an excuse to avoid them...
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
There is nothing wrong with either XP's or Vista's look and feel. Why the hell would you want to make it look like OS X? It seems that if you absolutely love the look of OS X that the best way of obtaining it is to buy a Mac.
ObjectDock is garbage, Konfabulator sucks up system resources, and DeskSpaces looks no different than YDOM, which made my system thrash like no tomorrow. (Granted, I don't have a 3D card) I wonder how much StarDock paid to get top billing...
Am I the only one who's tired of the PC being cast as the boring office-machine while OSX is fun? Or, as the article puts it, "ancient HP WageSlave 486s in strip-lit spreadsheet farms across the world". Not that I give a crap about which OS is more fun...I'm just tired of hearing the same message repeated over and over again. Yeah, I get it, Apple wants me to think PCs are for work, and Macs are for fun.
Less is more. War is peace. 2+2=5.
Whatever.
I'm currently typing this on a Mac, but seriously, gaming has always been way better on the PC than on the Mac, and while OSX comes with better entry-level multimedia-creation tools, on the professional front, I can't think of a single OSX application that doesn't have a comparable Windows-based competitor. It's not like anybody serious about movie or music making would use iMovie or GarageBand, anyway.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Unlike OSX, running all that crap on Vista or XP (stardock, "myexpose", etc) will significantly slow windows down. You can't bolt on a load of [poorly designed] third party apps and say its more like OSX.
Linux can run IE, that doesn't make it "more like windows."
You are welcome on my lawn.