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Ask Slashdot: Mac To Linux Return Flow?
jasnw writes "I'm one of apparently many people who moved to OS X from Linux in the early/mid 2000s for their desktop system, keeping Linux boxes around for the heavy lifting and server work. I may also be part of a large segment of that group now considering a return because of all the iOS-ification of OS X, despite the fact that the Linux desktop still falls short in the 'it just works' area. I'm angry enough at Apple, and wary enough of Linux, that I might just go to using Windows 7 for the desktop (not Win8, however). What is the feeling/experience of other 'traitors' who run OS X for the desktop and Linux for everything else?"
2009 must've been a different year.
I installed a PostGIS, Apache, PHP, QGIS, mapserver stack on both a Debian server and my OS X desktop. Getting it to run on Debian required moving the entire server to unstable, but after that it was easy and painless. Getting it running on OS X required a few manual downloads, but no other troubles.
I mean, if you're happy then all is good. I'm just saying. Because I just did the mostly same thing.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You say that like it's a bad thing...
@ submittor: if you don't like OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion), why not just go back to snow leopard? It's stable as a rock. My personal opinion is I like the additional usability in mountain lion, but obv ymmv.
KDE tried to copy Windows as much as they could - when I saw their annoying Windows-esque dialogue when you connect a USB mass storage device I was done with that. Then Gnome chased the "everything is going Web 3.0 and mobile" dream so this leaves me with only sensible window managers like XFCE and LXDE. Any other ones I should try?
I don't really understand this. How does one become so particular about the desktop system?
I personally do prefer KDE. Having said that, you can put me in front of a Gnome, Cinnamon, Windows, OSX, Windowmaker, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, environment and I only need a couple of minutes to find my way around and be comfortable with it. My preference for KDE is marginal. It is not a deal-breaker.
What is it about that USB dialog that prevents you from getting your work done? How is it a show-stopper for you? You described it as annoying, can you elaborate? I really want to understand this because I seem to be the oddball here.
After the story about Miguel de Icaza switching to Mac OS X, it got me thinking about my own history of operating systems. While I had happily used OS X for six and a half years, over that period of time I have drifted back in favor of Linux. This had less to do with new features being offered in Linux as it did with growing tired of foibles in OS X. Here are a list of some of the bigger issues:
- Beach Ball of Death (BBOD): While this didn't occur frequently, when it did it was more frustrating than a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). At least you knew you were fucked when you saw the BSOD. With the BBOD, sometimes you would recover from it and other times you could wait for up to ten minutes before realizing that you're never coming back. During that period, you are completely unable to access the System menu or start another app to find the proc that is chewing resources so that it can be killed. In 2013, this is completely unacceptable from an OS.
- Mouse Acceleration: There is no way to modify the acceleration curve in OS X, let alone disable acceleration. This is not a problem when you are using a trackpad since the acceleration curve is one of the best out of all OS'es for that, but it is incredibly frustrating when using a mouse. I have gone through many forums and found many other users complaining about this issue, but no one has come up with a decent solution for disabling mouse acceleration. For situations in which I am better off with a mouse, I always hopped over to a non-OS X machine.
- Poor Multi-Monitor Support: Since the menu for each application is in a detached panel that is only displayed on one monitor, this means you will be racking up a lot of mileage on your pointing device to hop between apps on the secondary monitor and their menu on the primary monitor.
- Updating Settings Behind Your Back: For me, this shit started with Microsoft and was one of the big reasons I left their OS. After an update, some of your settings would be changed to whatever they felt you should be using. Apple has since taken up this behavior, doing things like resetting all of your file associations to iTunes after one of their many updates. This didn't happen with my latest update, so maybe they stopped, or at least took a break from this behavior, but it has still left a very bad taste in my mouth.
- Frequent Update Cycles: This would not be too bad of a thing if they didn't regularly remove features they didn't like (but you may have loved) as well as make changes that disrupt your workflow. At this point, I am an old curmudgeon who has everything exactly as he likes it. I don't want to upgrade and run the risk of having the upgrade go south. Such an issue would cause me to have to reinstall all of my apps from scratch and attempt to reconfigure tons of settings to get it to work like it did before the upgrade. And with the update frequent cycles, it won't be long before your current OS version is not supported. Once that happens, Chrome and Firefox support go out the window as well. And don't even get me started on how Apple stops supporting perfectly fine hardware when they come out with new versions of OS X. Apple: you control the hardware in your machines yet you can't be bothered to continue supporting it six years after it is released while Microsoft supported XP on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations for eight years and Linux even longer!
There are many, many more reasons, but these are the biggest gripes. None of them on their own were dealbreakers, but over time they wore on me to the point of driving me back to Linux. While I still use my Mac for some commercial software that isn't available on Linux, it's Linux for everything else.
What exactly is this iOSsification people keep complaining about? There's nothing forced onto you that I can think of.
Quite a few things:
They got rid of spaces. You still have different virtual desktops, but I can no longer assign applications to always open in a particular one. They're also not always there, assigned in a configuration that was easy for me to remember, "from here, go to the desktop above to get to the browser, or the desktop to my right to get to xcode.
Applications no longer quit, instead they keep running in the background, if you click the red button. You can command-q for now, but they still try to retain state. Which is insane. When I open up a new video in quicktime, why would I want the last video that I watched to pop up in a window beside it? I keep having to go and close that other window. (At least now they give me the option to not save the current state of the desktop when I log out. No, I do not want to log back in and see what I was working on before. It's very unlikely I'll be working on the same thing. If I do have something that I always open every time I log in, and I do, I know how to set applications to start automatically every time.)
Applications are auto-saving on me. I don't mind that things auto-save into a backup file, for recovery purposes, but you should NOT overwrite the file I'm working on without my specifically clicking save. I know mac os x lets you get back to previous versions. That's cumbersome unless you're the one who chose to punctuate where each new version starts.
Applications are trying to save to iCloud by default, instead of the local drive. I don't have a problem with iCloud, but it shouldn't be the default location.
The launchpad displays applications in multiple screens and I gotta swipe right to see the other applications. That doesn't make any sense when you have a wheel mouse...I just want to scroll down. The applications folder still exists, so this one doesn't bother me as much, I can avoid using launchpad altogether.
When the iPhone came out, I remember many people saying that apple fully intended to eventually make OS X as locked down as iOS, and a bunch of people dismissing that as conspiracy theories. They have, however, been slowly moving toward that. They released the Mac OS X app store, which isn't really a problem. But then they made it so that you can't install any application that doesn't come from the app store by default, until you go and change the settings to allow it. My prediction is that the next step is going to be making it a setting that you can't get to without going to the command-line, and then they'll just not give you the option, and people will have to jailbreak their macs.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Are you prepared to defend the premise that people are only allowed to be upset by things that are forced upon them? That doesn't seem right to me. Nobody "forces" me to drive my Jeep Liberty but I still fucking hate the god-damned beeping sound it makes all the time. I've never thought "Oh, well you know, I could choose to cartwheel to the store instead of drive, therefore this car, other drivers, traffic, potholes and delays are off limits for annoyance." Nothing else in the world is like that so it seems silly to apply it to computers. Yeah, I could choose to live like the Amish, but I don't think that precludes the legitimacy of negative opinions about aspects of the computer systems I "choose" to use.
What the fuck is it with the Choice Police anyway? What kind of weird ideology is that? Where anything that can be tracked back, no matter how far, to a "choice" suddenly renders the outcome out of bounds for sympathy? It sounds like Republican bullshit to me. "Mmm, you chose to have that second cocktail, therefore you have to carry your rapebaby to term. No complaining! That's what you get for making choices, tsk tsk." Give me a break.