Mostly I'm 100% with you on all of that, except for one sweeping generalisation.
Tabs. I/hate/ them. Great in a web browser, because web pages, generally, do not change, so I do not need to keep looking at them to see what they now say. I will get to them when I'm ready.
But chat is different. The whole point is that it changes, constantly, and for me at least, that makes tabs useless. I don't care if the tab flashes or otherwise attracts my attention, I still must switch - and it must not, under any circumstances, switch tabs on me.
So beware over-generalising.
Oh, and the one thing that's wrong with Adium: that bloody duck. Ban the sodding duck; I do not care for software for three-year-olds. No icon, no sodding honking sounds, not even a tiny duck silhouette in my toolbar icons, thankyou. No bloody ducks. At all. Anywhere, ever, for any reason.
Interesting. I/have/ actually noticed this behaviour in the past, but now that I try it in RC3, usage shoots up - from ~450M by ~200M with 4 copies of that page - but when I close them again, it immediately drops back down again. This is on Windows XP SP2, incidentally, which normally fairs much worse on such tests than Linux does for me.
Not eveyone shares your tastes for flashier coloured interfaces. Personally, I think all your suggested changes are much less pleasant to look at than the original. NeXTstep is a thing of beauty, restrained and subtle and elegant. Adding themes to it is like draping Michelangelo's "David" in pink lace ruffles and frills - it merely detracts from the original beauty.
It's themable. Go play to your heart's content, but don't force your changes on anyone. The original is simple, plain, unfussy and easy on the eye. You may find it boring but to lots of people plain and simple is actually attractive.
For my two-penn'orth, the original scheme looks ten times better than any theme on any Linux GUI I have ever seen. KDE is pug-ugly, GNOME is only marginally better. The only half-way professional looking themes out there are Redhat's Bluecurve and Ubuntu's default muted earth-tones. All the others look like tart's handbags.
Another typically enigmatic unexplained US-centric/. story. So what is this "AdultSwim" thing? I've looked at its/their website and am no more enlightened. Something to do with cartoons?
The name made me think of, I don't know, webcams at the local pool? Underwater pr0n?
If you want a modern BeOS, go buy Zeta. Yes, it's closed source, but they *have* the BeOS sources. But their product and keep BeOS alive, or get a lot of friends to have a whip-round & buy YellowTab itself instead!
I'm/considering/ going, as it'll be as cinematic event, but the other 5 were all rubbish and progressively worse the further you go. Actually, to be fair, I'm basing my opinion of #5,/Clones/, on hearsay - I couldn't be bothered to go see it nor rent it.
So, maybe, if I can find a really cheap ticket. But the trailer makes it look very poor indeed - just another bit of mindless children's-story telling, driven mainly by flashy special effects.
So now that SuSE has gone all big-American-corporate, the remaining members of the UnitedLinux project are consolidating. How long until MandrakeConnectiva acquires TurboLinux, I wonder? Then they'd have all the emerging markets covered - for whatever that's worth.
For my money, I reckon Red Hat should have bought Ximian, rather than SuSE, thus getting all the GNOME folks under one roof. And then Mandrake, to acquire an easy consumer distro; Mandrake's Red Hat based anyway. SuSE & Connectiva should have merged, bringing their KDE and APT-RPM goodness together instead. That would have made more sense for Novell to acquire. Or Sun...
I'm sorry too. I don't meant to be rude about anybody's work.
And yes, certainly, you are right - people *do* demand this, and yes, that minimal rounded-corners theme isn't too bad, and the Aqua-like one does look, from a static image, much like the real thing. I'd need to see it "live" to see if it has the authentic animated fluidity of Apple's original.
But my point was two-fold.
1. Aqua looks cool but it doesn't/add/ anything to the usability of OS X. It's just eye candy. OS X's GUI is actually less capable and less flexible in many areas than NeXT, as is much of the OS.
Anyone who dismisses a GUI because it doesn't have pretty themes is a damned fool and should be ignored.
2. Most modern GUI themes are actually pretty ugly. In fact, I, like many people - but we're not vocal teenagers - generally *hate* themes and skins. Several of my one-time favourite Windows applications, like Trillian and WinAmp and even the Mozilla suite, are blighted by their skins. No matter how good the skin, it is *not* the original OS interface, and common UIs are one of *the* most important aspects of the GUI. Having every program look different makes the whole system much harder to use.
For example, in the Trillian chat client, even if you load a skin that *looks* like Windows Luna, windows' title bars do not change colour to indicate which is active, and if you change the OS colour scheme, themed windows do not change to match.
Summary: DOWN WITH SKINS AND THEMES! They are a nuisance and a hindrance and a pain. They're only a toy for children.
You know what they remind me of? Someone taking a masterpiece painting - the Mona Lisa, say - and drawing a beard and moustache and glasses on it in marker pen.
They are as ugly as the hind end of a dog with a hat on it. The first few minimal ones just make the clean GNUstep app look amateurish and childish with misaligned text in the buttons and garish coloured arrows to indicate the default button; the ones that attempt to imitate Aqua are actively ugly.
Leave well alone. Please. It's fine as it is. You will learn to appreciate the many virtues of simplicity in time. Adding in shading and pattern fills just because you can is a dreadful idea.
Taking the lovely clean simple uncluttered unfussy lines of the classic original and grafting on round buttons and gradient shades and fountain fills... it's/horrible./ It ends up looking like a tart's handbag, even nastier than OS X 10.0!
Shaded liquid effects on buttons. Yes, very nice, but what about when the OS can't decide on when something's a default button or not. E.g. in the Installer when loading a service pack. Look at the Continue button. Plain grey - not default - but the blue-tinged edge-shadow of a default button. Ugly *and* unhelpful.
Pinstripes. Fading away now in 10.3 but still there in the menu bar.
Moving the close control over next to max/min just 'cos it looks prettier. No indicators inside them of what each does until you go near, because they could. Great if you're colour-blind, say, or have poor motor skills.
Magnification in the Dock. Genie/Shrink effects to/from the Dock. Fading of messages in Mail.app when you move the selection bar. Drop shadows behind windows/but/ this has meant the removal of window edges.
The brushed-steel effect, used everywhere indiscriminately now in 10.3. Once Apple claimed it was for "media" apps; not any more.
It's all very pretty, but it's just eye candy. It doesn't/add/ anything, it doesn't/do/ anything useful.
And no, I'm not a NeXT freak. I've never even/used/ a real NeXTStep machine. I just know good design when I see it.
NeXTStep always was, and remains, *the* single most refined, elegant and attractive computer user interface there has *ever* been and nothing else in the world comes close apart from its own descendant, OS X - and Aqua has an excess of eyecandy and textures and needless crap, just because they could. If I could disable it all and go back to the NeXT interface, I would, in a second. For my Windows boxes, one of the first things I do on installation is define a custom colourscheme of NeXT's muted greys and get rid of all the shaded title bars and other needless crap that just pollutes the GUI.
Windows XP's Luna is lairy and Teletubbies-like but not actually garish. SuSE's default KDE theme is so loud it almost makes my eyes bleed and the same goes for most Linux GUIs. Only Redhat's Bluecurve is *remotely* professional-looking and it's too fussy with its irritating and distracting textures and stripe effects. [Shudders in delicate disgust]
Most of the themes I've ever seen for xNix GUIs look like they were designed by colourblind teenage heavy metal freaks. I have yet to see/any/ theme for the NeXT-like window managers (WindowMaker, AfterStep, Blackbox, Fluxbox etc.) which is anything less than tragic. They look like a beautiful piece of architecture which has been "tagged" by some mindless cretin with a spraycan.
Please $DEITY may GNUstep never lose its NeXTish elegance in favour of the tasteless crud that pervades the rest of the desktop world.
Save us from GUIs designed by the sort of kid who'd buy a Porsche and paint it in orange and green flames with a few skulls and chrome highlights. Or the sort of person who thinks that a PC is somehow improved by putting a window in the side, filling it with dayglo neon plastic and a few striplights. I mean,/really./ Some of us out here have/passed/ puberty now, you know?
Yes, it's the same size as other Powerbooks. We know that. It's probably the same unit, to save costs.
The points are, though, that:
#1 - the Powerbook keyboard is/already/ reduced in size. Small cursor keys, small function keys, some functions overloaded onto existing keys with Fn and so on.
#2 - with all the spare real estate on the 17" PB, there's room not only to expand all those keys to full desktop size and add in the missing ones, there's room for a separate editing/cursor cluster and a numeric keypad.
Even if it were just a BTO option so that the weirdos who can't cope with off-centre keyboards can still have their cramped one.
Most 17" laptops do this and the Powerbook is not only slightly functionally impaired, it looks silly without it, too.
Airy, wasn't it? Staff were carefully escorting people on and off the aircraft steps at Ronaldsway. Small pensioners were nearly being blown away. Most entertaining.
After a adolescence of Manx winters, I went for a stroll during the "Great Hurricane" of 1987 while at University in leafy Surrey. I thought there was a bit of a blow on, but nothing special - I'd walked the dog many times in far worse...
It freaks me out every time I see a mention of that online. It's the school I used to go to - indeed right now I'm only a few miles away, back on the Isle of Man for the holidays. We used to have to do that quiz every year and we all hated it!
Anyway, some information...
[1] KWC is not a 'college', really, despite its name. It's a primary and secondary boarding and school, these days, for boys and girls. (When I started there, it was male-only.)
[2] It's in the Isle of Man on the outskirts of the town of Castletown and the village of Ballasalla. This means it is not in the UK, strictly: the Isle of Man is an independant protectorate of the British crown. The Manx Tynwald is the oldest government in the world - 1,025 years of continuous rule.
This may be so, but then, she's used that to give the design more flexibility - as is mentioned several times in the story.
The "full machine" - as opposed to the joystick toy - is the C-One reconfigurable computer. It does rather more than emulate a C64 - from its site:
The FPGA programs - so-called 'cores' - turn the C-One into clones of famous 80's computers like the C64, VIC-20, plus/4, TI-99/4a, Atari 2600, Atari 400/800 series, Sinclair Spectrum, ZX81, Schneider CPC and many more.
That version has a 65c816 CPU and a slot for adding other chips. I suggest you read the site. Ms Ellsworth is rather more than just an FPGA programmer, and frankly, even if that were all, it's still a pretty damned impressive bit of programming - even given the number of C64 emulators there are.
[1] On the latest SuSE 9.2, try to play, say, a DivX clip. Ponder the inscrutable message about missing codecs. [2] Go to www.videolan.org [3] Download the latest VLC in SuSE package format. Stick it on your desktop or somewhere. [4] Click it in KDE. Note how KDE doesn't know what the hell an RPM is any more. [5] Open YAST. Give your root password. Notice how ticking the "keep password" box *doesn't* in fact remember it for next time, same as in SuSE 9.1. [6] Go into add/remove software. Discover how there is no way to open a nominated package from disk. [7] Go into "change installation sources"./Add/ (not replace or edit, now, careful - and be very careful, you're in as root). Add the desktop as a source. [8] Go back into add/remove programs. Note how there's no "install new apps" option or anything. No, you have to search for the app you've just added. [9] Search for VLC. Find VLC. Tell it to install VLC. [10] Marvel at the vast list of dependencies that YaST throws up which it has/no idea/ how to resolve. Consider how even ten years ago Debian had fixed this problem with APT.
You seriously think this is a good software installation system?
It's a PoS! It's rubbish. Windows users don't have this kind of crap; neither do Mac users. Debian users/on Linux/ don't, so long as it's in a repository somewhere. You're stuffed if it isn't, of course.
YaST is crap at this kind of thing. If it's not on the disks SuSE provided, you are *NO* better off than with raw RPM - and that's a broken bit of trash as well.
The OS X Finder isn't as good or polished as the old MacOS 9 one, but if you've never used that, you won't know. And the column view is very good to have.
I'd like a navigable tree view, like Explorer.
In general, I'd like more keyboard controls. I use the keyboard extensively on Windows and Linux+GNOME. In my Mac offline CIX reader, Vienna, which is derived from a Windows app and is so largely keyboard-driven, my screensaver regularly kicks in 'cos I haven't touched my mouse in 15min. I'd like that to be a more widespread problem, ISWYIM.
I'd like the ability to customise the Dock more, but you can get around that with DragThing and similar apps like Dock-It. Much lost OS9 functionality can be restored with "haxies" from Unsanity.
In general, I don't miss much. I miss more features from MacOS 9 than from Windows, but MacOS 9 was never stable or reliable enough to be my mainstream OS. OS X is about the most reliable OS I have. I've seen more crashes on Linux, and that's saying something.
Tho' I know little detail about the differences in the ported OpenStep from the "native" one, and I'd like to. I presume it had significant limitations & missing features? Not that NextStep was a world-class OS in those days, really. E.g. I read of signficant problems if its memory was maxed out - as in, reboot time.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly I'm 100% with you on all of that, except for one sweeping generalisation.
/hate/ them. Great in a web browser, because web pages, generally, do not change, so I do not need to keep looking at them to see what they now say. I will get to them when I'm ready.
Tabs. I
But chat is different. The whole point is that it changes, constantly, and for me at least, that makes tabs useless. I don't care if the tab flashes or otherwise attracts my attention, I still must switch - and it must not, under any circumstances, switch tabs on me.
So beware over-generalising.
Oh, and the one thing that's wrong with Adium: that bloody duck. Ban the sodding duck; I do not care for software for three-year-olds. No icon, no sodding honking sounds, not even a tiny duck silhouette in my toolbar icons, thankyou. No bloody ducks. At all. Anywhere, ever, for any reason.
Interesting. I /have/ actually noticed this behaviour in the past, but now that I try it in RC3, usage shoots up - from ~450M by ~200M with 4 copies of that page - but when I close them again, it immediately drops back down again. This is on Windows XP SP2, incidentally, which normally fairs much worse on such tests than Linux does for me.
Not eveyone shares your tastes for flashier coloured interfaces. Personally, I think all your suggested changes are much less pleasant to look at than the original. NeXTstep is a thing of beauty, restrained and subtle and elegant. Adding themes to it is like draping Michelangelo's "David" in pink lace ruffles and frills - it merely detracts from the original beauty.
It's themable. Go play to your heart's content, but don't force your changes on anyone. The original is simple, plain, unfussy and easy on the eye. You may find it boring but to lots of people plain and simple is actually attractive.
For my two-penn'orth, the original scheme looks ten times better than any theme on any Linux GUI I have ever seen. KDE is pug-ugly, GNOME is only marginally better. The only half-way professional looking themes out there are Redhat's Bluecurve and Ubuntu's default muted earth-tones. All the others look like tart's handbags.
Another typically enigmatic unexplained US-centric /. story. So what is this "AdultSwim" thing? I've looked at its/their website and am no more enlightened. Something to do with cartoons?
The name made me think of, I don't know, webcams at the local pool? Underwater pr0n?
If you want a modern BeOS, go buy Zeta. Yes, it's closed source, but they *have* the BeOS sources. But their product and keep BeOS alive, or get a lot of friends to have a whip-round & buy YellowTab itself instead!
I suspect 10K people is around the total number of people who ever bought BeOS - and you'd have a /really/ hard time finding that many donors now.
OTOH, someone like Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu could buy it out of petty cash...
I'm /considering/ going, as it'll be as cinematic event, but the other 5 were all rubbish and progressively worse the further you go. Actually, to be fair, I'm basing my opinion of #5, /Clones/, on hearsay - I couldn't be bothered to go see it nor rent it.
So, maybe, if I can find a really cheap ticket. But the trailer makes it look very poor indeed - just another bit of mindless children's-story telling, driven mainly by flashy special effects.
Oh, well *done!* Thanks!
/heard/ of this chap over here...
Came looking to the discussion solely for a link. I'm British, we've never
So now that SuSE has gone all big-American-corporate, the remaining members of the UnitedLinux project are consolidating. How long until MandrakeConnectiva acquires TurboLinux, I wonder? Then they'd have all the emerging markets covered - for whatever that's worth.
For my money, I reckon Red Hat should have bought Ximian, rather than SuSE, thus getting all the GNOME folks under one roof. And then Mandrake, to acquire an easy consumer distro; Mandrake's Red Hat based anyway. SuSE & Connectiva should have merged, bringing their KDE and APT-RPM goodness together instead. That would have made more sense for Novell to acquire. Or Sun...
I'm sorry too. I don't meant to be rude about anybody's work.
/add/ anything to the usability of OS X. It's just eye candy. OS X's GUI is actually less capable and less flexible in many areas than NeXT, as is much of the OS.
And yes, certainly, you are right - people *do* demand this, and yes, that minimal rounded-corners theme isn't too bad, and the Aqua-like one does look, from a static image, much like the real thing. I'd need to see it "live" to see if it has the authentic animated fluidity of Apple's original.
But my point was two-fold.
1. Aqua looks cool but it doesn't
Anyone who dismisses a GUI because it doesn't have pretty themes is a damned fool and should be ignored.
2. Most modern GUI themes are actually pretty ugly. In fact, I, like many people - but we're not vocal teenagers - generally *hate* themes and skins. Several of my one-time favourite Windows applications, like Trillian and WinAmp and even the Mozilla suite, are blighted by their skins. No matter how good the skin, it is *not* the original OS interface, and common UIs are one of *the* most important aspects of the GUI. Having every program look different makes the whole system much harder to use.
For example, in the Trillian chat client, even if you load a skin that *looks* like Windows Luna, windows' title bars do not change colour to indicate which is active, and if you change the OS colour scheme, themed windows do not change to match.
Summary: DOWN WITH SKINS AND THEMES! They are a nuisance and a hindrance and a pain. They're only a toy for children.
I almost want to sob into my keyboard.
You know what they remind me of? Someone taking a masterpiece painting - the Mona Lisa, say - and drawing a beard and moustache and glasses on it in marker pen.
They are as ugly as the hind end of a dog with a hat on it. The first few minimal ones just make the clean GNUstep app look amateurish and childish with misaligned text in the buttons and garish coloured arrows to indicate the default button; the ones that attempt to imitate Aqua are actively ugly.
Leave well alone. Please. It's fine as it is. You will learn to appreciate the many virtues of simplicity in time. Adding in shading and pattern fills just because you can is a dreadful idea.
[Moans] No, no, no, NO!
/horrible./ It ends up looking like a tart's handbag, even nastier than OS X 10.0!
Taking the lovely clean simple uncluttered unfussy lines of the classic original and grafting on round buttons and gradient shades and fountain fills... it's
What am I referring to? OK, here's some examples.
/but/ this has meant the removal of window edges.
/add/ anything, it doesn't /do/ anything useful.
/used/ a real NeXTStep machine. I just know good design when I see it.
Shaded liquid effects on buttons. Yes, very nice, but what about when the OS can't decide on when something's a default button or not. E.g. in the Installer when loading a service pack. Look at the Continue button. Plain grey - not default - but the blue-tinged edge-shadow of a default button. Ugly *and* unhelpful.
Pinstripes. Fading away now in 10.3 but still there in the menu bar.
Moving the close control over next to max/min just 'cos it looks prettier. No indicators inside them of what each does until you go near, because they could. Great if you're colour-blind, say, or have poor motor skills.
Magnification in the Dock. Genie/Shrink effects to/from the Dock. Fading of messages in Mail.app when you move the selection bar. Drop shadows behind windows
The brushed-steel effect, used everywhere indiscriminately now in 10.3. Once Apple claimed it was for "media" apps; not any more.
It's all very pretty, but it's just eye candy. It doesn't
And no, I'm not a NeXT freak. I've never even
You have *got* to be *kidding!*
/any/ theme for the NeXT-like window managers (WindowMaker, AfterStep, Blackbox, Fluxbox etc.) which is anything less than tragic. They look like a beautiful piece of architecture which has been "tagged" by some mindless cretin with a spraycan.
/really./ Some of us out here have /passed/ puberty now, you know?
NeXTStep always was, and remains, *the* single most refined, elegant and attractive computer user interface there has *ever* been and nothing else in the world comes close apart from its own descendant, OS X - and Aqua has an excess of eyecandy and textures and needless crap, just because they could. If I could disable it all and go back to the NeXT interface, I would, in a second. For my Windows boxes, one of the first things I do on installation is define a custom colourscheme of NeXT's muted greys and get rid of all the shaded title bars and other needless crap that just pollutes the GUI.
Windows XP's Luna is lairy and Teletubbies-like but not actually garish. SuSE's default KDE theme is so loud it almost makes my eyes bleed and the same goes for most Linux GUIs. Only Redhat's Bluecurve is *remotely* professional-looking and it's too fussy with its irritating and distracting textures and stripe effects. [Shudders in delicate disgust]
Most of the themes I've ever seen for xNix GUIs look like they were designed by colourblind teenage heavy metal freaks. I have yet to see
Please $DEITY may GNUstep never lose its NeXTish elegance in favour of the tasteless crud that pervades the rest of the desktop world.
Save us from GUIs designed by the sort of kid who'd buy a Porsche and paint it in orange and green flames with a few skulls and chrome highlights. Or the sort of person who thinks that a PC is somehow improved by putting a window in the side, filling it with dayglo neon plastic and a few striplights. I mean,
Yes, it's the same size as other Powerbooks. We know that. It's probably the same unit, to save costs.
/already/ reduced in size. Small cursor keys, small function keys, some functions overloaded onto existing keys with Fn and so on.
The points are, though, that:
#1 - the Powerbook keyboard is
#2 - with all the spare real estate on the 17" PB, there's room not only to expand all those keys to full desktop size and add in the missing ones, there's room for a separate editing/cursor cluster and a numeric keypad.
Even if it were just a BTO option so that the weirdos who can't cope with off-centre keyboards can still have their cramped one.
Most 17" laptops do this and the Powerbook is not only slightly functionally impaired, it looks silly without it, too.
Coo, lookit that!
Wouldn't be right without a mouse, tho'.
My PDAs run EPOC and Linux, so I can't even try it...
The best Mac game EVAH. Recently found a copy for my Classic II. Gorgeous. Wonderful use of the mouse for control, too.
All else is heresy!
Aaargh! They're everywhere!
Indeed. If you were a landowning male of voting age, anyway. Wouldn't want untermenschen such as women voting, after all, would we?
P.S. Hi, Adrian!
Airy, wasn't it? Staff were carefully escorting people on and off the aircraft steps at Ronaldsway. Small pensioners were nearly being blown away. Most entertaining.
After a adolescence of Manx winters, I went for a stroll during the "Great Hurricane" of 1987 while at University in leafy Surrey. I thought there was a bit of a blow on, but nothing special - I'd walked the dog many times in far worse...
It freaks me out every time I see a mention of that online. It's the school I used to go to - indeed right now I'm only a few miles away, back on the Isle of Man for the holidays. We used to have to do that quiz every year and we all hated it!
Anyway, some information...
[1] KWC is not a 'college', really, despite its name. It's a primary and secondary boarding and school, these days, for boys and girls. (When I started there, it was male-only.)
[2] It's in the Isle of Man on the outskirts of the town of Castletown and the village of Ballasalla. This means it is not in the UK, strictly: the Isle of Man is an independant protectorate of the British crown. The Manx Tynwald is the oldest government in the world - 1,025 years of continuous rule.
The "full machine" - as opposed to the joystick toy - is the C-One reconfigurable computer. It does rather more than emulate a C64 - from its site:That version has a 65c816 CPU and a slot for adding other chips. I suggest you read the site. Ms Ellsworth is rather more than just an FPGA programmer, and frankly, even if that were all, it's still a pretty damned impressive bit of programming - even given the number of C64 emulators there are.
You have *GOT* to be kidding.
/Add/ (not replace or edit, now, careful - and be very careful, you're in as root). Add the desktop as a source. /no idea/ how to resolve. Consider how even ten years ago Debian had fixed this problem with APT.
/on Linux/ don't, so long as it's in a repository somewhere. You're stuffed if it isn't, of course.
Here's a test for you, then.
Try this.
[1] On the latest SuSE 9.2, try to play, say, a DivX clip. Ponder the inscrutable message about missing codecs.
[2] Go to www.videolan.org
[3] Download the latest VLC in SuSE package format. Stick it on your desktop or somewhere.
[4] Click it in KDE. Note how KDE doesn't know what the hell an RPM is any more.
[5] Open YAST. Give your root password. Notice how ticking the "keep password" box *doesn't* in fact remember it for next time, same as in SuSE 9.1.
[6] Go into add/remove software. Discover how there is no way to open a nominated package from disk.
[7] Go into "change installation sources".
[8] Go back into add/remove programs. Note how there's no "install new apps" option or anything. No, you have to search for the app you've just added.
[9] Search for VLC. Find VLC. Tell it to install VLC.
[10] Marvel at the vast list of dependencies that YaST throws up which it has
You seriously think this is a good software installation system?
It's a PoS! It's rubbish. Windows users don't have this kind of crap; neither do Mac users. Debian users
YaST is crap at this kind of thing. If it's not on the disks SuSE provided, you are *NO* better off than with raw RPM - and that's a broken bit of trash as well.
Nothing significant.
The OS X Finder isn't as good or polished as the old MacOS 9 one, but if you've never used that, you won't know. And the column view is very good to have.
I'd like a navigable tree view, like Explorer.
In general, I'd like more keyboard controls. I use the keyboard extensively on Windows and Linux+GNOME. In my Mac offline CIX reader, Vienna, which is derived from a Windows app and is so largely keyboard-driven, my screensaver regularly kicks in 'cos I haven't touched my mouse in 15min. I'd like that to be a more widespread problem, ISWYIM.
I'd like the ability to customise the Dock more, but you can get around that with DragThing and similar apps like Dock-It. Much lost OS9 functionality can be restored with "haxies" from Unsanity.
In general, I don't miss much. I miss more features from MacOS 9 than from Windows, but MacOS 9 was never stable or reliable enough to be my mainstream OS. OS X is about the most reliable OS I have. I've seen more crashes on Linux, and that's saying something.
OK, understood and agreed.
Tho' I know little detail about the differences in the ported OpenStep from the "native" one, and I'd like to. I presume it had significant limitations & missing features? Not that NextStep was a world-class OS in those days, really. E.g. I read of signficant problems if its memory was maxed out - as in, reboot time.