thelinuxlink.net

OK, here's the deal, I finally got my Mac mini, and I've been playing with OS X for about 2 hours now, and I have to say, anyone who claims that Mac OS X is better than Windows is a fucking idiot, this thing is a big pain in the butt to use, it's slow, yeah my KDE is much snappier and much eaisier to use!

If I tried to get my mom to use this, she'd go crazy, as a Linux and former Windows user, this thing is not good for switchers IMHO. Dirk Hohndel said that the average Joe would proably find a better experience on OS X and I'm calling bullshit on that! It's a freaking pain to maximize windows, there aren't a good and quick menu to start applications from ......

And yes I have been playing with this and tried to see what it was all about, but this is just the crapiest desktop experience, besides Windows, that I've ever tried in my life!

All the hype and crap about OS X being the best thing since sliced bread and Steve Jobs's having a wonderful **** ..... ALL BULLSHIT! Heck, OS X doesn't even play OGG files man!!!!!!

But 'ey, it's a superior Apple product right? No! It's an inferior Apple product!

OK, enough ranting, back to installing BSD on this thing!

Eh, I've played around with OS X on my Intel box, and it's a real nice interface, especially for non-geeks, but I grew tired of it rather quickly. I kept finding myself looking for solutions to use all my favorite Linux applications like XMMS, and OpenOffice, trying to play FLAC, and Vorbis files, read Linux file systems, etc. I kept thinking to myself, why bother? I can do everything I want to do in Linux with no hassle. It's amazing that an operating system with all these open source roots can't even play nice with Linux partitions, or play Ogg Vorbis or Theora files.

Wally Balljacker wrote:Eh, I've played around with OS X on my Intel box, and it's a real nice interface, especially for non-geeks

I thought so for a while, but my mom would go crazy over it. Personally I found it frustratingly hard to maximize a window, frustrating to find icons or launchers for my apps.

I actually did get my mom to try it, and she was like "WTF?", when I put her in front of SUSE's default KDE desktop, she was like "That looks nice, now let's check the mail".

So for my mom, Linux or a UNIX with KDE and Firefox is infinently better solution than Mac OS X, and to tell you the truth, I think it is for a lot of other people too.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

Wally Balljacker wrote:Eh, I've played around with OS X on my Intel box, and it's a real nice interface, especially for non-geeks

I thought so for a while, but my mom would go crazy over it. Personally I found it frustratingly hard to maximize a window, frustrating to find icons or launchers for my apps.

I actually did get my mom to try it, and she was like "WTF?", when I put her in front of SUSE's default KDE desktop, she was like "That looks nice, now let's check the mail".

So for my mom, Linux or a UNIX with KDE and Firefox is infinently better solution than Mac OS X, and to tell you the truth, I think it is for a lot of other people too.

I don't know about that. Installing applications on OS X is about as easy as it gets. KDE might make more sense to Windows users, but for older people who have never owned a computer before, I think OS X is alot simpler to use. Too simple in fact. That's why I got frustrated with it, fast. I like changing my icons, theme, window border, and just tinkering with things. Doing that in OS X is damn near impossible without extra 3rd party programs.

For people with kids like us, who can administer their computers for them, KDE or GNOME might be a better choice, but for non geeky people who need to manage their systems themselves, OS X can't be beat in terms of sheer ease of use. I can't imagine my mother adding repositories to her apt sources.list file, or hacking an xorg config file.

Wally Balljacker wrote:I don't know about that. Installing applications on OS X is about as easy as it gets.

Well, my mom surely wouldn't know how to do it, and since both Windows machines from Dell and Macs from Apple come preloaded with the OS and are basically ready to go, I think it's fair that I promote myself as OEM in my mom's case, and I preload SUSE Linux, and it works better than both Windows and Apple for her, even just a default install of SUSE worked great without the multimedia tweaks, she was perfectly happy, so if Novell gets Dell to preload that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 product they have coming up, and if it's possible for people like us to purchase them, I think it'd be a great solution for a lot of people.

Wally Balljacker wrote:KDE might make more sense to Windows users

Something I noticed, KDE seems to be like Windows in a few areas and GNOME like OS X in a few areas, but as you said, KDE makes perfect sense for Windows users.

Wally Balljacker wrote:but for older people who have never owned a computer before, I think OS X is alot simpler to use.

If you're a first time computer user, and you havn't learned the basics of neither Windows, Linux or Mac, I think either one is as complicated to learn as the other one are, but once you learn to use either one of them, you're fine.

Frankly I think Linux is the best solution for people completely new to computers, because it just works, and it does it's job very very well.

Wally Balljacker wrote:Too simple in fact. That's why I got frustrated with it, fast. I like changing my icons, theme, window border, and just tinkering with things. Doing that in OS X is damn near impossible without extra 3rd party programs.

Which is why I'm installing OpenBSD on this Mac mini, gonna put a nice sticker on it too

Wally Balljacker wrote:For people with kids like us, who can administer their computers for them, KDE or GNOME might be a better choice, but for non geeky people who need to manage their systems themselves, OS X can't be beat in terms of sheer ease of use. I can't imagine my mother adding repositories to her apt sources.list file, or hacking an xorg config file.

Dude, you're sounding like if we just traveled five years back in time! Or if we're using Debian, Slackware, Arch or whatever distro that you have to be experienced to use. If you go to Fry's and buy SUSE (I use SUSE as an example in this case because it's the only distro I know of that has a retail version other than Linspire, and Linspire is insecure IMHO, if you make your distro so that users run as root by default, you don't understand UNIX security period!) you'll get a good manual that guides the user through the installation process, and all the way through doing stuff like setting up KMail, Firefox and so forth, heck that's even better documentation than you get from Microsoft, and you'll never even have to even come close to messing with xorg.conf or adding repositories, you just pop the CDs in the drive and you install the distro, and to not be like a total SUSE fanboy here, Fedora and Mandriva does a great job in this area of making it transperant to the user as well, I actually have a Mandrake 10.1 retail box, and it's great too, good manual and good selection of software included.

For old-time Mac users, of course OS X makes the most sense, it's the culture they're used to, but for Windows users I think Linux makes a heck of a lot more sense in a lot of cases, not necessarily all, I don't wanna be a zealot and say it's the best solution for everyone, because it isn't, but what I am saying is that it makes sense for people to use Linux in A LOT of cases. But hey, if you believe that Linux is mostly for the techie type guys like us, and "normal people" should go buy a Mac, be my guest and take that belief, but I believe that despite all the crap people like Leo Laporte, and ITWire or whatever site it was, throws out there about Linux being hard to use, and not being good enough for the average Joe and blah blah blah donkeys can fly blah blah blah, I think Linux is a great OS, I think it's very easy to use, I've tested it's ease of use on my mom, my aunt and my uncle (I have several sets of uncles and aunts, I've only tested this on one of the sets ), all of them was able to do everything they wanted to do with their computer for day-to-day stuff, it almost also worked for my sister, but she wanted to play Sims 2 and was a bitch about learning to use OpenOffice, ohh it's not Microsoft ohhhh, so she uses Windows.

on my daughters imac tangerine 266 I have dual booted to mac osx and linux ubuntu and my daughter never ever wants to deal with mac osx - she always saying make the penguin come up

because she wants to do khangman - tuxpaint, abiword, patato guy etc

she also hates the mac osx interface.

one other thing is ubuntu runs better than osx on this hardware - go figure

jsusanka wrote:on my daughters imac tangerine 266 I have dual booted to mac osx and linux ubuntu and my daughter never ever wants to deal with mac osx - she always saying make the penguin come up

That's quite an intelligent daugher ya got there, are we talking about the next generation of Jes Hall?

jsusanka wrote:because she wants to do khangman - tuxpaint, abiword, patato guy etc

As Dann once said on the show, even though the collection of educational software and software for kids is limited on Linux, the stuff we have is really really good.

jsusanka wrote:she also hates the mac osx interface.

I like being able to quickly maximize my windows by just doubleclicking on a random spot on the window decoration, that's just so awefully handy.
And in general, I don't like the way the OS X interface is limited, and I absolutely hate the hastle you have to go though to get KDE apps like Kontact, Konversation, Kopete and so forth to run, and it's even worse with GNOME apps in my opinion.

jsusanka wrote:one other thing is ubuntu runs better than osx on this hardware - go figure

Well, there you go, if schools could get a bunch of old crusty Macs, and just put Linux on them and let the kids play with them, that would be really great, 'ey uou can get a cheap-ass Mac for like a 50 bucks on eBay.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

jsusanka wrote:she also hates the mac osx interface.

I like being able to quickly maximize my windows by just doubleclicking on a random spot on the window decoration, that's just so awefully handy.

You can do that in Linux BTW

Tsuroerusu wrote:And in general, I don't like the way the OS X interface is limited, and I absolutely hate the hastle you have to go though to get KDE apps like Kontact, Konversation, Kopete and so forth to run, and it's even worse with GNOME apps in my opinion.

I find setting up most KDE apps a breeze. I personally have setup and use kmail, kopete, amarok, koffice, konqueror, akregater, korganizer, and k3b (probly some more too) and I found them easy to use/setup and I love how integrated everything is. You can link a buddy from kopete to a record on kontact and then you can change their info in a unified place and send emails directly from kopete to that contact using kmail, and how in amarok you can select a couple of songs and hit 'burn as audio cd' and it will do that through K3B. KDE has become far better than windows and mac IMHO (despite some minor annoyances I have with it).

CptnObvious999 wrote:You can do that in Linux BTW

Which is why I've trashed that OS X stuff, get da real BSD!

CptnObvious999 wrote:I find setting up most KDE apps a breeze. I personally have setup and use kmail, kopete, amarok, koffice, konqueror, akregater, korganizer, and k3b (probly some more too) and I found them easy to use/setup and I love how integrated everything is. You can link a buddy from kopete to a record on kontact and then you can change their info in a unified place and send emails directly from kopete to that contact using kmail, and how in amarok you can select a couple of songs and hit 'burn as audio cd' and it will do that through K3B. KDE has become far better than windows and mac IMHO (despite some minor annoyances I have with it).

Did I say I had issues with KDE under Linux or *BSD? It's such a freaking headache setting the stuff up on OS X, first of all you have to install the X11 server, which doesn't integrate with Aqua at all, and then you gotta jump to the terminal and do DarwinPorts, and by the time you're done, you could have downloaded Yellowdog a million times and installed it.

I agree with what you saying about KDE being better than Windows and OS X, and it's only getting better.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

CptnObvious999 wrote:I find setting up most KDE apps a breeze. I personally have setup and use kmail, kopete, amarok, koffice, konqueror, akregater, korganizer, and k3b (probly some more too) and I found them easy to use/setup and I love how integrated everything is. You can link a buddy from kopete to a record on kontact and then you can change their info in a unified place and send emails directly from kopete to that contact using kmail, and how in amarok you can select a couple of songs and hit 'burn as audio cd' and it will do that through K3B. KDE has become far better than windows and mac IMHO (despite some minor annoyances I have with it).

Did I say I had issues with KDE under Linux or *BSD? It's such a freaking headache setting the stuff up on OS X, first of all you have to install the X11 server, which doesn't integrate with Aqua at all, and then you gotta jump to the terminal and do DarwinPorts, and by the time you're done, you could have downloaded Yellowdog a million times and installed it.

I agree with what you saying about KDE being better than Windows and OS X, and it's only getting better.

Oh I didn't understand your first post correctly. Though you were talking about setting up and using KDE on a linux box.

I personally have not used Macs very much but the interface can be a little weird at times. Just as long as you are only surfing the web its not too bad but managing a bunch of stuff and opening up programs seems like a chore. But those are just the impressions I have from the 10 minutes I have played with it at my aunts house.

CptnObvious999 wrote:Oh I didn't understand your first post correctly. Though you were talking about setting up and using KDE on a linux box.

I was referring to running KDE apps on Mac OS X.

I guess I'm in the minority here, I really like OS X. But if it's you're first experience with a Mac OS, I can see where it would be frustrating. But I do plan to set up a dual boot system on iBook with either Ubuntu or Yellow Dog when I get a chance.

jamathis wrote:I guess I'm in the minority here, I really like OS X. But if it's you're first experience with a Mac OS, I can see where it would be frustrating.

Yesterday I gave it another chance, I had three hour session, and once again I really have to say that I think Mac OS X sucks compared to KDE and GNOME, and I also think software installation is eaisier under SUSE Linux, Fedora Core and FreeBSD, and heck even OpenBSD for that matter.

Well, for instant messaging I could use Adium right? Sure I could, but I like Kopete a hell of a lot better, and if you go look here, you'll see that Apple "advertises" the UNIX base than OS X do have, and the somewhat FreeBSD components of it, and they say "UNIX users will feel at home in Darwin, the robust BSD environment that underlies Mac OS X.", which is why I think it is completely fair to say that I should be able to run all of the open source apps I run under Linux and FreeBSD on OS X, and holy crap, that is just a big pain in the ass, first of all you need to install Apple's crappy X11 server which doesn't integrate well with Aqua, and then they you need to fiddle around with Darwinports and stuff. Under SUSE Linux and FreeBSD I just use YaST or do pkg_add -r appname, sure it's eaisier to install native OS X Aqua apps, but I don't give a crap, I like UNIX programs such as Kopete, Kontact, OpenOffice, amaroK (I fucking hate iTunes), Konqueror........ and all of 'em are a big pain to get going, and it's unlikely that I can get their latest incarnation without getting even more complicated and compiling the sources myself, which is a big pain in the butt.

jamathis wrote:But I do plan to set up a dual boot system on iBook with either Ubuntu or Yellow Dog when I get a chance.

I actually tried the new Yellowdog 4.1, and it was pretty nice, I just like having access to stuff like the controversial GStreamer plugins and such, and of course the latest and greatest in KDE and GNOME, so I threw Fedora Core 5 on there and that runs VERY well as well, although I think I'm gonna use SUSE 10.1 once it's released.... but that's probably not gonna happen for the next 20 days, as of writing, so I think I'll be using Fedora until then.

jamathis wrote:I guess I'm in the minority here, I really like OS X. But if it's you're first experience with a Mac OS, I can see where it would be frustrating. But I do plan to set up a dual boot system on iBook with either Ubuntu or Yellow Dog when I get a chance.

Ah, don't sweat it. The Apple hate here is strong - sometimes absurdly strong. Besides, 90% of the complaints in this thread basically boil down to "I'm unfamiliar with the OSX way, and can't be bothered to learn it." Not at all dissimilar to how many windows bigots treat their first, and generally only 20 minute experience with linux. At least Linc has some legitimate gripes which he has from actually using it.

Snarkout wrote:Besides, 90% of the complaints in this thread basically boil down to "I'm unfamiliar with the OSX way, and can't be bothered to learn it."

Dude, if Apple actually uses the UNIX base of OS X as a reason why people should use their OS, why shouldn't I be able to do things in UNIX ways on it? And by the way, I have been playing around with the interface and stuff, it's not as if I just sit down for 5 mins. and just give up.