var is mysteriously clogged

[Sy Ali]

On 1/6/06, David Thornton <david-FkEgs2FKm2NvBvnq28/GKQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> The Mac camp would speak up at this point and say: I have a system that
> works right but I doin't know how and I don't need to.
<snip>
> I assumed that Sy was in sysadmin mode ( as in; he was taking a
> professional approach the maintaince of a business computer). If on the
> other hand Sy is just being a user on say, a desktop, then go get a mac :P

I had a mac handed to me at work and was able to do anything I wanted
with it.  I gleefully played with it.. and broke it in horrific ways. 
I even found a reproducable bug that destroyed data during a copy
process.  Yes it was reported.. I understand a patch came out just
after that report.  Presumably it's been fixed.

The interface is godawful..* and the experience was just like
windows.. everything "sortof worked" out of the box and absolutely
every single last thing had to be swapped out for some third party
application which "actually worked" (in my opinion, of course).

However, there was a lot of glitter and the effort for a of things was
clearly visible.  The glitter, however, is initially impressive and
then becomes offensive and distracting.  I hate randomly animated
crap.. I hate bubbles and shadows and fades.

It came down to.. I felt that most of the OSX defaults were insane and
nearly impossible to configure.  Now running a well-configured linux
distribution.. things are generally configured in a sane way and it's
fairly trivial to set things the way I want.  For example, KDE's
shortcuts are insane to begin (like ctrl-tab) with but are at least
configurable to be 99% what I want.

As for applications.. under Linux, if it's a nice distribution, it's a
matter of using a package manager to use an alternative, and I'm
generally happy enough with what's available.  Under Windows or the
mac.. it's a matter of endlessly scouring the net.. listening to
various recommendations and repeatedly trying stuff out.  That's much
more work.. even when I'm in a playful mood.

I did a lot of playing around with software on the mac, and really put
an effort into getting used to it.. but it fell down too many times. 
I had flashbacks of windows 3.1 and 95 and trying endless pieces of
software because everything that came with it couldn't quite do what I
wanted.

Heck, I had to download and install a third-party "blank"
screensaver.. how silly is that?


* Cannot quickly navigate the menus with pure key combinations, poor
file management, cannot manipulate windows quickly with just
keystrokes, etc etc.  I've got a list somewhere.. =/
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