I recently got a MacBook for work, and thought, “Hey, here’s a chance to finally stop mucking about with all the inconvenient things about Linux! Flash won’t be broken half the time, I can use things like VMWare Fusion and Adobe Lightroom… it’ll be great!” So I installed 10.4, and started trying to get some work done. Here’s my thoughts for that day.

Bad stuff

Spaces is a total joke. Every time you open an application it switches workspaces to wherever the application was last. You can enter spaces to drag apps around, but that means that if you want, say, a new firefox window on the current workspace, you need to switch to another workspace, fire up a new window, enter spaces, drag the new window back to the space you want, and exit spaces to the new workspace. It’s completely broken.

Also, “new window” is a difficult concept. I wasn’t able to map a keyboard shortcut to it, even after giving up on the OS X keybinds configuration pane. Vague mutterings on the internet suggest you can write an Applescript program to accomplish this, and link it into quicksilver, but that’s still more keystrokes than I need, and Spaces gets in the way again.

The zoom button is dumb. It never does what I want–namely, seeing much more of the window. Invariably it does something ridiculous like shrink in one direction and give me 40 extra pixels in the other. No maximization–and no horizontal or vertical maximization either. No window snapping. No alt-drag to move windows. No alt-middle-drag to resize. In fact, no middle mouse bindings at all. Huh?

Why doesn’t enter open a program or file? Which are you going to do more often–open something, or rename it? Why does the enter key mean “confirm/submit/activate” in all other OS X contexts but the finder?

Home and end don’t do anything like what you’d expect them to do. The terminal does default to Bash now, which is a great improvement over tcsh, but still has broken backspace, nav keys, and arrow mappings.

Good stuff

Two-finger panning is awesome. However, it’s just emulating (like the Mighty Mouse) two independent scroll wheels, which can’t be active at the same time. Hence you can’t (as you might readily expect from both the Mighty Mouse and the touchpad) pan at a 45-degree angle; you’re limited to awkward horizontal or vertical panning but not both at the same time. Oh well.

The keyboard feels pretty good. Keys are responsive, though sometimes you have to hammer on them. I prefer the Dell Latitude keyboard–tactile feedback is a little more clear, and it doesn’t take as much force to ensure a keystroke is made. The fn/ctrl/alt/meta arrangement is a little weird but not bad. I do, however, question why they opted for half-size arrow keys and no navigation keys at all, when my Latitude fits all of those in a smaller chassis.

The screen is bright and clear! Slightly blue-tinted, but even color and brightness across the whole surface. It’s a nice box to work with, on that alone. Integrated microphone and camera are fantastic. Little things like the magsafe connector and magnetic clips to hold the lid shut are satisfying and unobtrusive.

The box as a whole is fast, and the 500GB drive on my macbook pro is great. The wireless is kinda flaky though–something I’ve noticed from most Apple laptops over the last 4 years in Sys/Net.

OS X is really slick. The apps are fantastically designed, and everything works together. I also loved the widgets layer–a lot like dockapps but prettier. If it weren’t for the broken window management and weird application model, I’d use it on a regular basis. Oh, and it needs Apt.

Bottom Line

I gave up on OS X and installed Ubuntu. More on that in the next post.