Dakini wrote:Disposablepuppetland wrote:Each of the main desktop OS's have their problems, but Apple irritate me particularly.
For a start, their marketing. It takes hypocrisy to new levels.
With Apple there is no freedom whatsoever. You are totally locked in to Apple products and the Apple way of doing things. It's like a cult.
How so? Get Fink, install all the Linux programs you want on your Mac. The only Apple products I "have to buy" are adaptors to connect my machine to projectors. You don't have to use iTunes, iMovie, iCal... whatever else they have. You can have a non-iPod mp3 player, you can have a non-Apple external hard drive, you can read your photos off a card reader, how are you locked into a cult?
Damnit, can't you just unthinkingly accept what I say as truth without question? Now I have to actually try and remember stuff. I don't use Macs often. I try to avoid them.
To be honest I didn't know about Fink, so that makes quite a difference. I'm mostly going on problems my Mac owning friends have had. While it might technically be possible to replace iTunes or an iPod, in practice that doesn't seem to work so well.
It the hardware where you're really locked in. You have to use an Apple machine, and third party stuff is a bit of a lottery.
I can't stand the OSX GUI either. It's so slow. It takes about 20 clicks to do something that would take three on XP, and after every click you have to wait a few more seconds for some irritating animation.
Do you have an example? I find them both about equally easy to configure. Sometimes there is an issue of figuring out where something is on a mac, but there was also this same problem on windows when I first used it too.
And by irritating animation do you mean the little rainbow swirl that's about the same effect as the hourglass?
No I mean stuff like the dock, and the window animations. Maybe you can turn some of these off, I don't know.
The control panel is poor, although oddly, that needs more clicks. It needs 'ok', 'test', and 'cancel' buttons. The network file sharing set up was particularly frustrating, and didn't seem too reliable compared to Windows and Linux.
Admittedly XP starts off like this when first installed, but at least it only takes about 10 minutes to reconfigure it to work like Windows 2000 - simple and quick.
Why would you want XP to work like 2000?
The Windows 2000 GUI was quick and responsive. XP in classic theme is also good. Vista and Windows 7 seem to be a step backwards.
Thinking about it, the NT GUI is amazingly fast, although lacking many features these days.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do once XP support expires. Windows 7 looks pretty bad. OSX is just horrible. Some of the Linux distros are ok, but they don't run Photoshop, or any games.
Wine. It definitely runs photoshop, I think the best running thing out there is WoW, I don't know which games you play but there's definitely support for them (though it probably varies based on what the people who know enough to code wine play).
Although if you don't like having to click a lot to configure things or use the command line then I'd stick with Ubuntu. The only people I know who have had to spend a significant amount of time tinkering with that are people who had dual monitor setups with it.
Using the command-line is fine, and in fact I have Ubuntu server (no GUI) running my music/video server/backup machine. It was very straightforward to configure the things that came in the repository, but installing and compiling a music player was a chore. Following the never-ending trail of dependencies took hours. Power management support was hopeless too, but that wouldn't really matter on a desktop machine.
I'll have to try Photoshop in Wine, maybe that would be ok, but I suspect games would be a problem. SimCity4 grinds along like a crippled slug even on XP, so I'm not hopeful about that. It's also encumbered with some EA DRM so that might cause trouble.
Half-Life series requires Steam, so I'm not sure how that'll go. Other than that, GTA, Total War series,