At work I finally gave in. After much resistance and stubbornness my computer at work is running Windows 2000 server. I’m not proud of this, and it’s actually a bit depressing, but I really can’t deal with linux there anymore. Compatibility issues were just taking up too much time, and then I went into work yesterday morning…
Since I hadn’t been at work in a month someone else was using my desk, my computer was in Michael’s office. He brought it out and plugged it in. X wouldn’t start. Michael spent a bit of time configuring it and trying to figure out what had happened to it. Shut down during an upgrade? Hardware issues with some swapped parts? Unfortunately neither of us had the time to screw around with it, we both had work to do. Frustrated I muttered “Just put stupid dumb Windows on it.” So much for my lovely Gentoo raid box %(
Unfortunately I didn’t have time to wait for a Windows install and all the software installing that I’d need, and Michael didn’t have the time to set it up for me anyway. So we looked around for a computer I could use. All the Windows machines were being used. A lonely power mac with OSX 10.1 sat in the corner. OSX is *nix, no problem, I thought.
Now I know better.
I guess this is a lousy way to be introduced to a foreign operating system. I had to use the tools on the system because I wasn’t about to go looking for new software (and risk screwing up the box). Quickly I got very frustrated, the terminal I was using to ssh into the production box didn’t support vim colors… no syntax highlighting!! AAHH! Actually the color support all around in that terminal was pretty lousy, seemed to handle irssi colors fine (of course there were horrible keybinding conflicts) but couldn’t see mutt or vim colors properly. I also couldn’t use the pgup/down keys in terminal, this was annoying, I ended up navigating the files I was working on by /searching through them. I had to open a Word doc, and the only way I could do this was on a Windows machine (the copy of office on the mac was shared with another mac, and you can only have one open at a time), so I had to use a remote desktop program. Now this is the real tricky part, I’m a linux user, who has to paste from windows into mac. Do you have any idea how insane that is? I kept hitting the wrong copy or paste. Shall I talk about the mouse now? It wasn’t a mouse, it was a trackball. I hate trackballs. The keyboard was a nightmare, it was small and loud and the alt key is in the wrong place! IE was the default browser, so I kept ended up using it rather than firefox, and it crashed 4 times during the day. Now that I use mozilla all the time I’m not used to a browser crashing!
It was a long day. I figure that work that could have taken 5 hours took 7 instead. By the time my work was done I was all ready to curse up a storm in irc, and I’m sure people were quite amused. This doesn’t mean that I hate OSX though. I can actually step back from my day’s horrible experience and realize that my problems could easily be worked around with small changes that I’m sure could be made with some tweaking and installing different programs. And from what I saw, I think MacOSX really might have a good future. It gave me a look into what *nix could be. Candy coated and user friendly, even moreso than KDE. I think if they keep on this path and make more and more stuff work well with it it could really go somewhere. Oh, and bring their hardware down a bit in price…
Not that I want to complain more, but I must share my experience with Opera 7.5. Back in the days of Opera 6.x I dealt with the random crashes of the browser because it was so quick and slim and saved my settings when it crashed. A crash wasn’t such a big deal, and I didn’t need to load bulky mozilla (for a lot of that time I was on a 450mhz machine). Opera was great because it was slim. Now with 7 they added all sorts of crap to it, made it heavier. With 7.5 it’s even worse! Built in RSS reader (which is cool because they are the first browser to do it, but not so cool because it
sucks), it has an irc client (I tried it, it makes chatzilla look good), it has all sorts of addons that make me dislike it. I want my browser to browse dammit, not make my breakfast (and a lousy one at that)! So, I stick with mozilla and firefox.
Well today we have plans for doing lots of house stuff, hopefully paint the bedroom, mow the lawn, clean out the fishtank that