I’ve got a couple of weeks of OS X use under my belt now, so I feel remotely qualified to comment on the “Linux vs. OS X” issue, at least as it pertains to the desktop experience. A few disorganized thoughts:
- Don’t underestimate the value of “it just works.” I love to tinker, but even so, there’s a lot of stuff I’d rather not have to work out for myself. To take an example, I remember issuing commands of the form
echo "foo" > /proc/usbin order to get a digital camera to work. No thanks. And thanks. - Bling [ 1 ] is unimportant, except when it’s not. I have to admit that in some sense, I believe that it’s not really code unless it’s displayed as aliased, blocky Courier. On the other hand, I’ve spent more than a few minutes enabling subpixel antialiasing and installing a different look and feel for Netbeans. Xgl, on the first hand, will have to wait.
- 64 bit is all fun and games until somebody loses the ability to run an application. In a contemporary desktop computer, there’s precious little value in 64 bititude right now beyond bragging rights. Besides, as a sensible person, if you’ve got a 64 bit processor, your CPU was made by AMD (this week, anyhow) and those do well with 32 bit applications. On a Linux desktop, all you’re really doing by running a 64-bit version of your favourite distribution is putting barriers between you and that bling, and some not-bling.
- UI effects that don’t improve usability are ultimately annoying. OS X’ default minimization animation (think: a genie being sucked into a bottle) is an example of this; the thumbnail display in the dock of your minimized windows is not. The 3-d rotating cube VM-switching effect in Parallels, however, is still cool. I can justify this …
- Penny Arcade, sometimes, is spot on.
- If OS X weren’t UNIX underneath, I would never have bought a Mac. Well, unless it was something entirely new and interesting. If the MacBook didn’t have (reputed) good battery life and didn’t have a good weight/price ratio, I also probably wouldn’t have bothered. But the hardware is good. Respect the hardware.
If there’s a unifying feature here, it’s that given the way I use a computer, the OS X/Linux differences are not all that significant. My computer use trends towards the textual, and I don’t have much use for a lot of the multimedia stuff, at least not in a big way. Thus, in the end, there’s not a huge amount of value in OS X for me when compared to a modern Linux desktop. But I don’t regret the purchase: I haven’t even tried out iPhoto yet.
[ 1 ] In some Debian package set, there’s a GTK2-based build of Emacs, which looks great and integrates well with a GNOME desktop, which, going by the Debian page, looks like it uses Pango to render text. The least appealing aspect of “stock” Emacs for me these days is the Motifiness of it all.