::scr A PC user speaks ...

[David Cantrell]

I expect some of you have seen on /. that Apple are soliciting feedback
from PC users who are either thinking of getting a Mac, or have done so
recently.  Here's what I wrote to them:

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I've been a PC user for something like ten years, first with DOS and
Windows 3.1, then Win95, then NT starting in 1995, and then I grew up
and started using Linux.  I have been a professional sysadmin, programmer
and security consultant for several large companies, using NT, Linux and
Solaris, and am also familiar with SGI Irix and have some knowledge of
VMS.  My first serious exposure to the Mac was in 1995 when working at
a major magazine publisher.

I've always admired Apple's hardware.  With very few exceptions, it has
been well-designed, and built to a high quality.  What has let you down
until recently is that fact that your operating system was a steaming
pile of turd.  I don't care that it was "easy to use", because I am an
experienced computer professional and don't need hand-holding.  In fact,
I found the Mac *hard* to use because it lacked such crucial tools as a
command line.  And I actually had to ask for help ejecting disks -
dragging disks to the waste basket to eject them is daft and certainly
not intuitive.  But worst of all, your OS crashed.  It was even less
reliable than Windows.

But now, with OS X, things are different.  Your current hardware is not
as well-built as it used to be - but then, I realise that build quality
had to suffer to get the price down and get volume sales.  The machines
do look good, which is a bonus.  But most importantly, you now have an
operating system which actually operates.  The combination of a Unix
kernel with the ease-of-use of GUI applications is really nice.  I like
that it is a closed hardware platform, as it means your OS is guaranteed
to work out-of-the-box with my hardware and I don't have to dick around
with drivers.  You share this good feature with Sun and the other Unix
vendors.

There are still a couple of things I don't like though.  Having only one
mouse button sucks.  Having your own rendering engine - Quartz - sucks,
as unlike X, it is opaque to the network.  I frequently run apps on one
machine and want to display them elsewhere, either over a LAN or a WAN
link.  On OS X, I can do that by installing XFree86, but that's an ugly
hack and Quartz apps won't work with it so I'm limited to apps I can
compile myself - no benefit from Linux on x86.  The one advantage I can
see to using Quartz is the transparency effects, but they really are
pointless and serve to do nothing more than suck up CPU.  Please, get
rid of them, and use X instead of Quartz.  Turn Aqua into an X window
manager and a widget-set that applications can use to achieve a common
look and feel.  And finally - the widgets are too big and look too
childish.  I'd quite like to see the OS 9 "platinum" look on OS X :-)
Oh, and your documentation is AWFUL.  Luckily, I know enough Unix that
I can find my way around OS X, but I can't find the answers to some of
my questions anywhere in the online help, and even my friendly local
Apple dealer has been unable to help.

-- 
David Cantrell | david@cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  I often reflect that if "privileges" had been called "responsibilities"
  or "duties", I would have saved thousands of hours explaining to people
  why they were only gonna get them over my dead body. 
                 -- Lee K. Gleason in comp.org.decus