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On Fri, 22 Apr 2005, Juerd wrote: > Chris Devers skribis 2005-04-21 17:33 (-0400): > > If I want to install an MP3 player, I can just try a dozen And this seems sane to you? Who wants to spend their life evaluating a dozen mediocre variants of every kind of application they might want to run? If you're "not too picky", wouldn't it generally be best to just have one or two really good ones that you don't have to agonize over? An overabundance of choice isn't necessarily good; it's suffocation. > > Sure, it's an educational experience to have to tweak every damned > > thing just to do *any* damned thing, but at what point does it cease > > to be educational and start to be self-punishment? > > That is exactly what I mean with how a geek uses Linux. This way of > working with an OS is a choice made by the user, as it's by no means > necessary. In my experience, it's a "choice" if I "choose" to do things like, say, use an mp3 player. Or print something. Or get KDE to quit using cursive fonts everywhere that I asked it to use monospace. Or get KDE to decide if it's going to attach menus to windows, Windows-style, or the top of the screen, Mac-style; I can deal with either, but please just pick one. Or... well really the last time I used KDE (about a year ago) it was such an endless source of unnecessary UI fiddliness that there isn't much point in making a big deal about any particular atrocity. The point being that *everything* is configurable, and the defaults on all of these is, in some minor-but-maddening way, insane, so you end up having to spelunk through endless configuration screens trying to get it to all just work in a way that doesn't give you nightmares, and you keep coming across distracting other options that don't actually get you closer to the change you needed to make in the first place, but they sound interesting and possibly useful, so you start making more adjustments, but then you realize that they're only making things worse, so you have to retrace your steps to get back to how things were before, but there's just so many damned options and so many of them seem to be redundant -- but aren't -- so it takes 45 minutes to figure out where you found that setting for FocusFollowsWhim or whatever, and six hours later and you realize that it's 2am and you never got around to doing what you were supposed to be working on at the outset because you've been trying in vain to just get the UI to get out of your way, but it has foiled your efforts at every damned turn. On the bright side, all the text in these configuration screens is now anti-aliased, so obviously, progress is happening at great speed! > > I think it stopped being fun for me about five years ago. > > Five years. Have you really no idea of how much has improved in that > time? I don't know, have I? At work, everyone with Linux runs Debian stable, which just seems like a supreme exercise in masochism to me. But then again, Debian stable is about 40 years old at this point, so maybe it isn't a fair comparison. In the past year or two, I've spent time with recent (as of that point) editions of RedHat and SuSE, and they both seemed "better" in that the fonts were all anti-aliased now, and the installation took a bit less time and was a bit better at figuring out all the irrelevant-to-humans hardware details that you still have to know on Debian, but that was about it. Once you have a running system (which is, I hasten to add, the whole damned point of installing it), the UI didn't seem fundamentally better now than it was a few years ago when I got sick of Linux, or a few years earlier when I first learned *nix on Solaris machines with TWM. My impression of the average "drank the Kool-aid" Linux user's view of system usability today is something similar to, say, how impressed Soviet citizens must have been with their national airline when Aeroflot got their aerial disaster rate down to under once or twice a week. Yes, progress may have happened, but it's still a dangerous jalopy. > > As Peter said, you are *so* ready for a Mac... > > So was I. And then I bought a Mac Mini, only to after a month realize > that Mac OS X is software like all other, and deserves a good piece of > hate. Ah, sorry, I didn't mean to lead you astray there. OSX is, of course, also a hateful, hateful thing. It's just that, for the most part, much (but not all) of the hate is now in individual applications rather than the system itself, so you're a step up from the Linux hatefulness. > I hate how my terminals sometimes lose their access hotkeys. Oh you can do better than that. Tried to use `screen` with Terminal yet? You'll be wallowing in the hate for hours once you give that a go... > I hate how Safari won't let me hide referrer headers. Tried setting up the local Apache instance as a cleansing proxy? > I hate how there is absolutely no telling how keys like home and end > will behave in a text input box. So don't use them. In most cases, Emacs keybindings will work just fine. > I hate that there seems to be no good way to navigate the Finder with > the keyboard (two enter keys and neither executes the selected > program...). Hint: [cmd]+[o]. It could be better, but I find column view to be fairly friendly to all keyboard usage of the Finder. > I hate that you can't just drag an image to the desktop from a browser > to save the image there or use it as wallpaper. Sure you can! Well, not to make it the wallpaper, but dragging images from the browser to the desktop (or a Finder window, or another app) should work just fine. Something broken on your setup maybe? What browser are you seeing this behaviour with? > I hate that there's no easy way to find out where diskspace is going > (like KDE's blocked view in Konqueror). MenuMeters can help with this, I think... <http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/>; > I hate that I can't find where the hell I can set program bindings, so > movies start with VLC instead of Quicktime. Yes, this is annoying. RCDefaultApp helps here: <http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/>; > I hate how long shutting down takes. So don't shut down! Just put the thing to sleep when you're done. > I hate having to reboot after installing non-kernel software updates. > Feels awkwardly like Windows. Yes, this one is annoying. Thankfully, it doesn't happen nearly as often now as it did when OSX first came out. > Maybe I'm better off installing Linux. Maybe. After all... "Linux is free if your time is worthless." :-) -- Chris DeversThere's stuff above here
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