Well this was a long post about what annoys me about OSX (new shiny iBook). But since it ate my post, and there seems to be no DAMN support in the browser for Ctrl-Z (undo) for a textarea. How lame is that?
No my friends, OSX doesn't "just work". It's pretty, and it's shiny for a Unix, but it's not as good as KDE yet. Contraversial, eh?
It took me about 4 months to warm up to the 'lick me' gui and such....give it time
IE, Chimera and Mozilla all support cmd-z for undo in textareas. I personally use Mozilla. Chimera had a tendency to crash and had no progress indicator on downloaded files. IE 5.2 for some reason couldn't handle PNG, even though it's supposed to. Mozilla 1.1b here works well, fast and does what I want.
As for KDE3, I ran it from about a week after 3.0 was released until a few weeks back when I got this iBook, and there's no comparison. I'll take column view in Finder over any filesystem view in KDE any day. I did all my filesystem manipulation under KDE from the command line, I mostly use the finder in OSX. I'll still take Mozilla over Konq for web surfing. I never liked the rest of the KDE apps, hated Kate, they had no IRC solution worth mentioning, and XMMS was the mp3 player of choice.
I turned on Swing hardware accel and turned off font smoothing in jEdit, and it's only a hair slower than on my win2k box, and more than fast enough to use regularly. I also played with the BBEdit demo and found it to be a pretty good editor, even though it doesnt indent right.
The one app I do miss from KDE is Konsole. Terminal.app is OK, but I've struggled with font sizes, and I really miss Konsole's tabs.
Other than that, I miss nothing else about KDE or Linux.
Granted, it does take a bit of getting used to the interface differences. If your criteria is "I want this to work just like KDE" then you're likely to be disappointed. It doesnt work like KDE, or Gnome, or CDE, or Windows or any other interface out there. You can either embrace the OSX setup or fight it. I, for one, have largely found it to be incredibly intuitive once you learn the key commands.
In the end, my recommendation to you is to run what you're comfortable with, whether that's OSX on an iBook or BeOS on a vaio. Machines (And their operating systems) are tools and not the religious icons many try to make them to be. Dogma is dogma, and fundamentalist zealotry is the same whether the message is "Run OSX" or "Drink the KoolAid".
For me, it does "Just Work", and work better than any operating system I've ever used, all the way back to my Atari ST running TOS and GEM.
While I personally believe that you, a person who changes their text editor as often as you change your socks, could adapt to OSX and love it, I don't have any evangelistic notion to call you out if it doesn't work. If you hear me gushing about it, it's because I'm shocked at how well it does work for me, not because I think you're an idiot if you don't get it. (Which I don't.)
Re:Yep.
Matts on 2002-07-30T17:08:01
The biggest annoyance so far in my list is definitely the Ctrl-Z thing. That simply did not work in IE (the default browser) and I had tried every key combination going (I'm not blind to the fact that most key controls are now Command+Letter, rather than Ctrl+Letter). Seems to work in Chimera though, so I'm making that my default browser for now.
Next thing is word-delete. Word selection works fine via alt-left/right while holding shift (and navigation works fine while not holding shift), but alt-delete doesn't delete a word like Ctrl-delete would do in Win/KDE, which is pretty annoying for someone who spends all his time at a keyboard.
I'll now re-type the annoyances list and see what people think.Re:Yep.
ct on 2002-07-30T19:58:05
OK, I'll give you that one. I had to test it out because I'd never used that combo. I'll address what I found in the reply to your newer comment.Re:Yep.
pjm on 2002-07-31T06:35:20
Hmm, the word delete thing seems somewhat variable.
In the terminal you can use esc-delete to "back-kill" a word. (Guess this is an emacsy binding thing, same as ctl+a, ctl+e and so forth.)
Explorer seems to obey the option+delete (== alt+delete) command fine, as do several other applications I tried (the Finder, for example, when you're editing a filename). Chimera, too, seems to behave as expected in this respect, and even takes out the intervening space, unlike IE.
Not terribly consistent I'm afraid.
According to Antoine, _OS X: The Missing Manual_ is well worth having. While I usually shy away from books that explain OSs -- they should be intuitive imho -- this one sounds good and the fact that OS X tries so hard to hide the complexity means that having a book that shows what's behind the curtains probably helps.
