Mind over Matters: Rumbles of my mind.. Echo in this blog..

I have always wanted to get my hands on to a mac OS. It has amazed me over the past. Its UI and some of its applications have been so mind numbing that i have always thought that no other OS on earth could come near it in terms of usability. I recently got to lay my hands on the latest Mac OS X (leopard). I had also been using the latest version of opensuse (version 10.3) on my laptop. (well i have windows xp too.. but thats nowhere in the race). Here are some comparisons that a novice user like me could make.

a) The first thing that struck me odd was the single click mac mouse.. I had to press the control key to simulate the right click. How odd and completely unusable is that? On the pro side, the scroll ball on the mouse could scroll in any direction which was not available in other ordinary mice.

b) I have always thought that the Mac OS X UI was the most advanced and pleasing UI the modern desktop OS ever had. Well, after actually using a mac, i would say that the linux desktop (with xgl enabled) is actually as good as the mac OS X UI if not better.

c) The login screen in both mac and linux looks the same. Infact, in linux, you can configure your login screen to look the way you want it to. I am not sure whether you could do the same with a mac.

d) The startup screen in linux of late has evolved to give you the progressbar showing the OS start up rate similar to the way mac shows you. Nothing different here. I am not sure whether Mac has an inbuilt bootloader like linux gives you given that you can now run windows on intel macs.

e) The Mac has a totally different desktop when compared to linux(which emulates windows). So, i was a bit uncomfortable to indentifying where the "applications" portion was situated. But that is just the part of the learning curve and i guess i would get used to it.

f) Another big change was that each time i opened an application, i saw the menu bar of the application coming up on the taskbar that was situated at the top. Depending on which window had focus, the taskbar's menubar changed. It took me a couple of hours to figure out where the menubar of the application was situated and i still havent got used to the fact that the application's menubar is actually not embedded in the application but rather way up above in the top. I am not sure how the keyboard accessibility of this works yet. But its really a pain even if i want to use my mouse to use the menu bar if my application window is small.

g) The file navigator in mac leapord has a new feature where in you can browse the files similar to the way you can do it in your iphone or the touchscreen ipod. This is a very big plus when compared to the file navigation in windows. You could actually run a movie or see a pdf file in the preview mode. The UI for this is very sleazy too.

h) The taskbar at the bottom of the screen where you invoke your applications from is a big hit for me. I dont need to go to a start menu to access my frequently used applications. I could of course make a shortcut on my taskbar if i wanted to in my linux. But the icons over here are so big in mac and with  the fish eye widget functionality its hard for me to click the wrong icon which so often happens for me in windows and linux.

i) On the negative side though, the portion of the task bar which shows the current running applications is small and i cant enlargen it a lot. So, if i have a lot of windows open, it becomes a bit hard to navigate between them using a mouse.

 j) Has any one seen or know how to use the "show-desktop" icon on mac? I use that a lot in linux/windows.

k) I found hacks on how to lock the screen in mac (by using a screen saver and putting a password for it was supposedly the easiest). But is there actually a button which i can put in my taskbar which when clicked locks the screen?

l) The workspace switcher is a big bummer in mac. The linux version with xgl enabled is quite amazing IMO. You can actually rotate the desktop like a cube and you can drag the window visually between the cubes or even put it inbetween two cubes. That is visually mindblowing than a mac which actually allows you to use keyboard and move between desktops with a small visual window with arrow marks showing you where you are.

m) Hitting alt+tab on linux shows me a preview of windows that i use currently. Not the same on mac which has the old windows style version of showing the application icons.

n)  Games?? Do i need to purchase games for mac?

o) The software that comes bundled with mac is quite awesome. But given that with linux, you can download and install any software for free, i really dont think it is a big plus for mac in any way.

p) A big plus for the mac is that everythign works out of the box. No tinkering needed. I just boot it up the first time, run the wizard, and i am on.. No opening the console and typing in commands to configure my system.. How cool is that for a unix based OS.. (It better be i say.. i am paying money for it! ) 

q) It did not have any problem with bluetooth. I havent managed to make my cell phone work with my linux bluetooth driver till now. Maybe i am just lame..

r) Network browsing? The best i have seen on mac. No glitches whatsoever. Linux still has some catching up to do on this. I can search for files on a whole network using mac.

Overall i would say that linux has done a pretty awesome job of catching up with Mac in terms of usability though there are minor glitches here and there and you still need to know some amount of linux to set up the OS and start using it. OTOH, mac just works out of the box and can be used by users who dont know crap about unix. But the availibility of free software for linux just beats mac.

Update: After reading the comments, i configured the mouse to be a two button mouse and also found that i could configure my "middle click" to "show desktop". The F8 button shows all the workspaces that i have in a much larger window which is much better than pressing ctrl+arrow keys. Pressing F9 had the same effect as moving the mouse to a corner of a screen in linux by which you could see all the open windows on the screen Thanks for all your comments!