Apple or Ubuntu

[Richard Bennett]

On Mon, 17 Sep 2007 03:27:54 +0200, gup502 <gup502 at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> I have a friend who is a big fan of Apple and despises MS and Linux.  In
> his opinion, Apple has the best features, even Beryl is considered to be
> just a copy cat.

Hi,
I fell for the hype and their reputation of good quality too, but
I only had my macbook for one and a half days, and returned it for a  
refund.
Partially because it had a defect, it kept giving a buzzing sound out of  
the speakers, and the left speaker didn't work properly, and partially  
because its keyboard and mousepad were missing too many buttons to enable  
using Linux comfortably. (No del, pgup, pgdown, right shift, right click  
etc).
I had to use MacOs to download and install bootcamp, and honestly I hated  
it. The commandline was hidden away even further than in Windows, it was  
almost as irritating as Windows, what with those jumping icons at the  
bottom.
I was a bit surprised to find a couple of inconsistencies in the Mac OSX  
too,
and that just in the short time I used it to download and setup bootcamp
(Although I have access to OSX at browsercam to try things out too).
I thought consistency and ease of use was the whole advantage of OSX, but
found my Ubuntu desktop to be more consistent on some aspects, while that
is often quoted as one of Linux's weaker points.
One OSX weak point was when using keyboard-only input to go through
wizards.
Sometimes you could tab through all options and confirm with Enter,
othertimes you had to confirm with Space, and on some input windows you
can't tab through at all, like the choice that pops-up when you push the
power-button. There's probably a simple way to switch it off without using
the mouse, but it isn't Tab Tab Enter, like I would have expected, I had
to use the mouse to click the button.
Another thing is a dropdown combobox doesn't scroll to the first entry of
that letter when you click a key, so where choosing 'Belgium' would
usually require Tab B B B, it now requires using the mouse to drag down
the scroll-bar.
And why doesn't tapping the mouse-pad area fire a click event? The
hardware handles it just fine because it works under Linux, but seems to
be switched-off by default in OSX.
And why do the min/max/close buttons gray-out in windows that don't have
the focus? It means 2 click are needed, one to awaken the colored buttons,
and a second to chose the one you need. And why are they all round and
only differentiated by color unless hovered-over?
Only differentiating by color is an accessibility 101 error, and the
hovering aspect is mistery-meat navigation, probably even worse, and for
no apparent reason as the buttons could easily be different shapes.

I guess people customize MacOSX to work for them, but out of the box I
can't agree that it 'just works' all that much better than any other OS.

So I have now ordered a barebones PC laptop from
http://www.rkcomputer.net/rkcnotebooks/index.php?l=product_detail&p=3
and don't have to pay for OSX or Windows - should have done that from the  
start.

Cheers,
Richard