Apple or Ubuntu

[Liam Proven]

On 17/09/2007, Richard Bennett <richard.bennett at skynet.be> wrote:
> 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.

While there is stuff there I agree with - e.g. poor keyboard
accessibility - and things that are personal dislikes of mine - e.g.
touchpad taps being turned off by default - these are minor niggles.
Macs are driven with a mouse; indeed a keyboard was originally an
optional extra. I prefer more keyboard controls, but it's not part of
the Mac's design.

However, most of your points seem to me to be either initial
unfamiliarity, which you cannot criticise the OS or the vendor for -
*anything* new will be unfamiliar at first - or your bad luck in
getting duff hardware, which you could have swapped.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com • MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk • Skype: liamproven • ICQ: 73187508