Mac Style

Please read Part I if you haven't already.

Last year I bought an IBM ThinkPad R50, with a Pentium M 1.6GHz, 1Gb RAM, and a high resolution screen. It was black and mean, and when I say black, it was very, very black, if not a bit ugly. But it performed well.

As far as operating systems go, I've progressed from whatever came with the C64 and C128D then onto MS-DOS 3.3, 6.22, Windows 3.1, Windows 95a, 95b, Windows 98, Windows 98SE. After forming the habit of re-installing my computer every 30 days or so due to slow downs in Windows 98SE, I decided to switch to Linux.

Linux was a great friend. It was open, it was free, and most of all, it was geeky. A perfect fit! Even the new IBM ThinkPad is running SuSE Linux 9.2, one of the best Linux distributions that I've ever used. But, in the end, I started to find all the shortcomings of a Linux desktop. In the early days, there used to be hardware problems, which were eventually overcome by recompiling something, upgrading something, or switching a small piece of hardware over. But, near the end, I just couldn't get my Palm Pilot to reliably sync with anything, Evolution, Kontact, you name it, it worked, but was quickly followed by a data corruption.

I also found the lack of consistent design in software designed for Linux. I'm not sure what causes this, in the old days of shareware, software was generally good quality, with innovative features and consistent designs. It was like thought went into the design of the software. Unfortunately in the Linux world, this same level of thought is not generally put into software design. Keyboard compatibility is inconsistent, general user interface design is poor, useful and innovative features are missing, the software is designed for a developer, not a user. I think that overall, I hold usability as a high priority in the software I use, if software I use distracts me from working because I have to think for the software developer, then that is bad, and in the end, it got unacceptable for me. I couldn't take it anymore, I needed to switch.

Now, I'd fallen in love with certain parts of Linux, and I really couldn't go back to Windows, so Mac OS X looked promising. Little did I know just how enjoyable a Mac would be.

Continue to Part III...