Installed Mac OS X on a cube..

[yossie]

The install was seamless, Classic started up like a champ. It simply works, no panics in almost two weeks. I do reboot now and then, but mostly because I am still trying to figure out which unix processes equal which GUI features and how to restart them.

I got the machine set up as part of NIS domain, such that anyone in the domain can login to the machine and get their NFS mounted home dir automatically. Also, my home dir is NFS mounted

Oddly enough, iTunes (Carbon) can't resolve a song in it's catalog to a NFS mounted volume UNLESS some other process (UNIX) does a 'cd' or somesuch to the mount point!

I wish I could figure out how to get NFS volumes to show up on the desktop!

Got SSH up and running - easy.

The development environment is nearly enogh for my company's rather intense use. I had to install makedepend, dlcompat and muck around in some Makefiles in order to make our product - pretty damn impressive actually.

I have succesfully caused SystemPreferences, iCab, OmniWeb, GraphicConverter and others to crash repeatedly - though never to the point of taking the system with them! They always restart just fine.

There are something that I miss, like most of the oddball USB device drivers (but I am sure those will show up soon enough).

Printing was, well, tricky. Had to make some scripts and programs SUID root in order to get it working - not sure why. It is also WAY slow.

In fact, Mac OS X in general is pretty damn slow. I have 192M of RAM which should be plenty, you would think - certianly Linux runs like a champ in MUCH less. Still, and all, it is responsive enough for me for now.

 

[pbrice]

I had a seamless install on a Cube, as well. However, I am not a developer, as you obvioulsy are. I'm just a home user surfing, emailing,...etc. I use Text Edit as my word processor (which seems similar to WriteNow from NeXT days), Graphic Converter, and some games. Oh, and iTunes--which I love.

I only find some things slow on OS X, but have noticed that as I customize my system, I am discovering that trying to do things the old (read: OS 9>) way tend to be slower than working with OS X new features.

Example: The browser view of the Finder is ''fast' but the List view is slow (I never liked it anyway).

Moving files around was sometimes a pain in the ass becasue you would have to Command+double-click to get a another window for copying or moving. However, I've now discovered that not only does clicking on a toolbar icon take you to that folder quickly, but you can drag and drop items directly to the folders on the toolbar or Docked folders. Now, I don't need to bother navigating all the way to a folder, when I can just drag and drop to the toolbar or Dock.

Having large (up to 128x128) icons of my graphic files right in the Finder saves me so much time I can't even get over it--especially if you open the Folder, scroll through it once, and then minimize to Dock. When you un-Dock it, it scrolls quickly.

I can go on and on, but my main point is, I guess, that there is a new paradigm lurking in OS X that may seem counter-productive, at first, but once I got rid of my desktop, and starting playing around with the new features, I realized that huge efficiencies were to be gained. IMHO, the desktop paradigm is useless in OS X, and slower (in both computer speed and usability).

I loved the Desktop in OS 9>, but after using OS X for just 2-1/2 weeks, I can't stand going back into 9.1 and navigating through folder after folder, looking at all the poorly rendered text and graphics, I even miss the visual animations to clue me in to what is happening (genie, Apps bouncing, throbbing buttons,...etc.). And I miss the Dock. Death to the Desktop! is my motto now, as you can see in my sig. I know others don't agree, but from my line of vision, that's their loss. For them, I'm the crazy one. I'm okay with that.

 

[rharder]

I've heard of a group of people who think the Desktop was a bad computer metaphor in general and that it was a big mistake to use that metaphor Way Back When, but I don't know what their argument is. They're probably the one's preaching Functional Programming (or is it Declarative?).

Is anyone familiar with this anti-desktop movement and what they have to say?

-Rob