Being a hardcore geek, I love running on top of a "unix" like environment. I should flock to Linux, but Mac OS X is just prettier, and more stable. I don't know better fonts maybe? For that reason, and I know it seems small, I prefer Mac. BTW. I only use emacs and Firefox most of the time anyway.
I cannot refute the bold statement about stability, since I have no experience with Mac OS X. However, I have extensive experience with Linux and OpenBSD and I've had zero stability problems with Linux. OpenBSD is a different story.
The funny thing is that BSDs have this nimbus of being ultra-stable and bug-free; my experience is just the opposite.
I recently acquired a MacBook after using a variety of standard laptops with Linux installed on them.
In my experience, the Mac is better as a /consumer/ laptop, while the Linux box is better as a /geek/ laptop. I'm sure that I'll get better at getting under the Mac's hood at some point, but right now it's frustrating to have to use GUI tools for everything.
In general, everything (apps, UI) in Mac are prettier and easier to use than their *nix counterparts, but /far/ less functional.
Also, Mac OS X is internally UNIX-y enough to make me /think/ that things still work in the same way, but are different enough to make me sorely disappointed when I find out that I was mistaken.
My iPod is pretty, but "stable" and OSX are not two words I use in the same statement. I think my iPod has gone down more than my two Vista machines since I've owned them.
My computer crashes once every week or two, but it does that when I'm running ten stressful applications at once. Before my computer I'd never have thought of trying to burn a CD, create a movie, run diagnostics on my library, and several other things all at once. Things on Windows crashed haphazardly, unpredictably. I can run my Mac for days straight and they still go well for the most part, and when they crash it takes one reset to get it all working again.
iPods have a much lower standard, sadly, though my iPod touch hasn't crashed once since the software update.
I'm sorry, but you're going to be the brunt of this small mini-rant about Linux users being incredibly unaware of what we mean when we say pretty.
Fuck Compiz. It's wholly unfunctional. A rotating cube does not make something pretty, it makes it resource-intensive. Wobbly windows are not functional and they serve no purpose.
Pretty is something that looks good WHILE having a definitive meaning. The "genie" effect, for instance: it shows me exactly where I have to go if I need to restore a window. Or Expose: seeing my windows fly out and reveal themselves. Or stacks in Leopard, giving me one-click access to whatever I want one-click access to.
Pretty is trying to do something and realizing you can. It's my being in iTunes, talking to a friend about a song that came on, and realizing I could just drag the song out of iTunes to send a copy to him. That's not an advertised feature of iTunes. It's just something that you can't do in Windows Media Player or Amarok. It's something that made my life a wee bit simpler.
Pretty is my searching Help for something, being given a menu item instead of just a result, and having that item highlighted with a spinning arrow to point out the result.
Pretty is spring-loaded tabs. It's picking a color and being given a set of crayons as a visual metaphor. It's opening TextEdit for the first time and realizing that it's not just Notepad, it's a fully-featured visual text editor that can produce pretty beautiful results.
Pretty is CMD-Space-s-a-enter opening up a web browser, or CMD-Space-s-h-e-space-l-enter opening up a song. Out of the box. Without any fiddling, having an ultrafast system for opening files.
When we Mac users talk about pretty, we don't mean the fact that our windows look beautiful, although let's be honest, they do: they're minimal, they look very pretty even though they're gray, and I love how menu options appear as part of the chrome instead of having two distinct dividers apart from content (not to start talking about the lozenge button or the top menu). Pretty is how things just work. It's things making perfect logical sense as you do them. It's about whenever you wonder if you can do X, you find that you CAN do X.
Linux is not pretty. It's not it's not it's not. It takes a good screenshot nowadays, and that's more than it used to be able to do. But that doesn't make something pretty. That makes something PRETEND to be pretty. It's what's on the inside that counts, not what's on the outside.
I'm not anti-Linux. I ran Ubuntu for a year before I got OS X. I like it more than Windows, when it works, when my audio and graphics don't get messed up (and they ALWAYS do, of course). It is not pretty, though. It's pretty on the surface, pretty before you realize just how incapable it is of doing some things easily. And some Linux users are honest. My friend says that he cares only about if Linux does what he wants at no price. That I can respect. But don't say that your wobbly cubes make your OS pretty. That's like saying Vista is pretty because of Aero.
tl;dr: OS X is much, MUCH prettier than Linux. Period.
> "I'm sorry, but you're going to be the brunt of this small mini-rant about Linux users being incredibly unaware of what we mean when we say pretty"
Probably because you're misspelling it. It's written "functionality." You know, ease of use & all that.
I hesitate to go into specifics. A few of those you mentioned are in linux & a few aren't. Most don't really matter to me (honestly, text editors?) so I think it's just a matter of taste.
Form and function are one and the same. Pretty things are functional, and vice versa. You can have five thousand extras and be hard to use and I wouldn't call that functional either.
The ones I mentioned were the tip of the iceberg. The point is that if you WANT to do something, you can. With Linux basically it's that if you try to do something you often need to tinker.
When we say we love our operating system, it's because of how superbly beautiful it is, and part of its beauty is how all of the small things just WORK. Linux doesn't have that. Linux is, excuse my French, shit compared to that. It's more functional if you want to go to the command line and tinker to death, but the beauty of OS X is that you don't need to do that.
I doubt you've ever used a Mac from what you've said, so it's hard to explain. But you can't point at rotating cube and use that as a counterexample, because that's not pretty OR functional. It's a waste.
You mentioned genie & expose earlier. Not only are those in compiz, but I have them turned off because of the rotating cube. I don't need a windowlist/taskbar; I have enough space that windows rarely get below other windows.
I got used to it & working on a different operating system now feels very cramped. Same as I got used to tinkering (aka customization) & using OS X feels like typing with gloves. Like I said, it's pointless to argue. A few more iterations of ubuntu & it should be easy enough for OS X users.
No it won't. Apple has a head start of at least several years, and Apple has not stopped innovating for the last decade. Leopard was an enormous improvement from Tiger, and Tiger was still holding its own. Apple obsoletes Apple.
The rotating cube in itself is a failure of Linux because it solves no problem. It's a multiple workstations system: plain and simple. That existed before the cube and solved the same problem. Apple implemented that with Spaces, and with 10.5.2 it ended with a product that I'd argue is better than any of the other workstation set-ups I've seen in terms of pure ease of use.
The genie and expose shouldn't HAVE to be turned off. Neither one is intensive whatsoever if implemented well. The fact of the matter is that it's there just in case that sort of thing is activated. I use Expose despite having 9 workstations, because I like running larger windows, and Expose lets me move files back and forth extremely easily. (Unsure if that works in Linux.)
The ultimate triumph of the Mac's vision is that it doesn't have spare dangly bits. It doesn't have a rotating cube, because having a cube rotate serves no purpose whatsoever. It's needless gaudy visual. Some visuals (like windows sliding on Spaces) help give you a spatial understanding of your windows. Apple has no un-needed visuals (with the possible exception of the ripple in Dashboard).
Ubuntu developers may make something that looks good on the surface as Leopard looks now. I doubt even that. I don't even doubt them being able to replicate Apple's ease of use because it is a sheer impossibility. To quote Daring Fireball: "A well-designed product is not simply harder than a poorly-designed one. It is an entire MAGNITUDE of difficulty greater."
I know you're joking, but: when did "geek" become synonymous with "doesn't care about rich user experience?" Can't you be a geek and care about things working beautifully? Because according to some people on HN (not you, omouse, this isn't against you), the minute you start worrying about aesthetic you abandon being a TRUE geek, and that's stupid and demeaning.
