Flirting With Mac OS X

By Moshe Bar

September 23, 2002

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Regular readers of this column already know there is no lost love between me and GUIs. In fact, I rarely use them; I do most of my work from the regular console, using a variety of tools to do all the things I'd ever need from a GUI: Multiple terminal sessions (screen, Linux virtual terminals, Emacs, vim) and a good e-mail client (nothing beats pine).

Yes, I know. Nowadays you can really get productive with a Linux box and KDE or Gnome. StarOffice—or better yet OpenOffice—works as well or better than the Windows classic suites. However, for the life of me I can never get used to the ugly fonts, to the amateurish look of it all, and to the abysmal multimedia performance. Add the fact that it takes a guru to install and operate a simple wireless PCMCIA card on a Linux-driven notebook and you begin to understand why Linux succeeds first and foremost in the server market. Sure, some key Linux players, like IBM, are trying to make us believe that we actually like the GUIs available for Linux and that big corporations want to switch their thousands of expensive Windows workstations to dirty cheap Linux desktops.

The reality is, it ain't happening. UNIX is for servers, Windows is for desktops. Right? No, wrong. Turns out nowadays you don't need to use that ugly W word to have a decent desktop and office environment. Enter Mac OS X (and people do insist you pronounce the X as "ten," not as "eks"). Many see it has the cool new kid on the UNIX block, while others feel that their Linux machines are in some way threatened by the new Mac OS.

I happened to install Mac OS X on a Mac Power8500 back in 1999. That was a pre-pre-pre-beta, and not much besides the installation worked. Aqua wasn't in that version yet, and so I quickly decided that Mac OS X was going to be a nonissue for me.

Meanwhile, I continued to be generally unhappy with the Linux desktop environment. Recently I went to give a speech at a conference and was startled to see all these cool Mac iBook and PowerBook laptops.

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