Raúl Santos
About two weeks ago, one of my “dreams” of lately has become true: I’ve been working with an Apple Macintosh and, of course, Mac OS X - in this case, I’m using a Mac mini at work.
I like it pretty much and overall, I think I can say the experience has been positive. I’d definitely recommend Mac OS X as the desktop OS for any non-tech user. It’s easier to use than Linux and way better than Windows.
But still, there are some things that could be improved. Actually, they should be improved, because they’re annoyances that make me want to go back to Linux or, for some of them, even Windows.
First of all, why on earth do I have to press Shift+Alt+8 to get a simple {, which I get by pressing Alt+8 on any other OS? One guy on #macosx on irc.freenode.net said this was my keyboard’s fault, not Mac OS X. Well, the thing is, this is an Apple keyboard. A Portuguese Apple keyboard. Why doesn’t it behave like any other Portuguese keyboard? Why are the keys all mixed up, placed on unusual and weird locations?
What about the “home” and “end” keys? I know they’re not “home” and “end” keys but damn it, I miss those! There’s nothing more irritating than having to press Command+right_arrow to get to the end of a line in a text editor and then doing it on the tabbed interface of an instant messenger or IRC client only to discover that in this program, it will change the active tab to the next one on the right. Why this inconsistency?
And still mentioning the keyboard, what’s with the Shift+Command+Alt+3 key combination necessary to take a screenshot?? I mean, I know about Grab but can’t I just use one of the three extra “F” keys? That’s what every keyboard I know does - it has a “Print Screen” button that takes a screenshot!
And why does finder automatically extract the contents of a .tar.gz file? Why can’t I simply view those contents to see if I really want to extract them? And why does it create a .tar file first and then extracts the files in it to the new directory but then leaves the .tar file there instead of deleting it?
Oh, and I’d really love to know where the heck I’m browsing my filesystem, because having only the name of the directory I’m seing is not very helpful. And since we’re talking about file browsing, a filesystem tree would be nice, too.
All these things and some others may even be available as personal settings but I didn’t find them - and I looked just about everywhere I could think of. So if they are indeed available, then the personal settings are not easy enough to use ;)
In the end, would I trade Linux (the OS I currently use personally) for MacOS X? I don’t think so (for my personal computer usage). I like MacOS X a lot but not as much as I like Linux.