I am currently on my first test run of MacOSX, and has been the last 7 months now. During that period I have installed and tested almost every program that seemed the least bit interesting – and there’s a huge heap of interesting applications out there, I promise you. The result is that I have achieved a pretty unstable OSX installation.
Applications are segfaulting at random, and stuff generally does not work any more. The machine is slow and even crashes or freezes at random, some days twice a day.
If this was Windows I would switch back to Linux again, cursing the day I first installed Windows on the poor computer. But I kind of like OSX (understatement of the day) and I want to keep using it. In the last 7 months I have seen what works, how to do things, and what takes so much work cleaning up after that there is no point in fixing it. I have also found a lot of great programs, and those are the reasons for this post. Keep reading for finding out what I use!
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I recently had a lot of problems with fonts showing up in a disorderly manner in Safari, Adium and other apps on my Mac. After an intensive googling session I finally found Font Finagler . And happy days – it worked! One restart later and my Safari is usable again.
Of course, Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 1.5 still worked, but they kind of doesn’t do it for me anymore.
I saw this article about customizing Ubuntu/Gnome so It would look like Mac OS X. Soo… you can get Gnome to look like OSX. Almost. Except for all the extra-sexy GUI stuff that requires dubious hacks that never work 100% on all hardware anyway, and without the consistent look-and-feel that OSX has, since few Linux apps tend to use remotely the same toolkits. And you will still have to battle with things like external monitors, new mice, keyboards and synchronizing your phone and PDA over bluetooth against your particular choice of unfinished pieces of PIM software…
So why bother running Linux on the desktop? It’s hardly worth it. I made the switch to OSX (I bought a MacBook) a month ago, and I have never looked back. Everything that annoyed me with Linux is now surprisingly easy and intuitive. Even paying for software is easy when I for $10 can get an actual product that solves the task with which I am struggeling instead of having to download an half-finished proof-of-concept that almost works for 10% of the time from Sourceforge. The other 90% of the time you spend waiting for updates that normally fixes two bugs, introduces four altered command line switches and crashes in a way that renders your data useless.
However, as an server OS Linux is actually quite good, I would not dream of replacing Linux with OSX for that kind of use. But on the desktop… Hell yeah.
I tried a few freeware desktop blog tools, but they both sucked.
However, Ecto is teh shit.
And at a price of only $17.99 it’s even affordable!
