Mac to SLED

OS X Leopard is looming and represents the next mile on the Apple treadmill. No doubt, it will be £100 and will focus developers who will gradually drop support for earlier versions of the OS. I'm getting off the treadmill and going low-end. I've replaced my Mac (which is going on ebay) with a super cheap PC loaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Edition 10 (SLED 10).

Reasons I ditched Mac

  • Windows can only be resized with the bottom-right corner grippy. This has always bugged me.
  • iPhoto is molasses slow and makes little sense.
  • Pages word processor is dog slow. It lagged when typing 'hello world'.
  • DVI didn't work. Millions of Macs left the factory with faulty ATI cards. Apple shipped defective products, basically.
  • Terminal just didn't behave properly.
  • Mail.app started lying to me. Its indexing broke and only returned 'some' search results which of course is worse than a sharp stick in the eye.
  • Firefox would occasionally slow down/freeze. Seemed inexplicable. That little spinning colour cursor failed to distract me (a la the snake from Jungle Book).
  • Updates. 80MB Java updates bothered me with restarts almost weekly.
  • Couldn't play HD video. This is a hardware issue but shouldn't be as the graphics card is poky enough in other systems.
  • Unmappable keys (F14-16?) and a hidden # key.

Reasons I'm now using SLED

  • Speed. It's running on the cheapest PC in the country containing the cheapest AMD chip there is and yet it's much quicker.
  • Sticky windows. It's easier to arrange windows.
  • Banshee. It's like iTunes but simpler and quicker.
  • Gimp. There are no good image manipulation programs for the Mac other than Adobe Photoshop. Gimp for Mac requires X11 which is ugly, slow and a hacky window focus method. Photoshop itself is slow, dopey and poorly designed on the best of machines - in common with all Adobe products.
  • Inkscape. There is only one good vector graphics program for the Mac and it's Adobe. Inkscape is another X11 adaptation.
  • Evolution. An email app that works.
  • Gnome terminal. It just works better.
  • F-Spot. Like iPhoto but much, much faster. Image zoom is on the mouse wheel and follows the cursor, which is nice.

Reasons why I might pull the plug and go back to an abacus

  • If I can't get .avi, .mp4, .wmv video files to play. It seems inordinately difficult at the best of time to get non-open source codecs working but the 64 bit chip is compounding the issue.
  • The minute it fails to boot into the xserver driven gui despite no prior fiddling, is the minute I consider my options (abacus).
  • If I get bogged down in an unresolvable dependency hell. I'm nearly there truth be told.
Geoff Campos on March 21, 2007 - 9:12am. Geoff Campos's blog
Photoshop is not dopey.
Submitted by jparry on March 22, 2007 - 9:00am.

Laughing Photoshop is not dopey. It's the part timers that use it without training that are the weak link. I was a graphic designer for many years and probably used about 95% of it's functionality. It's not made for home users to 'touch up their photos', surely the price gives the biggest clue!

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Fair enough, it is a
Submitted by Geoff Campos on March 22, 2007 - 10:47pm.

Fair enough, it is a professional tool. I've used it for quite a long time (without needing to use its colour separating functionality) and I find its peccadilloes annoying like:

  • Non-customizable cursors, easy to lose on big rez, poor contrast with image.
  • No gutter on zoomed images.
  • No contrasting RGB level balancing. (I have to use channels.)
  • No snap on the guides.
  • Saved selection management is poor (I use channels.)
  • Adobe updater is needlessly violent
  • Context menu behaves inconsistently in dialog boxes.
  • MDI interfaces are frustrating, I constantly lose focus.
  • Moving selection with cursor keys is pain.
  • Bridge is amazingly bloated.
  • It's not mighty mouse compatible.
  • Window doesn't show floating layer's dimensions.
  • No x,y guides attached to cursor.
  • There is no alternative on a Mac.
  • Cost.
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Sled is great for 32 bit
Submitted by Anonymous on March 22, 2007 - 4:29pm.

Sled is great for 32 bit machines, but until there are 64 versions of win32codecs, i'd stick to the 32 bit version.

the apps on sled are really good. the latest banshee, which is STILL easy to build on sled 10 gets better with each release. the only problem being it only reads music shares hosted by banshee or itunes v6 and earlier (apple have made it impossible to do so with itunes 7).
shares that are compatible can be right clicked and imported to take with you.

resizing windows always did my head in on mac. i'm so used to alt+middle mouse button to resize windows, it's odd doing it any other way.

you can buy gstreamer plugins (which is what sled uses for its multimedia backend), for playing windows media here: https://shop.fluendo.com/ i've just checked and they have 64bit versions too.
the mp3 plugin is free, so try that first (you have to "buy" it for free in their shop, and they send you a link).

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Yast is just too much pain.
Submitted by Geoff Campos on May 23, 2007 - 7:08am.

Yast is just too much pain. I just couldn't figure out how to get the codecs but then, I was on a 64bit machine. I know what you mean about resizing windows on Mac but it's swings and roundabouts - I miss spring loaded folders.

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