My brief affair with Mac OS X
Mar. 14th, 2018 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungBack in 2012, Microsoft took a sharp turn into stupidsville with Windows 8. Around the same time, I grudgingly concluded that I was going to have to upgrade someday from Windows XP because more and more software was requiring something newer. This after nine years of reusing my copy of Windows 98 on various computers and another four reusing the Windows XP volume licence from morgan_dhu's work machine.
I surveyed the options: continue using XP and have more and more of the internet tell me my browser was too old; buying a legit copy of a newer version of Windows for close to $100, which would in turn cease to be supported after less than a decade, requiring me to buy yet another $100 licence; switching to Linux with all its chronic usability nightmares; or switching to the Mac.
We had by this point both gotten Ipads and I had replaced our DVD player with a computer running Itunes, so it didn't seem as huge a jump as it had in the past. I investigated hackintoshes and discovered that the creation, care and feeding of one would land me in the same user unfriendly realm as desktop Linux. I started shopping for a used Mac.
In the realm of computers, I am conservative. My LCD monitor dates from 2003-ish, my trackball mouse from the same era, and my mechanical keyboard from the 90's. I refuse to upgrade unless forced to do so because I learned long ago that nearly every software upgrade involves a change in UI. Why should I be forced to give the programmers even more money for features of dubious utility, and then be forced to spend valuable time relearning how to use the software? I stick with what I know because change for change's sake is never worthwhile. Sadly, this philosophy is directly at odds with the ethos of Silicon Valley, which stupidly worships change for the sake of change. And no company embraces that idiotic ethos more fully than Apple and the people who make software for Macs.
So. I needed to be able to continue to use Eudora (which became abandonware in 2006) for email, because every other email program I have tried seemed like either a feeble and half broken echo of Eudora, or a slavish copying of Outlook, which I refuse to use because Microsoft software makes me want to spit. But Eudora for the Mac requires Snow Leopard (aka 10.6) or an older version of Mac OS X. All along, this plan involved my upgrading from an abandonware OS made in 2001 to an abandonware OS made in 2009. Progress?
I knew I wanted a desktop. Imacs were clearly out because 16x9 screens are evil. Mac Pros were clearly out because they are energy hogs. Besides, both were by and large beyond my budget unless I got an extremely ancient machine. So I shopped for Mac Minis. One that would run snow leopard. One I could afford. One that had a non-intel GPU, so I could play Serious Sam or Neverwinter Nights if I wanted to. Eventually, I got a 2009 mini for about $300:
(photo gacked from the net for illustrative purposes)
That was a lot of money - usually what I did if I wanted a newer computer was buy a used motherboard, CPU and RAM off Ebay, spending maybe $120. I did the math on a full build (board, cpu, ram, case and power supply - I already had compatible and roomy enough drives), and determined that the Mini contained maybe $200 worth of parts. I told myself the extra $100 was the cost of never having to use a Microsoft product again, and bought it.
Naturally it had belonged to someone who smoked and marinated their house in perfume, so I began the long process of detoxing the damn thing to the point where I could run it at my desk without contaminating our living space with toxic stench.
After a few months of detoxing, I brought it upstairs, set it up for dual booting while I transitioned from Windows, and immediately discovered the joy of smallness - it was nice not having a huge tower taking up room on the floor beside my desk, not having to reach down to turn it on or to plug in a USB stick, not having to muck around in the corner every time I needed to unplug something from the back, etc. And after a few days of use we realized that it was still subtly stinky. Back in the basement it went. Rather than go back to my hulking desktop, I switched to using a spare thinkpad at my desk.
In late 2016, I finally switched the thinkpad to Windows 7, having found a way to get a working key for much less than $100.* After much googling, I even got it working so that the Windows Explorer file management UI and the taskbar UI were only mildly inferior to XP's.
The detoxing process went on the back burner and medical woes took centre stage the past two years, but late last year, the mini was finally truly safe. I spent January using Mac OS full time. And discovered, sadly, that I had to go back to Windows.
I got Eudora for Windows running under Wine and upgraded from Snow Leopard to El Capitan: no dice. Any OS that does not put up and down arrows in its scroll bars is an OS that I refuse to use, and that was only the biggest of a thousand small sins against usability that the nearly current Mac OS perpetuated in the name of looking pretty. Back on Snow Leopard, I managed, with some difficulty, to track down versions of every app that I needed, or close equivalents, that would run on OS X 10.6. But in the end, the cumulative effect of many tiny annoyances drove me away.
Some of it was just Mac being different from Windows. Page up, page down, home and end had to be remapped to get them to work the way they do on Windows. Not all apps respected the remapping. I had to be very careful about copying folders because the default for Macs is to clobber the target directory instead of merging the two folders. And the add on utility that was supposed to enable folder merging did not work under 10.6. It wasn't possible to open the trash to selectively delete some but not all things in it, nor could you empty the trash for one disk without emptying the trash for all disks. Again, a 3rd party utility to fix this malfuntionality existed, but I could not get it to work satisfactorily.
Some of it was because the available software for Mac was deeply inferior. For DVD ripping and video reencoding I had to abandon Vidcoder (windows only and not Wine friendly) and go with Handbrake, whose UI was actually markedly worse than most Microsoft products. It was like someone had read a secondhand account of UI conventions and built the program without ever using any other software to see how it is usually done. And to be clear, there really isn't any other decent choice for ripping DVDs on the Mac: everything else either costs money, works more slowly, and/or produces larger output files.
The final straw was the web browser. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox stopped making updates that run on Snow Leopard long ago, but Pale Moon for Mac (which is the web browser I was using on Windows anyway) exists in beta and for the moment it runs on 10.6. Now 64 bit Pale Moon is bugged: various sites (like, for instance, google) that work as they should on 32 bit PM have buttons that are totally unresponsive in 64 bit Pale Moon. And naturally, there was one and only one build of Pale Moon for Mac, and it was based on the broken 64 bit version.
So I switched the default boot partition back to Windows. I boot into Snow Leopard now to use its superior print to PDF capability, especially for making PDF versions of scanned comics and magazines formorgan_dhu (the only free non-web based CBR to PDF converter I can find for Windows cuts a tiny bit off the bottom of each page). At some point I will probably find other reasons to reboot into OS X.
I'm happy with my Mac hardware, and if/when I upgrade I will be getting another Mac Mini. I just wish the software was less dogmatic about knowing the right way to do things (and not allowing any flexibility), and that the ecosystem for Macs was less impoverished.
* Some Ebay vendors in the UK offer "scrap PC" key codes for under $10. They are codes copied from the Windows stickers on the cases of PCs that were used in large corporations. The code on the sticker was never activated because the company had a volume licence key, so these $5-10 codes work perfectly with no piracy warning. Yes, this means the corporation bought Windows twice for each computer. Microsoft is still an evil fucking monopoly; in other news, dog bites man, water is wet.
morgan_dhu's work machine. I surveyed the options: continue using XP and have more and more of the internet tell me my browser was too old; buying a legit copy of a newer version of Windows for close to $100, which would in turn cease to be supported after less than a decade, requiring me to buy yet another $100 licence; switching to Linux with all its chronic usability nightmares; or switching to the Mac.
We had by this point both gotten Ipads and I had replaced our DVD player with a computer running Itunes, so it didn't seem as huge a jump as it had in the past. I investigated hackintoshes and discovered that the creation, care and feeding of one would land me in the same user unfriendly realm as desktop Linux. I started shopping for a used Mac.
In the realm of computers, I am conservative. My LCD monitor dates from 2003-ish, my trackball mouse from the same era, and my mechanical keyboard from the 90's. I refuse to upgrade unless forced to do so because I learned long ago that nearly every software upgrade involves a change in UI. Why should I be forced to give the programmers even more money for features of dubious utility, and then be forced to spend valuable time relearning how to use the software? I stick with what I know because change for change's sake is never worthwhile. Sadly, this philosophy is directly at odds with the ethos of Silicon Valley, which stupidly worships change for the sake of change. And no company embraces that idiotic ethos more fully than Apple and the people who make software for Macs.
So. I needed to be able to continue to use Eudora (which became abandonware in 2006) for email, because every other email program I have tried seemed like either a feeble and half broken echo of Eudora, or a slavish copying of Outlook, which I refuse to use because Microsoft software makes me want to spit. But Eudora for the Mac requires Snow Leopard (aka 10.6) or an older version of Mac OS X. All along, this plan involved my upgrading from an abandonware OS made in 2001 to an abandonware OS made in 2009. Progress?
I knew I wanted a desktop. Imacs were clearly out because 16x9 screens are evil. Mac Pros were clearly out because they are energy hogs. Besides, both were by and large beyond my budget unless I got an extremely ancient machine. So I shopped for Mac Minis. One that would run snow leopard. One I could afford. One that had a non-intel GPU, so I could play Serious Sam or Neverwinter Nights if I wanted to. Eventually, I got a 2009 mini for about $300:
(photo gacked from the net for illustrative purposes)
That was a lot of money - usually what I did if I wanted a newer computer was buy a used motherboard, CPU and RAM off Ebay, spending maybe $120. I did the math on a full build (board, cpu, ram, case and power supply - I already had compatible and roomy enough drives), and determined that the Mini contained maybe $200 worth of parts. I told myself the extra $100 was the cost of never having to use a Microsoft product again, and bought it.
Naturally it had belonged to someone who smoked and marinated their house in perfume, so I began the long process of detoxing the damn thing to the point where I could run it at my desk without contaminating our living space with toxic stench.
After a few months of detoxing, I brought it upstairs, set it up for dual booting while I transitioned from Windows, and immediately discovered the joy of smallness - it was nice not having a huge tower taking up room on the floor beside my desk, not having to reach down to turn it on or to plug in a USB stick, not having to muck around in the corner every time I needed to unplug something from the back, etc. And after a few days of use we realized that it was still subtly stinky. Back in the basement it went. Rather than go back to my hulking desktop, I switched to using a spare thinkpad at my desk.
In late 2016, I finally switched the thinkpad to Windows 7, having found a way to get a working key for much less than $100.* After much googling, I even got it working so that the Windows Explorer file management UI and the taskbar UI were only mildly inferior to XP's.
The detoxing process went on the back burner and medical woes took centre stage the past two years, but late last year, the mini was finally truly safe. I spent January using Mac OS full time. And discovered, sadly, that I had to go back to Windows.
I got Eudora for Windows running under Wine and upgraded from Snow Leopard to El Capitan: no dice. Any OS that does not put up and down arrows in its scroll bars is an OS that I refuse to use, and that was only the biggest of a thousand small sins against usability that the nearly current Mac OS perpetuated in the name of looking pretty. Back on Snow Leopard, I managed, with some difficulty, to track down versions of every app that I needed, or close equivalents, that would run on OS X 10.6. But in the end, the cumulative effect of many tiny annoyances drove me away.
Some of it was just Mac being different from Windows. Page up, page down, home and end had to be remapped to get them to work the way they do on Windows. Not all apps respected the remapping. I had to be very careful about copying folders because the default for Macs is to clobber the target directory instead of merging the two folders. And the add on utility that was supposed to enable folder merging did not work under 10.6. It wasn't possible to open the trash to selectively delete some but not all things in it, nor could you empty the trash for one disk without emptying the trash for all disks. Again, a 3rd party utility to fix this malfuntionality existed, but I could not get it to work satisfactorily.
Some of it was because the available software for Mac was deeply inferior. For DVD ripping and video reencoding I had to abandon Vidcoder (windows only and not Wine friendly) and go with Handbrake, whose UI was actually markedly worse than most Microsoft products. It was like someone had read a secondhand account of UI conventions and built the program without ever using any other software to see how it is usually done. And to be clear, there really isn't any other decent choice for ripping DVDs on the Mac: everything else either costs money, works more slowly, and/or produces larger output files.
The final straw was the web browser. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox stopped making updates that run on Snow Leopard long ago, but Pale Moon for Mac (which is the web browser I was using on Windows anyway) exists in beta and for the moment it runs on 10.6. Now 64 bit Pale Moon is bugged: various sites (like, for instance, google) that work as they should on 32 bit PM have buttons that are totally unresponsive in 64 bit Pale Moon. And naturally, there was one and only one build of Pale Moon for Mac, and it was based on the broken 64 bit version.
So I switched the default boot partition back to Windows. I boot into Snow Leopard now to use its superior print to PDF capability, especially for making PDF versions of scanned comics and magazines for
morgan_dhu (the only free non-web based CBR to PDF converter I can find for Windows cuts a tiny bit off the bottom of each page). At some point I will probably find other reasons to reboot into OS X. I'm happy with my Mac hardware, and if/when I upgrade I will be getting another Mac Mini. I just wish the software was less dogmatic about knowing the right way to do things (and not allowing any flexibility), and that the ecosystem for Macs was less impoverished.
* Some Ebay vendors in the UK offer "scrap PC" key codes for under $10. They are codes copied from the Windows stickers on the cases of PCs that were used in large corporations. The code on the sticker was never activated because the company had a volume licence key, so these $5-10 codes work perfectly with no piracy warning. Yes, this means the corporation bought Windows twice for each computer. Microsoft is still an evil fucking monopoly; in other news, dog bites man, water is wet.