The Mac mini doesn’t come with a keyboard, a monitor, a mouse or indeed anything except the system box. You can (and for a week, I did) use a Dell monitor, keyboard and mouse. However, Macs are set up to work with Apple gear, so for example, Apple’s font rendering is meant to work with Apple monitors like those you see in an Apple store. For a few days after, I looked in dismay at “black” text that looked like it had been written with a pen that was just about to run out of ink. Then I found this article which explains how you can restore decent text on a Dell monitor if your Mac is using Snow Leopard or Tiger. The short version is: you go to a Terminal (which you can find by clicking the Finder — that’s the smiley face — in the Dock, choose “Applications” from the list at the side, then double-clicking “Utilities” which is where the Terminal is — and entering this command:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

You can’t change this in System Preferences; Apple got rid of the setting in Snow Leopard. It’s a bit worrying that they have banished this to an obscure setting which you have to use the Terminal to set; in the past, this has been the prelude to getting rid of it altogether. (The article says that the last figure can be 1 or 2 to give acceptable fonts.) To get rid of the setting (say, if you acquire a dedicated Mac monitor), you can type this:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing

It’s depressing that Linux offers more readable fonts for free than Apple does on a computer that costs a minimum of £529 (UK prices).

The first thing I sought to install were the developers’ tools, and the Qt libraries I needed to compile my application (which I’m using to type this entry) to run on my Mac (and hopefully, anyone else’s). Unfortunately, it being Christmas Day, it appeared that everyone was activating their new computers, smartphones and tablets and large downloads (such as the updated version of the Mac OS itself) were impossible: even more frustratingly, they would get to the end of the download and just stop, telling you it was corrupted. Later on in the day, this fixed itself, but it would have been better if Apple had actually loaded the update onto the computer before shipping it (it was released in October).

Anyone who’s used Linux will know that one of its best features is how easy it is to download software, particularly open-source software: there is a package manager, there are archives, and you just use a package management tool to download your package (and anything it needs to run, called dependencies) and install it. Sadly, this isn’t true on the Mac. Back in 2004, a project called Fink provided the package manager and archives, but for some reason it has ceased to provide compiled downloads, only source downloads, which MacPorts already offers, so I am not sure what it provides that MacPorts doesn’t. This means you have to go to the vendor’s own website and download their disc image if you want a compiled (that is, runnable) piece of software. This is a major weakness of the Mac as a development platform. Perhaps it suits Apple’s purposes, as it hinders cross-platform development and encourages Mac developers to develop Mac-specific software, using its own developers’ tools.

A further disappointment was how my application actually looked once I’d got it compiled. Clearly, the developers of Qt have not anticipated that an app would look, and handle, totally differently in Cocoa (the native Mac toolkit which is inherited from NeXT) to how it did when Qt was based on Carbon (the “old-Mac” toolkit). I had hoped to simply compile and release that day, certainly within a week, but that’s not possible: there is an unsightly large status bar (the bit at the bottom where messages are displayed) and a problem setting the window to the size I want (that is, the size I set, or the size a user will set). I can forsee having to personally write a replacement for the status bar.

I have also had some difficulty getting stuff that makes the Mac fit into my existing cluttered desktop with its jumble of cables. My keyboard, mouse and monitor all work with the Mac, but I only had one of each, and it would have been nice to have some sort of switch that I could use so I didn’t have to unplug and replug each cable every time I wanted to switch computers. These switches are known as KVMs and Maplin’s do one with a brightly-coloured box with various misspellings and old logos that positively screams “Made in China” for £39, but it doesn’t do DVI switching, only VGA. New computers usually come with DVI outputs now, and DVI produces better colour output that doesn’t require calibration (I never could quite get white to show as white when I plugged my Dell monitor into my old Mac). DVI has been around for years, so it is a mystery that there are no affordable DVI switches. That cheap and nasty-looking switch in Maplin’s would have let me double my keyboard and mouse, but I decided to get an Apple keyboard instead (which has USB sockets that I can plug the mouse into). Mac minis no longer have DVD/CD drives, so you will need to buy an external one (and if you shop around, you can find one much cheaper than the £66 Apple charges for theirs; mine, by Samsung, cost £35).

Finally, one thing that was a bit of a culture shock the first time I got a Mac was the totally different nature of the Mac and Linux presses. Linux magazines are all about in-depth stuff — news and comment on the politics of open-source, patents and the like, reviews of fairly low-level software (programming toolkits, for example), articles on setting up servers and services, and programming tutorials. There’s very little of that in the Mac press: much of that is about products you can buy, and learning to do things like use iPhoto, iMovie and the like. A lot more software on the Mac has to be paid for and that doesn’t always mean it’s of better quality than the free software that is available for Linux, even if it is more polished. Still, there are some products which are fairly inexpensive, like Apple’s own Pages and Keynote, the second of which was good enough for Steve Jobs to do his own presentations on.

The Mac itself is pretty fast — considering that I do a lot of development on it, it really burns through jobs that took hours on my old machine — and quiet: the fan comes on only rarely, and only when the machine is seriously working (I did not realise it had one until several hours after first turning the machine on). My ‘old’ 2009 Dell, which has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, was incredibly noisy and sometimes made a barely tolerable sawing noise. I’ve yet to test out iPhoto and I’m not sure if I’ll use it for keeping photos — I still have a lot of old photos on my Dell which still has two barely-used 500Gb hard drives in it. I will probably use this much more for movies, as I have a camcorder which I haven’t used much so perhaps will do so a bit more (and maybe get working on that film project I’ve mentioned to one or two people, although perhaps that needs a better camcorder than mine and better software than iMovie). Anyway, however much old stuff remains on the Dell, I’ve not used it since Boxing Day, I think (I’ve used my older Dell laptop a bit, though). It’s a great little machine and I expect to get a lot of good use of it the next couple of years.

I’ve got a lot of disabled friends who really rave about Macs and other Apple products: Mac OS has screen-reading software built in (not an unreliable, expensive extra as it is on Windows) and their handheld devices can be used (with the help of special software, which is extra) as speaking devices for people who cannot speak themselves (known as an AAC). There are other cases of disability where the Mac still doesn’t shine: Windows Vista and 7 have speech recognition built in (so, kind of the opposite to the Mac in that sense) and, although Dragon Naturally Speaking is the product most used for this (by those who cannot use a keyboard, such as quadriplegics), some have reported that Windows’ own speech recognition is good. Others have reported to me that they cannot use a touch-screen phone or PDA; they require an actual keypad, as on the Blackberry. and no Apple device has one.

I bought a Mac in 2004. At the time, they were good value for money, although I had a bit more freedom than I ever have had since as a trust fund (not huge, and sadly less than had been invested in it) had matured. For much of the time since then, Mac hardware has consisted of standard commodity hardware crammed into a fancy box, with a specification which fails to jusify the cost of the unit; in particular, memory and hard drive space were often low by comparison with PCs of the same price. To upgrade memory at purchase, you would have to pay twice as much as you would pay at Crucial or Kingston. For example, an upgrade for the current i5 Mac Mini from 2Gb to 8Gb currently costs £240 from Apple, while the memory itself costs £111.85, including VAT and delivery, from the Kingston partner SMC. I have heard various justifications for why the kit itself is so expensive (including “aluminium unibody casing” and the “Apple ecosystem”), but that is simply a rip-off.

Apple simply do not care about people who are on a budget and need a computer that works for a reasonable price. (This includes, for example, many of the Unix hackers who work on the BSD underpinnings of Mac OS X.) Jobs was on record as saying he had not come across a $500 PC that was not a piece of junk; it may have been junk to him, not coming in one of his fancy aluminium cases, but no doubt worked and had more memory and storage than a much more expensive Mac, and could be expanded, if need be, the case opened with the aid of a screwdriver rather than a decorator’s spatula. For me, the fancy box was nowhere near as important as what was inside it, and that’s why I haven’t bought a Mac since 2004 (and I once wrote that I would buy another Mac when it came to upgrading that one, if they were still a viable option). Mac ownership has become rather like an exclusive club, a bit like a gang of schoolkids at a posh school which shuts out the “poor kid”. Since I’m not rich enough to join the gang, am I going to mourn its leader? No, I’m not.

Charlie Brooker, of TVGoHome and Screenwipe fame, wrote this column for Monday’s Guardian, about how he prefers the insufferably unreliable Windows Vista to getting a Mac. His main gripe about Macs seems to be Mac fans. It’s not the first time; back in February 2007, he wrote a similar piece called, simply, I Hate Macs, for the same section of the same paper, to which I wrote this reply. His gripe this time is less to do with the system itself as with the fans.

His first ten paragraphs (admittedly, four of them are less than a line long) are about Mac fans. Not about Macs. Here are a few of them:

Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER.

Of course, it’s safe to assume Mac products are indeed as brilliant as their owners make out. Why else would they spend so much time trying to convert non-believers? They’re not getting paid. They simply want to spread their happiness, like religious crusaders.

Consequently, nothing pleases them more than watching a PC owner struggle with a slab of non-Mac machinery. It validates their spiritual choice. Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical implications of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. It drove me up the wall. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table.

And there’s the problem. I use Vista as well. I also (occasionally, now) use a Mac. I mainly use PCs which run Linux. Vista is terrible. I find it mind-numbingly frustrating, because you need anti-virus software which requires updating regularly, and frequently requires a restart to finish updates or anti-virus updates when you’ve only just finished the lengthy process of starting the thing up. I recently tried to install Vista’s Service Pack 2, and it took ages, only to abort and waste more of my time while it rolled everything back. The actual desktop experience is not the problem, and never has been. If it had been, Linux users would complain about its wholesale copying on that platform. The problem with Vista is, well, just about everything else.

Macs, when I bought mine in 2004, were good value. These days, they are anything but, as I have complained many times before on this site. They are underspecified and overpriced, and use standard components from the same manufacturers which produce PC components. They are simply PCs with a different operating system and one or two chips which PCs don’t. There is the lack of upgradeability in anything except memory and anything you can’t plug into a Firewire or USB port. And there is the stupid packaging, form-over-function design, giving the impression that Apple has bought its own lifestyle marketing and really believes that a Mac is something more than a tool.

Not to buy a Mac because you cannot justify the cost for a machine as miserably specified as the Mac Mini is one thing. Not to buy one because you don’t like Mac fans is insane. I’ve managed to avoid the obnoxious Mac fans for the five years since I bought mine. Microsoft itself is notorious not for obsessive fans but for planted advocates on forums known as MicroDroids. He also concedes:

OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

Now, I’ve used Linux (the principal “other operating system”) since 2002 and, as with Mac fans, I’ve mostly managed to avoid the creepy and snooty ones. Yes, there are a lot of Linux geeks who lack social skills and are harsh towards people who disagree with them or who are less knowledgeable, but there are also friendly forums with people more than willing to show a less experienced user the ropes. What Brooker has produced is just an outdated stereotype. It’s true that there is a lack of commercial applications for Windows, but it comes with an office suite and various other applications as standard, and it’s free. It’s also vastly more secure and does not require anti-virus software. My Mac, when I bought it, offered the security and stability it shares with other systems running Unix-type operating systems, like Linux, with a range of supported commercial applications, including Microsoft Office.

Admittedly, there are some good reasons to use Windows, among them that there are some commercial applications which don’t run on the Mac or Linux, but avoiding the Steve Jobs personality cult (you know, the sort of people who will line up round the block from the Apple Store overnight on the eve of a new Mac OS X release) and the obnoxious Linux geeks who tell newcomers to RTFM (read the f***ing manual, which often doesn’t exist) aren’t among them. Most Mac users are perfectly normal, ordinary people who wanted a system that worked and was secure and were willing and able to pay more for it. Sadly, the idiots who run Apple think Mac ownership is a lifestyle, and that only those with money deserve it, and that doesn’t include me.

With regard to the lack of an update to the Mac Mini, the price and specification of this machine demonstrates how out of touch Apple are with the current state of the world economy. Prices start from £391 for a machine with a “combo drive” (meaning it can read but not burn DVDs), 80Gb of disk space and only 1Gb of RAM; updating to 2Gb nearly £50. In the real world, 2Gb of that type of RAM costs under £20 from Crucial, including delivery, and you can get a Dell with twice the memory, 500Gb of disk space, a DVD writer, a dedicated graphics card and a faster processor, which can be opened with a screwdriver rather than with decorators’ tools and upgraded easily, for £329. Apple are clearly not interested in selling computers to people on a budget, and since there will be far more of those around in the months to come, one hopes Steve Jobs will get out of the way or get a clue if the platform is to survive.

A couple of years ago I wrote this, a reply to a series of articles on OSNews on why the author wouldn’t be buying another Mac. I said I would be, if the platform was still as viable as it had been then. That was in 2006, and it’s now 2008, and my eMac is still sitting there, and it’s still the only Mac in the house. Not because it’s really “going strong”, although I still use it (not so much now that I’ve got Office on my Dell laptop, but it’s the only machine which can send faxes), but because in that time, it has simply been crowded out by the competition. Quite simply, Macs are not good value for money anymore, at my price range.

So, you can imagine my reaction to reading what Steve Jobs has to say about “cheap computers”, linked off OSNews today:

Asked whether users will be likely to see a cheaper computer from Apple, Jobs answered, “I think what we want to do is deliver an increasing level of value to these customers.”

“There are some customers which we chose not to serve,” he added. “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve. And there’s a lot of them.”

“We’ve seen great success by focusing on certain segments of the market and not trying to be everything to everybody. So I think you can expect us to stick with that winning strategy and continue to try to add more and more value to those products in those customer bases we choose to serve.”

This really demonstrates that Jobs is stuck in the past and still obsessed with lifestyle marketing, because I quickly did a bit of research and discovered that Dell sells a machine of roughly the same specification as its Mac mini for a little over half the price in the USA. Specifically:

• Dell Inspiron 518, 2.53GHz Core 2 duo, 2Gb RAM, 250Gb HD, Vista HPrem, Intel GMA 3100: $439
• Mac mini, 2GHz Core 2 duo, 1Gb RAM, 120Gb HD, OS X, onboard Intel graphics: $799

Really, why would anyone in their right mind pay that price for such an underspecified machine? Just because it’s got a silly little square case, which can only accommodate laptop hard drives rather than normal ones, which offer far greater capacity at much better prices? (You do not get 120Gb hard drives anymore, other than on laptops; standard hard drives go from 80 to 160Gb.) It is a rip-off; there is no other word for it.

Steve Jobs seems to have no clue that many people just want a computer that works for them. The article I replied to in 2006 noted that Mac fans thought of their machines as the BMW of the computer scene, but at least BMWs have features Fords and Vauxhalls don’t. Macs offer inferior features and less expansion capacity for more money - they are equivalent to a car like my little Daewoo Matiz with a BMW badge. Admittedly, Mac OS X is better than Windows, but the retail version of Vista is more expensive than the boxed Mac OS X (and, in any case, Apple got the basic operating system for free), so where does the rest of that money go?

Everything about Apple now is a product of the boom that has just gone bust, and I hope Apple gets wise to this fact, because in the next couple of years people who can afford to buy computers at all will not be looking to pay big money for an inferior computer that just looks good. They will want something that ‘just works’. If Apple doesn’t, they will go bust, and that will be a crying shame, because they may well take a great operating system with them (unless they sell it to Microsoft). I would love to buy another Mac, but until I can get one which takes standard hard drives and sells for a decent price, I will be sticking with PCs running Vista and Linux.

I hurried home excitedly with my new purchase and opened the packaging to find the disc was knocking round in the case. I tried installing it, and it failed towards the end with an error message saying “A required file is missing”. I assumed that the missing file was in the same place as the scratch the disc had picked up from the broken lug inside the disc case, so I headed back to Bentall’s and tried to get a refund. Unfortunately the manager, who was the only person entitled to do refunds, had gone sick. So, all I could do was go up to Tottenham Court Road, where each store had a couple of boxes each at the reduced price, and get an exchange there. So I did, yesterday, and got the exchange.

Problem was, when I installed that version, the same error kept happening. I did a search on Google, and found nothing much of help, but on searching the Photoshop Elements User fora and Adobe’s own support pages and fora, I found various suggestions as to how to get round the problem. Among them were creating a new administrator’s account and installing from that, deleting various QuickTime components and installing from a “safe boot”. None of these worked. The same error came up time and again.

It turned out that the problem was my file-system being case-sensitive - an option Apple introduced into Mac OS X with this version or the previous one, presumably to make Unix users (like me) feel more at home. The Mac (and Windows) norm was the opposite - a case-insensitive but case-preserving file system, which means that you can call a file “My Document” or just “my document”, and you’ll be able to access it by any combination of upper- and lower-case you like. Whoever wrote Adobe’s installer did not take into account that some users would have case-sensitive file-systems, which meant that the software, once installed (and it was actually installed, despite the error), would not launch.

There were two solutions. Alexander Templeton, on this blog entry, suggested renaming the offending files. In the case of Elements, the offending files are actually in frameworks inside the Elements application bundle. I chose soft-linking rather than renaming: this means creating a file which points to another file, so that if you access the link file, you’ll get the other file, so that the original file remains intact. However, I won’t bother telling you how to do it, because although it got Elements to launch, it did not stay launched. It told me that my name, organisation and serial number were invalid and that it would have to quit.

The only thing I could do was to install on a non-case-sensitive file system, which I happen to have on my iPod. It still quit the installation with the “required file is missing” error. But Elements installed on my iPod, and when I tried running it, it ran without a hitch. However, the stupid installer insisted on putting Adobe Bridge (the image browser program) and the Help Center application in my normal Applications folder, on my normal case-sensitive file system - after I had told the stupid installer to put everything on my iPod. I managed to transfer Bridge and Help Center from my hard drive to my iPod, but although Bridge now works, Photoshop Elements for some reason can’t launch it (although Bridge can launch Elements).

It seems that keeping Elements on my iPod is the only way to make it work, although I still have another trick (OS X has a program called “installnametool” which tells a program which name to use to look for a framework), although I guess if Elements detects that it’s been tampered with, which is possibly why the first work-around failed, it won’t work either. I’m just really annoyed that software I paid good money for does not work properly because of a bit of sloppy coding by someone at Adobe. Of course, some would say I should stick to open-source software, in which stupid errors like this are noticed, and corrected, pretty quickly. The trouble is, not much in the open-source world can do everything Elements (let alone Photoshop itself) does, or is anything like as well-documented. From the forums, it seems that much higher-paying customers get similar results from Adobe’s software.

This Monday Charlie Brooker (Guardian columnist of Nathan Barley and TVGoHome fame) told the world why he hates Macs in the most-read page on Comment Is Free this week. He not only hates Macs, but also people who use them and “even … people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did”. Thabet @ Eteraz agrees with him. Brooker reckons that “Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui” and that the “I’m a PC/Mac” adverts, which in the UK feature a comedy duo called Mitchell and Webb, whom I’ve never watched, are “devastatingly accurate” for the wrong reasons:

[Mitchell & Webb] are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.”

I’ve been a Mac user for almost the last three years (I bought an eMac in Spring 2004). So, I’m perhaps not your typical Mac fan who’s been using them since they were only one of a number of varieties of proprietary computer system (Mac, Amiga, Atari ST) or someone who stuck with them through the tough years (the 1990s when they were struggling to get their operating system sorted and before they resorted to buying Steve Jobs’ NeXT company with a more-or-less ready-made solution). My first Mac OS was Panther, and I came into the Mac world when a Mac was what I enviously read about in computer magazines when I was 12 - a NeXT box (Cube or Station, it doesn’t matter) - with a white case and with a fraction of the price tag. And I came from Linux, because I wanted a system with the stability of Unix but with some commercial applications.

Admittedly, some things infuriate me about the Mac system. Particularly mine, which is extremely heavy and requires anyone wishing to expand it (by upgrading the hard drive, for example) to take out bits of the computer’s circuitry first. There simply isn’t an affordable Mac that you can expand by opening it up and putting in what you need to put in. You can’t install normal graphics cards, for example, in a Mac Mini because it’s too tiny, so you’re stuck with the on-board Intel graphics chips which use system memory rather than their own. You can open up the cheapest normal-size PC and stick in a graphics card (or get it included when you buy it), but to get a Mac with dedicated graphics memory, you have to pay £679 (nearly £800 when you include VAT) for an iMac. (Buyer beware: it’s extremely difficult to get graphics cards for low-profile PCs - it took me months to find the one I’m using now.)

Then there is the obsessive Apple secrecy, evident in the fact that people who obtain pre-release versions of Mac OS X are not even allowed to post screenshots of what they try out, in case “the competition” get hold of it. (Owners of websites who posted the screenshots had to remove them after receiving threats from Apple.) This morning I registered for an “Apple Tech Talk” on their site out in Uxbridge later this month, and in the invitation I was informed that it was under a non-disclosure agreement, meaning I could not reveal what I learned there - as if someone could beat Apple to market with a product they only learned about with something they learned of at the tech talk.

But still, there are reasons why I like my Mac and I won’t be stopping using it in favour of a Windows-based PC any time soon. Now that Windows VIsta is out, the first good thing about the Mac is that you don’t have to buy a brand new system to get decent graphics out of Mac OS X, because the graphics aren’t too flashy (and if you don’t like the abundance of styles, you can download UNO for free and all your windows will look the same) and they look good on all Macs which aren’t ancient. (Tiger didn’t change that and I don’t think the upcoming Leopard release will either.) It still offers the security and stability of Unix with a large user and application base which plays common media out of the box, and does not require anti-virus software even though some is available. The Mac and its operating system is produced by a company which gets the job done in a reasonable time - you can be pretty certain that the next version of the OS after Leopard will not take six years, assuming Steve Jobs is still around.

However, while I cannot see myself ditching the Mac for Windows, I have found myself increasingly using my old Viglen Pentium 3 which I bought for about £40 on eBay (with various upgrades, which brings it to rather more than that) because I’ve found a version of Linux which does not suck as much as a lot of Linux distributions do: OpenSUSE v10.2. For one thing, the digital photo manager digiKam is so much more pleasant to use than iPhoto - at least the 2004 version I was using, which is dog slow (and I’m not willing to pay them £50 for the latest version which is probably no faster). It does not take seconds to open up a picture, for example, and the system recognises my new camera (more on that in a future entry, insha Allah) when I plug it in. Unlike any of the Mozilla family of web browsers, Konqueror (via the KDE wallet system) remembers my Yahoo and Hotmail passwords. Fonts are no longer ugly, as they were on previous versions. You get the Spaces feature the Mac won’t get until Leopard is out this year. You can customise the desktop far beyond anything you can do with a Mac or on Windows (you can even have the Mac-style menu at the top of the screen if you like). And the sort of trivial software people like to charge you money for on the Mac is free on Linux, although to give the Mac developers credit where it’s due, some of the Mac shareware is better quality than some of the freeware available for Linux; it often gets abandoned when the developer finds he has other commitments.

You might notice that, having been a Linux user for a few weeks, I’m finding it more and more difficult to find things about the Mac to gush about. The fact is, however, that I was a generally satisfied Mac user for the best part of three years and I still go back to it when I need to type a letter and fax it straight out of the system’s own modem. I still go back to it when I need to quickly transfer data from my Mum’s old XP system, because although both Mac OS X and Linux use Samba to get data to and from Windows boxes, using it on the Mac is a piece of cake, which it’s not on Linux. And if I ever have to use Photoshop, I certainly won’t be investing in a Windows Vista system if it’s not out for Linux by then. I’m not saying the Mac and Mac OS X are perfect, but I think they are better than Windows by a mile, and I wasn’t convinced by any lifestyle marketing. I wanted a system that worked, so I bought a Mac. And it works.

OSNews regular Thom Holwerda on how Apple, who used the title above as a slogan when launching the current version of Mac OS X (Tiger) in 2005, has done a bit of photocopying of its own for the upcoming release, codenamed Leopard. Most of the new features it is offering have been available elsewhere in the industry for years, even decades, most obviously Spaces, a funked-up version of the virtual desktops presently available via a third-party add-on to OS X (and as standard in Linux). (More here, here and here.)

On Sunday evening I finally got round to ordering the new hard drive for my Mac (a 120Gb Seagate). It arrived on Tuesday morning by standard first-class post, which was unexpectedly early, though they do say on the dabs.com website that “low-value” items may be sent that way. I put it in the wardrobe, still surrounded by most of its packaging (minus the cardboard boxes) while I read up on how to disassemble my Mac so that I could replace the existing one. The procedure turned out to be staggeringly complicated.

Replacing the hard drive in the eMac - the successor of the original multicoloured iMac, albeit with a faster processor and a white case - is not just a case of opening it up, loosening a couple of screws, sliding the old drive out and putting the new one in and tightening the screws up again. No, you have to get inside the machine, move the fan out of the way, take off the “Faraday shield” (a metal shield) and the “digital assembly”, which appears to contain a whole lot of the Mac’s circuitry as well as the hard drive and DVD drive. The instructions as to how to do this are on a website from which things download very slowly indeed - at about 8K per second, which for a PDF document this size results in a fifteen-minute wait. There are stern warnings telling you not to touch anything to do with the screen, because CRTs contain high voltages which don’t go away when you unplug the machine from the mains. One of the websites I read advised leaving the machine unplugged for twelve hours before going inside the case.

Once you actually get to the hard drive, taking the old one out and replacing it is easy, however. Then comes the whole ordeal of putting the whole thing back together again, which involves remembering which screws go in which holes (not that easy, although I think I got it right in the end). The only hiccup was when I turned it on, and of course the machine could not find anything to load an operating system from, given that the new hard drive was completely blank, and the CD eject button had no effect. I had to manually open up the CD flap and try and press the black button under the case myself.

I loaded up the Mac OS X installation DVD and partitioned the disk, with 35Gb as free space at the low end and the other 75Gb as a Mac partition. You might notice that this leaves 10Gb, which is the 10Gb which simply is not there. Hard drive manufacturers and merchants both collude in the “decimal gigabyte” scam - selling disks denominated in an inflated gigabyte which is 1,000,000,000 bytes as opposed to 1,024 megabytes, a megabyte being 1,024 kilobytes, a kilobyte being 1,024 bytes. Gigabytes, megabytes and kilobytes were always denominated this way due to computers operating in binary, not decimal, and 1,024 is 2 to the power of 10 and the nearest power-of-two number to 1,000. The phony “decimal” storage measurement benefits only merchants, and was probably invented in order to dishonestly inflate capacities in adverts. (The actual capacity of my drive is actually just over 111Gb.)

I then got on and installed OS X, rebooting when it had finished and loading up the Ubuntu CD which I had downloaded. I chose Ubuntu largely because it is based on Debian and thus easily upgraded, and the OS and the core applications are continually supplied with security updates and the like, and because it installs off one CD and not five. My laptop runs OpenSUSE version 10.1, and any time you load up the software management program on there it takes ages to scan the package database. Ubuntu will actually ship CDs out to you for free, and I ordered one of each of the three versions at the end of May, but I still haven’t received them and was not willing to wait any more by the time my hard disk arrived, so I downloaded both the “desktop” and the “alternate” CDs. Previous versions of Ubuntu had a “live CD” and an install CD, but that was before they added the ability to install the software from the live CD, so they renamed it the Desktop CD and left the old install CD for installing on troublesome systems. So today, the Desktop CD is the recommended one, because you can try it out on your computer and then install it, but when I booted from the CD it failed to start the window system as it did not like my graphics card or monitor. So I had to use the alternate CD.

I actually have no problems with Ubuntu having no “graphical installer”, which some take as a sign of an operating system moving with the times. (I find the text-only version of the SUSE admin tool faster than the graphical one.) Ubuntu’s installation is very basic anyway; there is no selecting packages or groups of packages; it installs the operating system, GNOME, GIMP and OpenOffice, and you can install anything else later. The biggest problem I had was making Linux’s file systems; the Ubuntu partitioner simply didn’t see the free space I’d set aside in the OS X Disk Utility, seeing the whole drive as free space. (Strangely enough, it saw 120Gb rather than the 111Gb or so that the drive actually contains; whether it’s a bug or whether the authors of this partitioner have adopted the “salesman’s gigabyte” I don’t know.) I had to use a Unix shell and construct a partition in the free space using the “parted” tool.

Once that was done, I set aside some space for swapping, established what I thought was a big enough boot partition, and used the rest as a standard Linux file system. The system told me that the boot partition had to be 800Kb big, and I let that go because I thought it was 800Kb big, as that’s what it said on the partitioning screen. As it turned out, it was too small, and having installed everything and found that the booting program couldn’t be installed, I had to install it all over again. This time, I let the partitioner do its job automatically.

Once the whole system was installed, I let it restart and found that the Linux booting program (Yaboot) was working OK, at least as far as loading Linux was concerned. Ubuntu have really put their stamp on their version of GNOME, with a redesigned “human” styling and colour scheme. You can see some screenshots of the new look here; in the old version, “human” meant brown - Ubuntu made a big thing of its African origins. (The look was a mixture of Ubuntu’s old colours, Clearlooks widget styles and the Industrial window decorations of the old Ximian desktop.) The first things I did were installing the software development tools, the Qt 4 libraries and, of course, KDE. The KDE version of Kubuntu is called Kubuntu, and eschews the brown human theme for a blue colour scheme; installing KDE turns Ubuntu into Kubuntu, although you can install Kubuntu from the outset. I didn’t do this because the version of KDE shipped with Kubuntu is not the most recent update (version 3.5.3), which was released the very day the present version of Ubuntu (and by extension, Kubuntu) was released. The Ubuntu website tells you of three ways you can install the Kubuntu desktop from Ubuntu, of which I tried the second of the three mentioned, which installs KDE itself without a lot of the extraneous applications, but it did not work, apparently for the lack of the “kdeutils” package. So I had to take the first option of installing the whole “kubuntu-desktop” package, which took less time than expected. (One thing that caught me out was that even after you install the Kubuntu desktop, and the system displays the blue Kubuntu logo rather than the brown Ubuntu one while shutting down, when you log in again, it loads the last session type, which is a GNOME session. It is not set up to load KDE by default; you have to choose this from the menu yourself.)

One of the biggest difficulties I had was finding out how to get back into Mac OS X, because when I tried picking it from the boot menu, it just returned me to the menu again. Obviously it wasn’t configured properly (although it was configured automatically), and I eventually accomplished this by booting again from the Mac OS install DVD and having a look at the partitions. The partitions shown in Disk Utility bore no resemblance to those actually on the hard disk; the number shown, with their capacities added up, comes to more than the total size of the disk, with large amounts of “free space” shown either side of the Mac partition and my Linux partition not there. The DVD can give you a menu on which you can choose to boot from either the Mac partition, the DVD or a network, and I chose the Mac partition, and it loaded up without incident, allaying my fear that installing Linux had trashed Mac OS X. But how should I get back to Linux? One article I read told me I should have done the opposite of what I had done at partitioning stage - put Mac OS X first on the disk, and Linux after it. But I soon discovered that the way to get a choice of operating systems was to hold down the “option key” (the Alt key, with a sort of railway points diagram on it) when the computer was starting up until well after you hear the chime. This gives you a graphical menu with two disks, one with a Mac symbol and one with a penguin (the Linux symbol) next to it. Click the latter and it will take you to the Linux boot menu.

The biggest disappointment was in finding how difficult it is to set up Ubuntu to use my Mac’s graphics card. My Mac has an ATI card, and to use its full capabilities you need a proprietary driver you can get for free from ATI, but they don’t supply it for Linux on the PowerPC Mac. (This is the case with a lot of the proprietary software available for Linux on the ordinary PC, including the Flash player: they don’t bother releasing a version for Linux on the Mac.) Essentially, I’m left with standard 1024x768 non-accelerated graphics, on the eMac’s built-in screen, which in my case has a nasty blotchy background, the reason for which I never found out, which is why I acquired a second monitor a few months ago. Of course, I’m not planning to use Linux for any heavy graphics work; if I had any interest in that, I have Mac OS anyway, but not being able to use your hardware properly because someone is sitting on the software that makes it work is irritating.

On the up-side, the system is a whole lot nippier than any of the PCs on which I have Linux installed. Whether that’s down to better hardware or to Ubuntu I’m not sure, but for example, while typing this using my own blogging application, the editor has not slowed down enough to bother me, which it does pretty quickly on all my other hardware. The whole system feels very responsive in both GNOME and KDE. And my usual bugbear on a Linux system - that of ugly fonts - is not much of an issue here; the standard font, DejaVu Sans, apparently derived from Bitstream Vera, is attractive although less so in boldface (that was an even bigger problem with the original Vera). It’s easy enough to load the Microsoft TrueType Core fonts, which a lot of websites use (my own included).

On the whole, I expect that Ubuntu will prove adequate for what I intend to use it for: software development. Installing it on an older Pentium III was much less of a headache, although that system has a separate hard disk for Linux so partitioning was less of an issue (and most ordinary computer users never install their own operating system anyway; it comes with the computer). As for Ubuntu’s ability to “catch on”, its serious flaws, even in the present version, include an over-simple installation with more advanced configuration (as with configuring the display) made more complicated than it is in other distributions. Then again, configuration may get easier over the next couple of months, as there is one book on the system scheduled for release each month for the next four months (the first being O’Reilly’s Ubuntu Hacks, due out next week; see it reviewed here). Right now, however, most Mac users have no need of Linux anyway; they already have a strong Unix-based OS with a fair set of commercial applications; in future, anyone who wants to use both Mac OS X and Linux should be grateful for being free of the restrictions of the existing Mac architecture.

Technorati Tags: linux, mac, osnews, alcibiades

OSNews recently published a really poorly argued piece by a former Mac enthusiast who subsequently became a Windows and then a Linux fan (Why I will probably never buy another Mac). It lasts for five pages, and in the first page he goes from becoming a Mac enthusiast while other office workers were being lumbered with PCs, through the whole history up to OS 8 and 9 and Windows 98: after that, he says, the quality of Mac hardware went down, the price stayed more or less the same, the operating system became vastly less reliable and fell behind Windows, and the community did not want to be told that their hardware was a poor choice compared to a PC running Windows.

The reader will notice that this author glosses over two important issues in attacking the Mac community. One of these is that Windows, at least since 95, has always been notorious for its reliability and security issues. He does not mention the “Blue Screen of Death” even once. He does not mention the fact that, to run Windows reliably, you need anti-virus software which costs extra (unless it came bundled with the machine), and uses extra system resources. He does not mention the continual updates, which as time goes on, detract from the performance of Windows - or even that the last fresh Windows OS was released as long ago as 2001. He was pleased with XP on a system which was fast, with lots of memory and a huge hard disk; on the system I use XP on, a 450Mhz Pentium 3 with 256 megabytes of RAM and a 7Gb hard drive, it’s an absolute dog.

He also fails to mention that actually OS X has become an excellent operating system. The presentation values speak for themselves (notably the fonts, unmatched on any other platform including Windows), it’s fast on my hardware (1GHz G4, 384Mb RAM), and it’s reliable. I’ve not had the whole operating system crash on me once, although individual applications sometimes do. And it has commercially-supported applications - not as many as on Windows, but certainly more than Linux has, which is what prompted me to move to a Mac having used Linux on a PC. (The Mac versions of the Microsoft Office packages are said by some to be better than their Windows equivalents; it’s just as expensive, though, and I got my copy only because I had a student discount at the time.) As for the original OS X being “a total dog”, first-release operating systems often are. Machines running that version of OS X were configured to dual-boot with OS 9, not least because a lot of applications had not been rewritten for OS X yet.

The author notes that internet forums on which Macs were discussed became less friendly and the inhabitants were often snobbily dismissive of PC users:

Windows machines were ridiculed for being boring beige boxes. Windows users were the subject of snobbish jibes. Contemptuous references to Walmart appeared. Macs kept being compared to high end designer brands, in particular to cars. If you chose differently, it was because you had no taste, no class.

BMWs appeared to have a particular fascination for the Mac aficionado. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The chorus of people who seemed to think that Macs were high class, and that buying them was a route to social mobility, was astounding. Could there really be so many people who were so naive about how social class really works in America? And could so many of them be Mac users? I shivered a bit at the thought.

Returning to the fans’ attitudes, some Linux forms are notoriously unfriendly as well, particularly to newcomers. There is one set of Linux forums I used to visit which would not establish a forum for a particular “distribution” unless its author’s support was forthcoming - the result being that every “one man and his dog” distro was represented but SUSE, one of the biggest with one of the biggest user bases, was not - and so the general Linux forum was full of discussion about SUSE! And a lot of the contemptuous terms he noticed Mac users using (Micro$oft, Windoze and so on) are common among Linux users as well - even turning up in magazines like Linux Format from time to time.

And the software available for Linux is just not up to the standard of the Mac’s, much less what is there for Windows. OpenOffice.org comes as one single program with word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package and whatever else, rather than as separate programs which can be loaded into memory as and when needed. You can imagine the drain this causes to the system’s performance, and the limitations it places on functionality. There must be a reason why companies are not rushing to put it on everyone’s desktop, because it is, after all, free. The GIMP, adequate for most people’s uses, may well come up to the feature set of Photoshop, but right now it doesn’t. While Linux has no shortage of server databases, both commercial and free, it does not have a serious answer to Access or FileMaker. And the Mac actually makes it easier to do everyday Unix tasks, such as starting an internet connection when the router has gone down or a wire accidentally got unplugged, than Linux often does (in this particular case, it detects available internet connections and activates them automatically).

His reasons for “probably never buying another Mac again” are that Apple, in his view, has cultivated the Apple bigots’ mindset, letting a culture emerge that is far more like a totalitarian state “with a Dear Leader who would be in place for life, and the only books allowed would be those not on the Index”. These bigots sneer at non-Mac users and cheer on Apple’s every move, including those which are antithetical to freedom (such as its use of Digital Rights Management and its fondness for suing people), and issue outright lies and then get abusive when the lies are refuted. However, the competition is also known for using morally (and legally) questionable tactics, such as issuing ad campaigns comparing the performance of their server OS with Linux on different hardware, and the phenomenon of what were (or still are) known as “MicroDroids”, who “post follow-ups to any messages critical of Microsoft’s operating systems, and often end up sounding like visiting fundamentalist missionaries”, is well-known.

The fact remains, though, that OS X is a great operating system let down by Apple’s obsession with “lifestyle” hardware marketing. The last actual new release of it was last year; the last version of Windows came out in 2001, and the upcoming version is not thought to work properly on hardware issued before this year. (It will also scramble your hard drive to stop you doing things certain corporations don’t want you doing with their products.) OS X also has a tried-and-tested open-source Unix base, which Windows XP does not have and neither will Windows Vista. And the limited hardware has its own advantage, namely that the system can be refined to work well with that hardware and does not need to bloat itself out to interact with every piece of hardware it might meet. (In the early days of Linux, people would compile their own kernel to suit their hardware for this reason; system resources were too precious to waste on compatibility for hardware you don’t have.)

I like Linux; it’s fun to play around with and it’s just about adequate for some people’s office needs. It is also, nowadays, easy to install for someone with a small amount of technical knowledge but who is not a “Unix guru”. I strongly suspect it will not gain desktop approval, if it ever does, until someone works out a solution to its font problems (asymmetry and general ugliness, particularly on serif fonts). But it does not have the serious desktop applications to make it overtake Windows or OS X, even if as an operating system it is vastly superior to Windows. Which is why, when I next need to buy a computer, if I can afford one and the Mac is as viable a platform as it is now, I will probably buy another Mac.

(Here’s my reply to an earlier article by a Linux fan - in this case the deputy editor of Linux Format - who said that Mac OS X sucks. OSNews linked my article and you can find more comments here, and another pro-Mac article with some caveats by Ed Thomson.)