I actually use a Mac with Virtual PC running WIndows, and I frequently evangelize the Mac/Open Source and dismiss and deride Microsoft and Windows, so I'd say I'm a perfect person to be asked to justify my behavior.
Worse--although I do in fact have OS X on my machine, I don't use it. What is the real reason most people use WIndoze?
Habit. Habit and Familiarity.
Let's be honest. Unless you're work for an oil drilling company like the man mentioned above, odds are you can find a piece of software for the *nix platform (especially if you include OS X). As many people above have pointed out, plenty of alternatives to favorites exist, and many games have been ported over to *Nix platforms.
However, people use their computers as efficient tools. I don't bother even looking at the toolbar when I click on a button, or glance more than 2 seconds at a menu, or pause before entering a key combination. They have all become automatic.
However, were I to switch to another OS, I would have to learn its nuances, and that would take time that I'm not so interested in spending. Even though I'm eager to use a command-driven interface, I find it frustrating constantly having to "learn" how to do things which I easily do in Mac OS 9, and have been doing for over 10 years now.
The reason I haven't switched over to OS X? Believe it or not, there's only one reason: that stupid Open File dialog. I can't grok it, I can't figure it out, and worst of all I can't just type in the first few letters of the file I want in the folder and have it be selected, as has been the case since Mac OS 6.x (back when it was just called "System 6").
I think one of the problems, in fact, is that so many Slashdot users are power users -- dedicated gamers, programmers, coders, designers, developers-- who have become accustomed to using their computers as an extension of themselves. For most everyday users, the biggest difference between a Windows machine, a OS X machine, and a machine running a GUI Linux would be the color of the windows and icons. They don't try to juice their programs as much. After all, if the most complex action you perform as a user is hitting the back button on your browser, it can be any browser on any software platform. But if you're used to coding in a specific text editor, moving to another can be a painful experience.
If the Open File dialog is really a reason, you need to check out DefaultFolder [stclairsoft.com]. It lets you type the name of the file and it selects it, plus a whole lot more for both open and save boxes. If the folder you want to use (open or save into) is open on your desk top, you can click on its title bar and the open/save location jumps to that directory. Plus recently used folders are listed, it rebounds to your last selection, and more. The best $35 investment in productivity I've made.
(I'm not associated with DefaultFolder, I just love the product.)
It does take time to learn. Its not a walk in the park, especially if you know your way around Windows the way most of us do.
I had always dabbled in Linux, but didn't make the switch for mostly those reasons. Then over the summer I had some time off, and I just decided, screw it, I'm sick of whining about windows going slow, crashing, etc. So I did. I spent a weekend installing Gentoo.
It took some time, but less than you think. And it was every bit worth it. Now, I am more productive, no more crashing computer, freezing apps that take 5 minutes to close (there are still freezing applications but a quick ps -aux then kill is far faster than doing ctrl-alt-del and dealing with all that crap) I can do file management tasks on the command line in half the time you can do in explorer.
Do yourself a favor, spend the time learning it, you'll be glad you did.
I disagree with your "habit and familiarity" statement. Here is my list of reasons for staying with Win2K:
1) Control Panel - the best feature of Win2K allows me to manage hardware and their drivers efficiently. You can keep your fstab files and multitudes of broken Control Panel ripoffs.
2) GUI consistency and responsiveness - even with sh*t like QuickTime and Trillian, my Win2K is more consistent than your KDE or [insert desktop of choice] plus I don't have to deal with Xfree86. That's a *huge* plus. 3)Microsoft Knowledge Base - I've read the man pages and tried Mandrake's help features and they're NOT enough. Not even close. Argue this all you want but I've tried everything except keeping a tame *NIX guru caged by my machine and only Microsoft has helped me out here. Scattered information brought to me by Google isn't enough either. Sorry. 4) Games. Games games games. - WineX is slow, buggy, and that's if it even works. Nice try though, props for effort. 5) All my programs - You think I'll toss hundreds of necessary apps (including Deep Fritz!) for the free GNU ones?? Not likely. See, there are NO equivalents for most of the programs I run, much less anything _better_ or even good enough. Examples here include my Vegas Video suite and numerous specialized tools. 5) RTFM - this little attitude courtesy of my friendly neighborhood Linux developers isn't good enough either. When I go Microsoft, there're a billion people who can help me out.. but often enough they don't need to because Windows is has a powerful help system on its own. 6) Little things - for example, until I can re-arrange and edit my "programs" menu via simple drag-and-drop I won't even touch a distro. That's a simple but necessary thing and I want an easy way to do it.
I think the basic gist of what I'm saying here is encapsulated thus: I'm not a coder so my needs won't be met if I switch to Linux - simple as that. Prove me wrong please.
It amazes me sometimes that I am one of the few people who really seems to say anything about a couple issues I have with OS X. I've never really used Windows, so I can't say how much of this it suffers. Anyway, I just wonder if anyone else cares about these issues at all.
Quick background: I've been using Macs since the 128K Mac back in 1985. I've purchased 5 Macs. Even so, I've never really been a Mac power user. I've used a Sun as my primary desktop at work since 1988. I love Unix. I'm attempting to become happy with my G4 with Jaguar as my desktop box at home. I've been using Linux as my desktop at home for the past couple years (until Jaguar came out).
1) Click to Focus - yuck! I hate click to focus. I ALWAYS use Focus Follows Mouse. I find all the extra clicks to be wasteful. 2) Auto-Raise - This paired with the first issue makes it impossible to overlap windows and type in a window that isn't on top. Anyone who doesn't understand this issue probably doesn't use a cmdline very often. 3) Send Window to Back - Basically, having the ability to do this allows you to have a stack of windows, and cycle through them easily. I'm not a huge fan of the dock. I just want to be able to hit a keystroke and get to the window I'm looking for. I shouldn't necessarily need to use the mouse to get to it. 4) Open File dialog - I agree with you! I can't figure out what they're trying to do with that. 5) Terminal - This stupid @$%#$%!& app swallows the PgUp/PgDn keys and just "helpfully" scrolls the terminal window for me. What if I'm running an application IN the terminal window that I need to send these chars to??? Even the old dialup programs used to have special buttons or menus to send any characters they swallowed for any interface reasons. 6) Mail - The other night I was trying to attach a photo to a mail message, and when I double clicked the folder in the dialog box so I could click on the pic to attach, the application decided that I must mean that I wanted to attach the whole freaking 178MB folder to my email message!!!! After listening to my disk do the dance of joy for about 12 minutes, I just power-cycled it so I could get back to work. The one time I wanted to be annoyed by a dialog box asking me if I was sure I wanted to do something, and there was none.:-/ 7) iTunes and iPhoto - Both of these apps have the same "feature". When you tell iTunes to add songs to the list of songs in your library, it COPIES the song files from the dir where they are into your home directory!! I worked around this with symlinks, but this is stupid. Even if I hadn't partitioned my disk such that iTunes filled one up with this feature, I still wouldn't want 2 copies of all those songs on my drive. I guess they figure that I've never ripped a CD before I loaded Jaguar, and that none of my family members like the same songs that I do. 8) File system view - What can I say here? The fact that the effective root directory from the GUI and from the cmdline are different is just insanely confusing. IMHO, this is made even worse if you partition the drive.
All that said, I think I like OS X better than 9, but I struggle to like it as much as using X on Unix. Perhaps 10.3 or 10.8 or 11.0 will be more to my liking.
9) Cut & Paste - Doing this in X is MUCH more efficient than on the Mac GUI. You just select the text and then middle click (I have a 5 button wheel mouse on the Mac, so this wouldn't be a problem). I hate having to do the Cmd-C/Cmd-V thing.
I agree, focus-follows-mouse is a big improvement over click-to-focus - with the latter you end up squinting at a partially-hidden window to find a neutral space on which to click. Also miss virtual desktops from Unix, though I quite like the dock. Perhaps virtual desktops were eliminated because it might make clicking the dock icon a bit confusing: suppose you had terminals present in several different desktops, clicking the terminal icon, the WM would have to make an arbitrary decision about which of the desktops you should be teleported to.
The reason I haven't switched over to OS X? Believe it or not, there's only one reason: that stupid Open File dialog. I can't grok it, I can't figure it out, and worst of all I can't just type in the first few letters of the file I want in the folder and have it be selected, as has been the case since Mac OS 6.x (back when it was just called "System 6")
Hmm, works fine for me. One thing you need to do is to change the focus from the "Go To:" input box first. Just hit the tab key and type a few letters. It will then select the first folder or file beginning with the letters you typed. You can then go into the folder by hitting the right arrow key. If you hit the left arrow key it will back up one level. The up and down arrows move you up and down in the current list.
Just because things might have changed a little doesn't mean that it's too much effort to switch to a new operating system. Sometimes you need to just plunge in and experience something new. Sure you will be slowed down for a little while, but MacOS X has many good features and actually has lost very little from older MacOS versions. I would say that overall the good far outweighs what has changed or has been removed. You will be up and running at full speed in no time
So jump right in and move forward with the many people who are now running MacOS X exclusively. I can honestly say that I have not run MacOS 9 or earlier in about a year, including Classic mode. I don't miss it at all!
I've tried this and it works for *some* applications. But it doesn't work for many of the applications that I use the most -- I can't get it to respond correctly for BBEdit, for example.
Very frustrating. *sigh*
Anyways, this isn't a Mac Help forum, so I'll shut my trap.:-)
The reason I haven't switched over to OS X? Believe it or not, there's only one reason: that stupid Open File dialog. I can't grok it, I can't figure it out, and worst of all I can't just type in the first few letters of the file I want in the folder and have it be selected, as has been the case since Mac OS 6.x (back when it was just called "System 6")
That particular feature did not appear in the OS until System 7, in 1991/2. There was an INIT/CDEV for System 6 called "Boomerang" that lent similar functionality, but it was a shareware add-on.
Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.
-- Dave Olson
Habit (Score:5, Insightful)
Worse--although I do in fact have OS X on my machine, I don't use it. What is the real reason most people use WIndoze?
Habit. Habit and Familiarity.
Let's be honest. Unless you're work for an oil drilling company like the man mentioned above, odds are you can find a piece of software for the *nix platform (especially if you include OS X). As many people above have pointed out, plenty of alternatives to favorites exist, and many games have been ported over to *Nix platforms.
However, people use their computers as efficient tools. I don't bother even looking at the toolbar when I click on a button, or glance more than 2 seconds at a menu, or pause before entering a key combination. They have all become automatic.
However, were I to switch to another OS, I would have to learn its nuances, and that would take time that I'm not so interested in spending. Even though I'm eager to use a command-driven interface, I find it frustrating constantly having to "learn" how to do things which I easily do in Mac OS 9, and have been doing for over 10 years now.
The reason I haven't switched over to OS X? Believe it or not, there's only one reason: that stupid Open File dialog. I can't grok it, I can't figure it out, and worst of all I can't just type in the first few letters of the file I want in the folder and have it be selected, as has been the case since Mac OS 6.x (back when it was just called "System 6").
I think one of the problems, in fact, is that so many Slashdot users are power users -- dedicated gamers, programmers, coders, designers, developers-- who have become accustomed to using their computers as an extension of themselves. For most everyday users, the biggest difference between a Windows machine, a OS X machine, and a machine running a GUI Linux would be the color of the windows and icons. They don't try to juice their programs as much. After all, if the most complex action you perform as a user is hitting the back button on your browser, it can be any browser on any software platform. But if you're used to coding in a specific text editor, moving to another can be a painful experience.
Re:Habit (Score:1)
(I'm not associated with DefaultFolder, I just love the product.)
You are right... (Score:2, Interesting)
I had always dabbled in Linux, but didn't make the switch for mostly those reasons. Then over the summer I had some time off, and I just decided, screw it, I'm sick of whining about windows going slow, crashing, etc. So I did. I spent a weekend installing Gentoo.
It took some time, but less than you think. And it was every bit worth it. Now, I am more productive, no more crashing computer, freezing apps that take 5 minutes to close (there are still freezing applications but a quick ps -aux then kill is far faster than doing ctrl-alt-del and dealing with all that crap) I can do file management tasks on the command line in half the time you can do in explorer.
Do yourself a favor, spend the time learning it, you'll be glad you did.
Re:Habit (Score:1)
Habit (Score:1)
I get more functionality in X than Aqua... (Score:1)
Quick background: I've been using Macs since the 128K Mac back in 1985. I've purchased 5 Macs. Even so, I've never really been a Mac power user. I've used a Sun as my primary desktop at work since 1988. I love Unix. I'm attempting to become happy with my G4 with Jaguar as my desktop box at home. I've been using Linux as my desktop at home for the past couple years (until Jaguar came out).
1) Click to Focus - yuck! I hate click to focus. I ALWAYS use Focus Follows Mouse. I find all the extra clicks to be wasteful.
2) Auto-Raise - This paired with the first issue makes it impossible to overlap windows and type in a window that isn't on top. Anyone who doesn't understand this issue probably doesn't use a cmdline very often.
3) Send Window to Back - Basically, having the ability to do this allows you to have a stack of windows, and cycle through them easily. I'm not a huge fan of the dock. I just want to be able to hit a keystroke and get to the window I'm looking for. I shouldn't necessarily need to use the mouse to get to it.
4) Open File dialog - I agree with you! I can't figure out what they're trying to do with that.
5) Terminal - This stupid @$%#$%!& app swallows the PgUp/PgDn keys and just "helpfully" scrolls the terminal window for me. What if I'm running an application IN the terminal window that I need to send these chars to??? Even the old dialup programs used to have special buttons or menus to send any characters they swallowed for any interface reasons.
6) Mail - The other night I was trying to attach a photo to a mail message, and when I double clicked the folder in the dialog box so I could click on the pic to attach, the application decided that I must mean that I wanted to attach the whole freaking 178MB folder to my email message!!!! After listening to my disk do the dance of joy for about 12 minutes, I just power-cycled it so I could get back to work. The one time I wanted to be annoyed by a dialog box asking me if I was sure I wanted to do something, and there was none.
7) iTunes and iPhoto - Both of these apps have the same "feature". When you tell iTunes to add songs to the list of songs in your library, it COPIES the song files from the dir where they are into your home directory!! I worked around this with symlinks, but this is stupid. Even if I hadn't partitioned my disk such that iTunes filled one up with this feature, I still wouldn't want 2 copies of all those songs on my drive. I guess they figure that I've never ripped a CD before I loaded Jaguar, and that none of my family members like the same songs that I do.
8) File system view - What can I say here? The fact that the effective root directory from the GUI and from the cmdline are different is just insanely confusing. IMHO, this is made even worse if you partition the drive.
All that said, I think I like OS X better than 9, but I struggle to like it as much as using X on Unix. Perhaps 10.3 or 10.8 or 11.0 will be more to my liking.
IMHO,
Michael
Re:I get more functionality in X than Aqua... (Score:1)
9) Cut & Paste - Doing this in X is MUCH more efficient than on the Mac GUI. You just select the text and then middle click (I have a 5 button wheel mouse on the Mac, so this wouldn't be a problem). I hate having to do the Cmd-C/Cmd-V thing.
I'm sure I'm forgetting more stuff too,
Michael
Try looking at iTunes preferences. (Score:1)
Re:I get more functionality in X than Aqua... (Score:1)
Also miss virtual desktops from Unix, though I quite like the dock. Perhaps virtual desktops were eliminated because it might make clicking the dock icon a bit confusing: suppose you had terminals present in several different desktops, clicking the terminal icon, the WM would have to make an arbitrary decision about which of the desktops you should be teleported to.
Re:Habit (Score:2)
Hmm, works fine for me. One thing you need to do is to change the focus from the "Go To:" input box first. Just hit the tab key and type a few letters. It will then select the first folder or file beginning with the letters you typed. You can then go into the folder by hitting the right arrow key. If you hit the left arrow key it will back up one level. The up and down arrows move you up and down in the current list.
Just because things might have changed a little doesn't mean that it's too much effort to switch to a new operating system. Sometimes you need to just plunge in and experience something new. Sure you will be slowed down for a little while, but MacOS X has many good features and actually has lost very little from older MacOS versions. I would say that overall the good far outweighs what has changed or has been removed. You will be up and running at full speed in no time
So jump right in and move forward with the many people who are now running MacOS X exclusively. I can honestly say that I have not run MacOS 9 or earlier in about a year, including Classic mode. I don't miss it at all!
Re:Habit (Score:2)
I've tried this and it works for *some* applications. But it doesn't work for many of the applications that I use the most -- I can't get it to respond correctly for BBEdit, for example.
Very frustrating. *sigh*
Anyways, this isn't a Mac Help forum, so I'll shut my trap.
Re:Habit (Score:1)
That particular feature did not appear in the OS until System 7, in 1991/2. There was an INIT/CDEV for System 6 called "Boomerang" that lent similar functionality, but it was a shareware add-on.