On 3 June 2011, at 02:32, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: >> ... >> Your Linux box isn't working, and you're complaining about Macs? >> >> That seems a little inappropriate. >> >> Let me assure you: when a Mac has a hardware button, it will work just fine. >> It won't be disabled for no reason. >> >> This is why I use Mac for the desktop. Because when I get home after a hard >> day's work fixing computers I don't want to have to do a "bat shit crazy >> amount of work to keep things working" [1 > > so why do you own a mac? > > Just days ago I beachballed a mac adding some pictures to a word document. > Yeah, that is the legendary MacOS stability. > > Next time I sat on a mac there were 37gb of stuff in trash. The poor owner > tried to delete them. MacOS showed the apropriate reaction, no error anyway - > and no file was deleted. > > Had to go down to the shell - and even after that some crap was still left. > Undeletable and with no error messages or informations why.
Part of my post that you chose not to quote was "I'd be the first to admit that Macs have flaws." All desktops / UIs / operating-systems are a compromise. I don't believe any of them are perfect. Last time I used Linux on the desktop (in ernest) I had some dreadful problems with KDE crashing or failing to open under certain circumstances, which I found frustrating and impossible to overcome. That was several years ago, and no-one on the mailing list or Usenet group I tried was able to help; I don't think I knew at the time to try the KDE mailing list. Currently the biggest thing holding me back from giving Linux another good chance to prove itself to me is basically that Mac OS X is "good enough" for me. It's exceedingly easy to try the new version - I'm booted off an external USB drive as I write this, and I can copy across my ~ directory from my old system just the way you would with Linux. That's something you can't do with Windows, for example. If I wanted to try Linux, it would take me at least a week to give it a fair chance, to install it, to configure my desktop, to find equivalent applications and configure those, too. And if I didn't like then I'd have that hassle of moving back to Mac OS and having all my files (ODF document files and even just such trivial things as chatlogs) in different formats and so on. That's 7 - 10 days of my life that I have no interest in spending. What's the benefit for me? One concern about using Linux on the desktop is that I don't think the apps will be as good or as polished as the ones I use currently. Another is that (I believe) gestures are not supported in present window managers - presently I can pinch outwards with two fingers to zoom in on an image, or I can swipe with 4 fingers to show an overview of my virtual desktops and open windows. Spreading all 5 fingers shows me the desktop. So I don't like mice, and I was getting pissed off with cleaning my trackball on a daily basis (the ball kinda gets all clogged and slow) … it's hard to find a device with as many buttons as I can make trackpad gestures. You complain of beachballing OS X, using Word. But Word is a Microsoft application. ;) Nevertheless, there are some things I agree are absolutely shit about OS X. Some of these are that way because Steve Jobs wanted them that way, and his "good taste" is not universal; some are purely technical. It's possible to make OS X swap horribly - that might well be what happened when you dragged the image into Word, but you don't tell us how much RAM that machine had. You don't tell us whether you checked swap consumption in `top` or Activity Monitor. Safari's memory usage seems pretty bad, and I have been easily able to consistently reproduce on occasions a beachball for several minutes as pages are exchanged between RAM and disk; there's a well-known printing bug that causes this, and some particular websites. Almost always it'll sort itself out if it's left alone to settle down. My next machine will have 8gb of RAM, and I'm pretty confident I won't see this problem; I typically have 40 - 60 browser tabs open in perhaps 8 different windows. OS X's HFS gets insanely fragmented in a way that many self-identified "Mac experts" will deny. They clearly haven't tested their assertions using Amit Singh's hfsdebug (or fileXray) tool. Nevertheless, these are very much manageable problems, they're known and they're clearly defined. If you've got some stuff in Trash that is not deletable, I would guess that you've got a corrupt file system. That can happen on any o/s. This feels like like old joke about "I can always get technical support by joining IRC and saying that 'Linux is crap because it doesn't do X'. Then half the channel will spend ages telling me how to do X in Linux". Format an external USB hard-drive as bootable (I believe you use "GUID Partition Scheme" for Intel Macs and HFS+ Journalled; there is no magic bootable tick-box to check, and no bootloader to install) then boot to an OS X installation CD and open a Terminal instead of the installer (from the Tools menu, usually). Copy the entire contents of the old drive to the new using `ditto` (using all "--archive --preserve-rescource-forks" type options, just to be safe). If you hold the ALT (or "Option") key when the computer restarts you should be able to boot from the external drive, otherwise boot to the old drive and choose the new one in System Preferences (under Startup disk). If the undeletable files are missing from the Trash in the new system, or you can now delete them (I assume you already checked their Unix file permissions) then the problem was probably filesystem corruption. You should be able to remove the drive from the external caddy, put it inside the Mac and use it instead of the old one (which may just have a corrupt file system but which is probably suffering from bad sectors / hardware failure). Stroller.
