Brand New Mac Mini

I have had my second Mac Mini for about a week now with none of the problems from the lemon Mini which was a refurbished machine.  I have bought refurbished machines before which were quite useful.  I had expected that my need for a Mac would be for several months while I prepared a Mac version of my assembly book.  After that I could survive a failure.

In any case the new Mini is a keeper.  I replaced the RAM with 2 8 GB SODIMMs the day after it arrived.  It was pretty sluggish before with 4 GB, but runs pretty well with 16.

It took me a few days to discover that Apple calls the virtual desktop "spaces".  What a silly concept!  I found the system settings menu choice pretty helpful.  It does nearly everything I needed to do with the Mac except set up "spaces".  I think I would have figured this out much quicker if the settings options included setting up "spaces".  I poked around with most of the choices there and it was fairly well organized.

In general I have found the Mac to be fairly easy to use.  I still prefer Linux, though I think the Mac is second with Windows third.

Negatives

• X Windows is not the main windowing system.  Perhaps the OS X windowing system is superior in some ways, but it would have been better for me for X to be the only windowing system.
• Tunneling X through ssh works OK for a little while, but seems to time out after half an hour or so.  I haven't looked at this closely, but to run X apps which OS X won't support I have taken to writing shell scripts which invoke ssh with the X app as the command to run.
• I don't like the fact that I can't easily just type in the name of a GUI app to run it.  I am used to typing in acroread.  I did manage to solve this using the open command in shell scripts.
• The top command on OS X is a weak tool.  They need to copy Linux on that one.
• I would prefer a hierarchical menu of programs and settings.  I don't like the Gnome Unity system and I don't like the somewhat similar choices in OS X.
• I still don't like the program's menu bar being part of the panel at the top of the screen.  In ebe there are several useful options in the menubar and you have to move the mouse across a lot of screen space to get to it.
• I have finally gotten used to using Control-C and Control-V for copy and paste and OS X seems to want me to always use the mouse.
• Apple should provide more open source software or at least make the system as Linux compatible from software as possible.  It took me a bit of googling and reading to figure out how to build kile on OS X.  I gave up on ksudoku.  It really shouldn't be difficult to match Linux.
• Mac Ports compiles everything which is a slow process.  This is arguably not Apple's fault, but it relates to the previous point in that I think Apple should grease the skids on using open source software.
• The operating system seems to have more to do than Linux.  Top typically reports about 92% idle while Linux would be at least 96% idle.  I haven't checked into this and perhaps this extra CPU usage is doing something I would like.
• Macs are more expensive.  A comparable Dell (in a much larger box) is about $300 cheaper and has 6 GB of RAM and a 1 TB disk.  I certainly think OS X is better than Windows 7, but I would simply install Linux on the Dell and have a very nice computer.
• There are no doubt a handful of minor differences which don't matter much.

Positives

• It is a version of UNIX at its core and feels like home to me.
• Porting code to OS X is far better than porting to Windows.  The Mac Ports collection has over 15000 packages which is quite large (though synaptic under Ubuntu reports over 41000 packages which are already compiled and quicker to install).
• The system preferences collection does nearly everything I need to do with the operating system.
• iTunes has a large collection of internet radio stations.
• The other i-apps are probably quite useful, but I haven't tried them yet.
• Some commercial software is available for OS X which is not available for Linux.  Most notable is MS Office which I will not be using.  I have installed LibreOffice instead.
• I have installed Skype which I expect to be less trouble with OS X.  I have move my webcam/microphone and try it out while I am using OS X as my main system.
• Bash is the main shell.  I would prefer the latest bash, but at least it is a very nice program.
• /etc/shells shows a nice collection of shells.  ksh and zsh are both respectable alternatives to bash.
• OS X is not likely to be infected like Windows.
• I have a lot of confidence in the file system which has been around for quite a while.
• There are a lot of positive features which I will not mention since they are common on Linux and probably a lot of others I have not yet encountered.

Summary

I trust Mac OS X to be a solid operating system.  It offers a lot of value and is relatively easy to manage for a UNIX system.  It is an expensive choice but it works well.  My ranking a 10 point scale is

   Ubuntu     10
   Mac OS X    9
   Windows 7   7

Now I don't really think Ubuntu is perfect, but it works well for me and is a little more useful.  My latest choice for a window manage is XFCE though KDE is a close second.