>That's a blanket statement if ever I heard one. What kind of serious
>work? For what I do, anything less than Mac OS X would be useless.
><statment type="blanket">Frankly, for anyone doing more than one thing
>at a time, anything less than Mac OS X is mostly useless.</statement>
It's a matter of software you use and the way you use your computer.
If you use buggy software, than MacOS X is the way to go because they
won't bring your machine down.
There is a bad tendency of people to say that OS X is better faster
and so on, while this isn't technically possible. If an operating
system gives time to every application, it will lose over an
operating system that gives time to a single operation. Even if Apple
would cut down the user interface blinking stuff, the interface would
still seem slower than on 9, the menu seem to go down slower or be
filled slower, etc. Just because when you pull a menu on 9, only
interruptions are still alive (properly written internet applications
don't suffer from it).
My sister does video capturing and editing on her eMac 800 SuperDrive
with 256 MB of RAM. Plus the usual stuff: mails, web browsing, word
processing with AppleWorks, etc. OS X is definitely her best choice
(although she cannot watch some movies encoded with indeo under X).
I use a Beige G3 with a G4 processor at 350 MHz and 320 MB of RAM.
MacOS X is supposed to run on it, but I need to do some OpenFirmware
voodoo to actually boot.
I do Newton development. I do MacOS development. I do some Unix development.
For Newton Development, MacOS 9 is the best solution. There is simply
no tool on OS X.
For MacOS Development, ProjectBuilder is a pain in the neck. It takes
eons when you type, it blocks everytime you compile your project, it
complains every time about CVS, the graphical debugger doesn't work,
it quits without any reason, it compiles very slowly thanks to gcc,
it doesn't have a browser-based coloring scheme like CodeWarrior,
it's not customizable as MPW is, and even if it was, I haven't ported
my scripts.
The solution is to compile in the terminal and use gdb without a
graphical frontend. I've used gdb in other circumstances, and I can
tell you that it's largely inferior to tools like MetroNub or Macsbug.
If you're a free software fan and you're used to poor quality
development software, I understand that you like Project Builder and
you venerate Interface Builder.
I prefer MPW and CodeWarrior, but I happen to have the first version
of CW which is supposed to run on OS X, namely CW 6, so of course it
doesn't work. Typing is slow and debugging doesn't work at all. And
MPW has been steved.
For Unix development, I definitely prefer to use BBEdit with MacSFTP
and MacSSH. The files stay on the machine they are deployed to, where
they are compiled and executed. MacOS X's terminal is horrible. You
can't type accents. I've tried various settings, no way. It
intercepts pageUp and pageDown. And MacOS X libraries and available
functions isn't always what you have on the target computer. And I
don't feel at ease with MacOS X unix-like stuff. I'm often lost, and
I'm always scared to break it.
For the usual stuff like mails, web browsing, word processing and so
on, I can't see any big advantage of one over another. Well, if you
have to use Office X, you'll need MacOS X. Idem with OpenOffice.
MacOS X might have faster network accesses, but it froze several
times on this machine corrupting databases like iTunes's. Therefore
when I'm using X, I use pine. I don't want troubles with my e-mail
database.
I still can't give up using labels in the Finder, though, and I hate
it when the computer asks me to which application a suffix shall be
associated with, even if it displays the correct icon!
Paul
-- NPDS: http://newton.kallisys.net:8080/ Apache: http://www.kallisys.com/-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
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