Sunday, July 06, 2014

At the 6 month point

So I have been using my Mac for about 6 or 7 months now and I am still happy with the purchase, so that is a good sign.

But what are somethings that Linux does better?

So far the main thing I have found is that Spaces on the Mac is similar but not near as useful as virtual desktops on Linux. When I am using my Linux machine I use virtual desktops constantly, but when I am using the Mac I don't. Not sure why, but so far it has yet to stick, maybe it is because there is not a panel widget to dock widget to make it easy to switch between them.

Another thing I miss is the package management, sure Apple has the store, but there are several apps that I use that are not in the store and so I have to end up manually updating them. It is very annoying when I want to open a program and the first thing it does is to tell me there is an update to it. Reminds me of using Windows and booting up to 5 apps that need updating. This problem needs to be solved. Maybe Apple or Someone else needs to come up with an "open" store that is searched by the System Update process. Kinda like how there are alternate package repos to Debian and Fedora. Apple needs to provide hooks into system update to make that happen, so I don't see it, but it sure would be nice.

Finally, I still think that the Finder could use some work. Nautilus has always been a good file manager and I think Finder could learn a few more things from it. There are still some things I don't do "the Mac way" and so that is probably what I am running into. Renaming a file is still not intuitive, pressing Enter should open the file, not rename it and there is no option menu item for rename.