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Edvard:
I'm pretty sure I could write the Linux version myself. I just spent an entire day on a nonexistent problem where I hadn't run a simple script. I came close to self abuse just to teach myself to pay attention better!
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John Battelle has been using macs since 1984 and writes that he's more confused than ever:
AM I AN OUTLIER, OR ARE APPLE PRODUCTS NO LONGER EASY TO USE?http://battellemedia...nger-easy-to-use.phpHere are some excerpts:
-- I’m not saying I’m switching, but I sure am open to a better solution. Because the past year or so has been dominated by the kind of computing nightmares that used to be the defining experience of my Windows-PC-wielding friends and colleagues. And it’s not limited to the Mac – the iPhone is also a massive fail in what was once the exclusive province of Apple: Ease of use.
-- But my wife isn’t an outlier. She has about 250 contacts. She tries to use iCal, but can’t make it work. Her email breaks early and often. And she’s spent the past two months in IT hell, trying to salvage her digital life from the clutches of Apple’s self-centered, walled-garden update called the Lion operating system, which wiped out nearly all her previous settings and useful applications. Watching her struggles, and trying to help (and realizing I couldn’t without bringing in expensive professionals) made me wonder – whatever happened to ease of use?
-- I spent a few more fruitless hours trying to find another solution on the web. There wasn’t one that didn’t require pretty significant technical know-how (such as installing a utility, running it to reveal all files on the iPhone, then deleting each file one by one, even if you weren’t sure what the file did). The only option that was relatively straightforward and seemed to work, according to many forums, was to restore the phone.
Which I did. And I lost all my apps save the ones that come preinstalled on the iPhone in the first place.
And guess what? It didn’t fix the problem.
-- Oh, and then there’s the vaunted Apple Super Magical User Interface. You know, the
Insanely Great Revolutionary Change the World User Experience that everyone fawns over as if it were a fact. Are you kidding me? If Apple’s UI is magical, then I’ve got a Unicorn to sell you. Let’s start with Mac Lion. There are so many Fails in this OS, it’s hard to know where to start. You need a 4-hour class just to understand all the contortions Apple seems to be doing in its attempt to make its desktop interface work the way the iPhone does. You know, pinch and swipe and app stores and mission controls and magic corners and all that. I’ve spent at least an hour figuring out how to turn most of that shit off. It just doesn’t work.
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My Rant:
Which is why this current i7 computer will be my last desktop "PC." Apple, Linux, Win8, whatever. I'm devolving to the guy who just wants things to work, and when I upgrade, I don't want to spend an entire weekend futzing and fiddling with settings and reinstalling apps;
this is why I have enjoyed my little Chromebox. And unlike John Battelle above, while I use Linux, I have a wife who's forced into Microsoft land because of her company and all the contract software/servers they bought from Microsoft. And frankly, that OS is as confusing to me as a Windows user trying to configure YaST for the first time -- I have to google a lot of things just to find them, e.g., volume mixer? Oh, just right-click the taskbar. But I didn't find it among the "sound" options in the Control Panel. Why!! Oh well, it's the story of our lives, isn't it?
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