Tao of Mac

Apr 1st 2006 · 5 min read

Side-Switching

Update: Yes, this is an April Fools, but one with a point: has, in fact, shown little ability to keep the side of its OS up-to-date or to polish the technical aspects of its suite to where I (for one) would feel completely comfortable with it. Eye candy isn't everything and the environment, despite its friendliness, could do with a bit more attention where it regards to, say, mobile phone support, bug fixing and standards compliance.

And no, I'm not allowed to have a at my current job - and I practically never take mine to the office. That, considering what I can do with a entirely on my own, and on my very limited free time, should give you some food for thought.

As should the fact that everything written below (either regarding or ) is, to a ludicrously large extent, perfectly true, except for my having installed on anything but my test laptop - but to make this more believable, I did try most of the migration tricks you see described below over the past two weeks (this post has been a long time coming).

Oh, yeah, and the GIMP still sucks (sorry, couldn't help myself).

A number of things have conspired of late to make it plain that I need to go a step further in my "technology made simple" approach, and that despite 's glorious user experience I have been wasting my time mentally context-switching from Windows to to according to my needs.

So I decided to bite the bullet and standardize on a single desktop environment, anytime, anywhere. And since I'm fundamentally fed up with 's flakiness and pigs will fly before I am allowed to have a at the office (a niche perk that executive recruiters may wish to address, incidentally), I have rather grudgingly decided that Gnome is the way to go.

Since Core 4 has been available for PowerPC for some time and Core 5 has been a mostly smooth experience on the desktop side thanks to the extensive improvements on Gnome 2.14, I decided to take the plunge and start getting my act together by installing on all my machines.

So, after my usual quarterly backups, I moved every -specific file to my (which will keep running 10.4.5 for the moment), made sure all my photos and media were backed up (remember, I store all my stuff on plain folders on an and all my mail on an IMAP server), burned a set of installation CDs, and have since spent a few hours getting everything going.

For the record, here's a few of the reasons I went for it and a few caveats regarding this sort of, er... side-switching.

  • Gnome looks gorgeous on my 20" (after the usual obnoxious X configuration tweaks, some of which you'll find here). No fancy OpenGL stuff and utterly crummy fonts, but it can all be tweaked to look very good indeed.
  • Judicious rsyncing of my home directory is all it takes for me to move my entire working environment from machine to machine. No more funkiness, no more inter-machine sync issues, everything syncs locally (and fast) over .
  • Spotlight has always been pretty useless for me (not to mention slow on anything below 1GB of RAM). and the new Gnome 2.14 search bar seem to strike a better balance, and I don't think I'm missing out on much.
  • The client works pretty well (including seamless window support), and although I need to hop through an Intel machine to use it on my , X11 forwarding just works. Just mind your keyboard settings.
  • power management still mostly sucks, and Gnome Power Manager still requires some manual tweaks, but my laptops seem to be getting on with it. Mostly. My still freezes when I close the lid, but it seems to work OK on my iBook so far. Smooth, however, it is not.
  • Getting Thunderbird to access all my e-mail (which has always lived on a home IMAP server) was trivial. Less so was moving my Address Book across, but at least now I can get working, because (get this) neither nor Thunderbird share 's asinine LDAP quirks. They both can do LDAP properly (plus Mark's encoding detector module helps with opening Address Book's UTF-16 format vCards).
  • still doesn't support (natively) any of the mobile phones I have (and we're talking about phones that are between six to twelve months old, not prototype stuff). Since I'm used to tinkering about with low-level approaches and there's no lack of -based tools for mobile phones (including ones using standard SyncML), there's no point in waiting for to catch up with the market (it's not like they are even trying, especially where it regards European phones).
  • Calendaring was (and still is) a non-essential function for me, but I got my iCal stuff imported into at present. I still loathe 's poor take on features, but it does the job.
  • Transitioning was painless. I'll sorely miss 's integration with Address Book and , but I've been using on Windows for more than a year, so I just copied across the relevant configuration files and bingo, my buddy lists were neat and clean (plus, of course, rsync made it painless to propagate them to the other machines).
  • I hate Ekiga's name and can't abide portions of its UI, but it worked with my corporate video-conferencing setup (and all my SIP accounts) out of the box on my . My iSight refuses to play for the moment, but I will get around to it soon.
  • F-Spot isn't as simple as and (apparently) doesn't have RAW support, but it does and metadata management properly. For free. I can't get it to import directly from my yet, but I suspect that's easily fixable. It can, however, cope with my multi-gigabyte photo archive over SMB just fine (provided I do some mount voodoo, which I'll magic away in due time).
  • Since we're talking about SMB, I'm looking for a Gnome-based music player with DAAP support (I still have my serving my archive using DAAP and a perfectly good , so there's no point in messing with that).
  • is, well... . Same for Ruby. I no longer have to worry about having outdated versions or bending over backwards to get some things to compile (although there is a tendency to go out and grab bleeding-edge versions of stuff that I will have to try to curb).
  • Despite some issues with Core 5's new OpenGL compositing stuff and the utterly dismal multi-head support on my (i.e., I still have to restart X11 to switch to multi-head), I'm finding using a virtually identical desktop environment saves me time (sure, moving between different environments makes you more flexible in many regards, but I'm past caring).
  • OpenOffice is still junk. About the only thing I like about it is direct PDF output from most applications, so I'll be sticking to my corporate environment for conventional work (although I'll be more careful with my slides to make sure I can present stuff in ).
  • Oh boy, do I miss . is crummy and woefully limited, but at least it does something when I hit Ctrl-Space.

As to this site, well... We'll see what sort of domain name I can get, and of course all the content will be kept up, but the absolutely worst bit will be going through 200-odd site headers using, of all things, that blasted GIMP.