Mac-snobs: pondering the switch

[dwenius]

Dear Lazyweb,

The Gentoo box, she is old. Very old. First generation dual-CPU Dell with dumb proprietary memory old. We are eyeing some kind of mac for the next go 'round, but I have some

Recall also that I am a lifetime unix bigot. Some of these questions may therefore be offensive to the faithful.

1. Hardware and HW compatibility questions first: Is there any point in hanging onto these SCSI drives, external enclosures, this nice SUN raid array, etc.? Does any of this hardware care about SCSI anymore?


2. What's the deal with printing...is it just CUPS? I've noticed that they sell USB-to-parallel printer cables; anyone used one? We have this perfectly usable laser printer that can handle 11x17" paper here, and I'd like to hang onto it if we can.


3. It looks like they ship the mini with a DVI-to-VGA adapter; good, we can keep the flatscreen. On the other hand, we eat a USB port for a mouse/kb adapter: boo.
   
4. Which of the hardware options-- mini, iMac, MacBook-- has the best reliability record? I know, they're all less than a year old, nobody knows yet. But you have stories, I know you do. Tell them to me. What broke way too easily? Where did they cut corners in a way that will piss me off? This Dell is ancient, but it's built like a tank; I've kicked it in the head with bad software on occasion, but the hardware has been rock solid.


5. Software stuff now, and first things first: I have over a decade of saved email; is OS-X going to do something automated and stupid when it finds a pile of email, like try to translate it out of mbox into some clever binary format?


6. In a related question: Graphic mail programs blow a goat. Can I assume that fetchmail and mutt will run without difficulty in a shell? The default shell is bash, right?


7. Speaking of shell windows: I still use a trimmed down custom compiled X-term, because it lets you remap character classes to allow double-click selection of email addresses, URLs, and so forth (you map the @ sign to the letter 'a' for example). Will I be able to do this? Rxvt, E-term, and other newfangled terminal programs do not allow this. You laugh, but it probably saves me 15-20 hours of real clock time a year, twice that if you count the time I spend being annoyed by terminals that lack it (ahem, cygwin).


8. More window management: I currently use XFCE, which is fast. I am not down with the current trend towards eyecandy with questionable human interface value. Are the more bloated features of the default UI defeatable, or do I have to live with slowdowns for features I don't need or want?


9. Is there a centralized source or binary repository? Can it be trusted? How current is it? Gentoo's portage was very fine, but there could be delays of weeks for some packages (say, Firefox)


10. Speaking of which, Firefox is not optional. Anything I need to know about the OS-X version? The usual extensions are available and such? Have the earlier stability flaws been addressed?


11. How well do random X11 programs build and run? Will I have to run an X server alongside whatever OS-X is using?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

1) If you can add a SCSI card to the computer, you can run SCSI on it. So this currently means a desktop computer and a compatible card. Mac OS X itself supports the cards, you don't download drivers from somewhere, so get a card guaranteed compatible with Mac OS X, or at the very least returnable. I do not know the SCSI on Mac OS X Intel story. They might have given up maintaining it. I dunno.

(Mac Mini and iMac do not have places to add cards. Mac Book Pro uses some new kind of card called an "Express" card which is the newer kind of PCMCIA.)

2) Mac OS X includes CUPS and also includes special drivers for many many recent printers from Epson, HP, Canon, and a couple more vendors. I assume your old laser printer is happy with CUPS and you are too, so you should be fine.

4) The MacBookPro and MacBook are getting a lot of attention for the heat/noise issues. They DO run hot, no doubt. As for the noise, I think it's the alien implants that are bugging people because their complaints seem pretty retarded to me. iMac (Intel) and Mac Mini (Intel) are pretty well regarded at the moment. Current rumors are that Apple will start selling desktop Intel boxes in August at the Developer Conference. Those are RUMORS but they seem reasonable.

5) If you launch Mail.app, it will give you the option of importing your mail. It doesn't delete the old mail when it imports. If you don't launch Mail.app, it will not mess with your mail. There's also no need to configure Mail.app to touch your mail accounts. So you've got two layers of protection from the GUI-ness there.

8) The Mac OS X GUI is not very customizable. There's a few hacks that write secret preferences that, for example, turn off the drop shadow, but not enough, and they don't really affect things that much. (I'd go on to explain that the graphical stuff doesn't consume much CPU, but you won't believe me, even when I'd explain that most all of the special effects are done by the graphics card.)

9) Fink and DarwinPorts are other people's repositories of open source goodness. They don't control Mac OS X itself. Mac OS X itself does not have package management. (SIGH. It's a LONG saga. Maybe in a few more years we'll get it.)

I haven't used Fink or DarwinPorts, so I can't tell you if they are well run.

I don't know what happens when Mac OS installs Apache, python, and perl, and so does Fink. I presume this is handled somehow, because I know people do this.

10) Firefox runs pretty dang well. At least as well as Safari. (It's often a bit faster than Safari, but seems to crash slightly more often.) Yes, it used to crash more, so it's more stable now. It's also faster than previous versions. FireFox has many extensions that run under Mac OS X. I use a few, and don't see any troubles.

11) You will need to install the Developer package (to compile stuff) and also install the X windows package. Then you can have X windows launched when you log in, and presumably you can then have it open all your crazy doo dads and dingers right while you are logging in. X Windows is an app under Mac OS X.

[haineux.livejournal.com]

Grrr. This would be me. (Livejournal keeps me logged in 90% of the time, so the other 10 is annoying.)

[haineux.livejournal.com]

Also, there are deals to be had through your Apple employee friends, so talk to them if you decide you want to make the jump.

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

Indeed, we will.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

As a sidenote, X11 is included passim on system disks, but is not installed by default. If you don't see /Applications/Utilities/X11, run the OS installer, click 'Options', install X11; it will not stomp over existing system files. The rest of the developer tools (a.k.a. XCode) require a (free) registration for a (free) hefty package download. Most of the heft is documentation, variously PDFs and HTML with graphic screenshots.

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

1) ok, maybe best to bail on SCSI then, as I don't think a big desktop is what we want.
2) Must. Save. Obscure. Printer. Drivers!
4) I will research the hotness issues.
5) Good to know. As wisn pointed out, I lose Spotlight access to mail if I stick with my habitual software choices for mail; this could be a drawback. Can you configure the default actions in the Spotlight search result screen? That is, can I get Spotlight to launch a terminal and mutt on a specific mail message search result? I'll assume not. Hmmmmm, pondering.
8) I am open to rational argument on UI speed concerns. I just know what has happened to every other UI I've ever worked with, except XFCE.
11) it's not so much the doodads and dingers, it's the 2-3 programs I don't wish to abandon that have usable X11 interfaces. One of these is Nethack, the others are fractal programs, hence all the graphics performance questions.