Linux

[music | Leaether Strip - What If (Beats on classic mix)]

The Amarok discussion usually comes as a result of a wider discussion/flamewar about the "little things" that bug the shit out of me a year after dropping SuSE for OSX as my home desktop. I used Linux as my desktop for about 8 years, and before that for more "traditional" server type applications. I've had a Linux desktop since Redhat 4.1, but it didn't replace Windows completely until about 1999. That gives me a different perspective on how a computer Should Just Work. My definition of that is skewed by things like uptime and standards compliance. I have no idea what the Standard Uptime is for a Windows desktop machine. My Windows desktops have always stayed up for months and months, because they do nothing except run Outlook and specialty business software that I couldn't get to work under Wine.

So from that perspective, OSX is not particularly stable. The only time I ever rebooted my linux machines was when either the power went out or I was upgrading SuSE. Aside from that, they Just Worked. I don't count things like upgrading KDE as a reboot, because it was just an X11 restart, ctrl-alt-backspace, new DE starts, no reboot. Leopard is more stable for me than Tiger was, especially in terms of returning from standby on the laptop. However in terms of applications "beachballing" and having to force-quit things, well that kind of thing rarely happened to me in SuSE. I'd probably kill Firefox every couple of weeks because something screws up or its footprint was too huge. I have to force-quit Safari every day or two (no SIMBL or other wackiness anymore until I figure out why this is).

Here's a quick list with some detail about what really bugs me, and what I really like in OSX:

[music | Sleater-Kinney]

Today's been fun. Yesterday a site run by one of my friends (wolfeboro.net) was shut down by its ISP because they got a large influx of traffic, and the ISP panicked.

[music | nine inch nails - eraser]

Not without some seriously non-typical end user junk, but giving up on installing dependencies myself after seeing control-center2 relying on nautilus, and nautilus relying on control-center2, I installed using YAST and it worked fine. I know I should have forced around the dependencies, but please, someone...

What kind of idiot runs an Alpha version of ANY OS distribution? You're looking at him. Yesterday I decided I'd had enough of being paranoid about my music collection not being backed up, and bought a 120GB drive at Staples ($59). The intent was to move my desktop system over to that and I'd have one copy there and one copy on my fileserver.

I was going to download OpenSuSE 10.0 but for some reason didn't, and decided to use 10.1 Alpha. That was dumb.

I backed up my config from the old disk and moved it over to the fileserver, everything except my X11 config, which is a fairly large mistake in itself, and proceeded with the install.

* Network card - Works/Doesn't work, depending on its whim.