Why I Ditched MacOSX for Linux - A Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 Review
Source: OS News
I entered the world of Apple hardware about 3 months ago now, with a second-hand iBook2. It was a 500mHz, 256mb, ATI Rage 128 model, with a standard CD-Rom drive. I spent the first few days trying to install Mac OS X to my liking, then a few further weeks installing and learning to use the applications I thought I'd need. Chimera, BBEdit, the developer tools, even the Fink X server so I could use Gaim. But OS X just wasn't stacking up for me. For my uses, Mac OS X isn't all it claimed to be.I'd read the hype about OS X, indeed it would have been pretty hard to miss. I was led to believe that great swathes of Windows users (and a few Linux users) were biting the bullet and changing to OS X because of it's performance, usability and stability. Maybe this situation is a little exaggerated given the nature of the pro-Apple press, which will pounce upon any morsel and claim that the Mac revolution had finally arrived (albeit maybe 15 years too late). But eventually, using OS X was, for me, a bit of an anti-climax.
The graphics card that was incorporated in my iBook wasn't up to running the new QuartzExtreme features, so I had to make do with standard 2D rendering. I experienced small amounts of graphical lag right from the start with OS X.
Scrolling a Finder window with more than 10 or so icons in it would produce skipping and visible refreshing, something I thought died with Windows 3.1. I certainly wouldn't have expected such poor performance from from a 256mb system, when my Amiga 500 managed such tasks and performed better, at least in terms of responsiveness, than this in 1991. Maybe this could be rectified. Maybe the configuration panel hides an option to increase rendering performance; but I shouldn't have to find it, such simple system performance issues should not exist. OS X on Apple hardware should just work well out of the box.
