Innovation in Software

Last Sunday I trundled up to the local Apple store with company debit card in hand to grab a copy of OS X Leopard. I installed it that afternoon and have spent the last week on the road and at home living with it. I’ve now come to a conclusion:

Leopard is an excellent advertisement for switching to Ubuntu.

Seriously, it sucks. I’m not talking suckiness on a Windows Vista level, but compared to Tiger, it’s awful. Here’s some reasons.

Firstly, perhaps reasonably for a dot-zero release (but still annoyingly), it crashes and/or locks up quite often. In several years of using Panther and then Tiger, I don’t think I had to power-cycle my machine more than twice. I’ve done it five times this week. Sometimes when using an external keyboard on my Macbook Pro, the system “just forgets” it’s there and I’ll have to unplug the keyboard from USB and plug it in again, but sometimes nothing happens even then: Finder stops responding, the mouse stops moving, and then it’s time to hold down the power button for a few seconds and bring it back up.

Whilst we’re talking about peripherals, I grabbed myself a replacement Mighty Mouse whilst buying Leopard (note: the scroll ball clogs and breaks within months, you’ll be buying a lot of replacements for the improved productivity I accept it provides), this time a wireless version. This helped me discover that bluetooth support for mice in Leopard is rubbish. Whether’s it blued taking up 50%-60% of CPU for long stretches of time, to not being able to see the mouse at all on resume, it’s so bad it’s basically useless. I don’t think it’s reasonable load average should be > 0.7 just because I am moving my mouse around.

Then there’s the RAM issue. Sure, with each release of an OS you expect to see more RAM being gobbled up, but I swear, I’ve never seen an OS have a problem with 2Gb of RAM and six applications open, not even Windows. With Tiger I used to be able to do a lot more and have a lot more free space to move around in. Leopard swaps so hard in the same usage scenario that it reminds me of when I was using an iBook G4 with half a gig of RAM.

Let’s now move to the extra features Apple provide in Leopard.

I don’t care what people say, Safari 3.0 is not faster than Firefox – anybody who is saying so just isn’t doing any meaningful measurement. What’s more, Safari still doesn’t “get” the plugin thing, and on my system at least rendered pages like it was spitting out HTML in vomit-like chunks.

The other big upgrade, Mail, is more of a mixed bag. Whilst Mail.app version 3.0 fixes several bugs I had learned to “work around” in 2.0, it introduces a few more niggles. That’s not the big problem though. Quite frankly Mail.app 3.0 needs a stake driving through it’s cold dead heart for producing HTML e-mail that cruddy, insisting all “notes” have yellow ruled-line backgrounds and integrating with iCal as more of an after-thought than as a reasonable feature.

Spaces is worse than 3rd-party solutions I used wth Tiger in my opinion, and gobbles even more RAM – a scarce commodity as it is in Leopard-land.

I’ve not actually tried the new integrated back-up system, because I’ve heard that Time Machine breaks Leopard even more than Leopard does on its own time and you end up fighting reboot screens constantly. I’ll stick with SuperDuper and the odd s3sync

Meanwhile they’ve managed to make sure the Dock is harder to make sense of thanks to little, tiny, blue-ish orbs on a reflective background indicating app state instead of clear arrows. Whilst we’re down there, can somebody please tell me what good are Stacks given that they’re slow, only make sense in ‘grid mode’ and don’t help you find anything you don’t already roughly know the location of.

At least though, that’s a relatively sane way of finding files. Cover-flow in Finder is just slow and silly, although Finder in general is much better. I daren’t even go near Spotlight, fearing that I might accidentally send share prices in CPU fan and RAM manufacturers soaring.

Whilst we’re at it, can I just mention the integrated firewall isn’t a firewall apparently, so unless you’re comfortable with ipfw, you’re about as open as it’s possible to be.

I am not however a typical OS X user. I am a developer who approaches OS X as a Unix with a better GUI than X + your choice of window manager. Some people will be happy with Leopard, and won’t want the stability or flexibility I need. Many switching from Windows will find the random, sporadic instability perfectly normal behaviour. I do not.

For all my problems with Unix as a desktop in the past, after nearly 3 years away from that flock, Leopard has convinced me to start moving back to Open Source. This weekend I’m going to Bootcamp up and put a “proper” Unix on like FreeBSD or a GNU/Linux distro like Ubuntu. That will allow me to slowly transition my data and working environment over and keep OS X (and Windows w/parallels) available for development and testing work.

I’m sorry Apple, this time you blew it, and you blew it hard. I hoped Leopard was meant to be more than an eye-candy release, but ultimately it’s just worse than any other version of OS X. I’d recommend Panther over Leopard right now, never mind Tiger.

For the last year, I’ve been running pretty much everything off old hardware I had lying around. It did its job – and still does it very well – but it’s time for an upgrade.

I’m now in the fortunate position that for the first time in about two years I actually have a small amount of spare cash to hand. Well, when I say “spare”, I mean “not immediately needed to pay a bill anywhere”. This means I have choices.

The first thing I need to decide is whether I want to stay with Apple or not. OS X has been my primary desktop for the last 2 years, and whilst it has a few features that make it stress-free – decent WiFi and phone synch support out of the box, combined with the integrated address book – there isn’t anything I couldn’t replicate in open source without a bit of tinkering. And I do miss running an entirely open source system. There’s also the fact that Apple hardware is ridiculously expensive for what it is. Component for component, even the cheapest Macbook can be had by a generic laptop supplier for nearly half the price.

I also need to decide on the level of portability I want or need. About six months ago, my laptop’s screen got fallen on (aka “The Guinness Problem”), and I haven’t got around to fixing it yet. That means it’s been anchored to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse for the last six months. There have been perhaps three occasions in all that time where I could have done with it being a laptop again, instead of a very quiet and power-efficient desktop. I anticipate in the next 3 months a total of five occasions – all of them “get around”-able – where I could do with power on the road and so I have to ask whether the premium for a laptop is worth it. I’m already planning on an E90 Communicator when they hit the market, so my “ssh whilst in the coffee shop” problem is taken care of. It’s whether I need something portable I can code on that is the issue.

This last one has led me to a rather philosophical point. The reason I am naturally resistant to getting a dream-machine dual-head, or even triple-head desktop setup, is that I don’t want to feel that moving from Manchester would require a great deal of thought. A laptop has the feeling that I could just pick myself up, pack a bag, and head anywhere in the World and still be in business. That feeling is perhaps immature, but I’ve been reading Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley” in recent days and I’m not convinced it isn’t just that I’m in need of spending some time on the road. Either way, I know taking root in a way that closes that choice out would make me feel a little peculiar right now.

All this results in me now trying to decide what the right hardware to buy is, not on technical specifications or pipedreams of how technically superior I could be if I bought “X”, but a much deeper philosophical perspective: what do I want out of life? Do I want to be here in Manchester? Do I want the hassle-free existence of OS X, or the unbridled freedom and moral authority of a completely open source system?

Stupidly “Big Questions” to be asking of a technology purchase. Especially when the answer might just be a couple of a Mac Minis or a Stinkpad.