MacBook vs. Dell w/ Feisty
I currently am testing out Ryan's MacBook vs. a Dell D620 laptop w/ nVidia graphics card in it, very similar to the one he was using in his test. The kicker is I'm using Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty on it. This test will not take into account Vista at all. The purpose behind all of this is to gain more experience with working with laptops and operating systems. I still have a long ways to go, as I'm not what we like to call a Mac Fanboy, and I don't have a whole lot of experience getting GNU/Linux at a workable spot for laptops.
Things that draw me to the MacBook:
- It's light
- The power management is top notch. Close the lid, and bam! It's asleep. Open the lid, and bam! It's awake. No annoying lag time in being ready for action. One caveat - the Mighty Mouse I use with it seems to take a while to be recognized after coming out of sleep - about 10 seconds. Isn't a show stopper as there is the track pad, but would be nice if it was faster.
- The keyboard is nice
- The OS is very intuitive to do administration that mom and pop would have to perform: Installing programs, mounting / removing harddisks via USB, taking pictures with the little camera mounted on top, all system administration in pretty much one place.
- Expose' rules
Things that draw me to Kubuntu 7.04 Feisty:
- It feels "snappy". No performance benchmarks at this time, however.
- KDE just feels more "put together" / "polished" than Gnome.
- I love GNU/Linux in general, for many reasons, and wanted to see how far it's come along in the mobile field
Things I still to accomplish with the Feisty Laptop:
- Power Management - Suspend to RAM seems to work, albeit a bit slowly, I haven't tried suspend to disk
- Docking Station Behavior - can't seem to switch the video back to "normal" display if I start X on the docking station
- Beryl - I can get this to "mostly" work, but am still seeing strange behavior like black windows, etc. I believe my video RAM is filling up but at 256MB this *should* be enough to have 4 desktops, each with about 2 windows up.
- Biometric device (thumb scanner) - would like to get this working
Things I still have to get working on the MacBook:
- Multiple desktops (X has been able to do this for eons - why isn't this anywhere in the system preferences?)
- I was never a fan of the MDI style of Mac. I still like having menus for each app, this might be a throwback to my PC upbringing, but it is more mouse travel sometimes to have to go all the way up to the menu all the time for each little app.
That's it! Hopefully after about a month I'll have enough to say about each to really give a quality review.
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i use multiple desktops on my main mac altho this is a third par
i use multiple desktops on my main mac altho this is a third party app. still, it works pretty well.
i put it up on a server for ya, : here.
try it and see if you likey. once leopard is out we won't have to install this.
wahoo.
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Thanks Wax - just installed it. One strike against the desktop
Thanks Wax - just installed it. One strike against the desktop manager in Mac - it doesn't really integrate with expose', meaning I can't look over all my virtual desktops at one swoop. Also, the Intel binary version is located here: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12682
yes, it doesn't work with expose' and i posted the ppc version.
yes, it doesn't work with expose' and i posted the ppc version.
thanks for the link to the other!
but - it's pretty neato, dont'cha think?
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Yes - I think it does the job pretty good. But once you get hoo
Yes - I think it does the job pretty good. But once you get hooked on expose' it's hard to go back. Come to think of it, when it comes to compositing window managers, that's really the only feature that I've felt was worth all the buzz.
oh, come on - you don't think the OS is worth all the buzz, over
oh, come on - you don't think the OS is worth all the buzz, overall?
it's not the most elegant, efficient of ALL the OS's out there?
even ryness likes his mac again!
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i'll have to save that for the proper review ;)
i'll have to save that for the proper review ;)
colin, i'd expect nothing less from you. : ) = w
colin, i'd expect nothing less from you.
: )
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I think elegance and efficiency in an OS is a relative thing. Fo
I think elegance and efficiency in an OS is a relative thing. For many, something new is always clunky and inefficient (unless it employs enough similarities). For me, navigating to files I'm more efficient using Windows (mostly due to kbd shortcuts). Finding an open window in a sea of three dozen I'm quicker on the Mac. Gnome is clunky as hell to me, because I'm so unfamiliar with it I don't know how to do stuff. Even more so with KDE. But that's just me.
I think the beauty of Windows is it's an OS for the people. Slap together a bunch of off-the-shelf hardware (albeit locked in a timeless standards quagmire (read: ACPI, PCI, ATX)) and install the OS on it. It does what it does without the luxury of tight synchronicity with whatever hardware it may run on. The Mac gets to integrate more intimately with its hardware and make better (perhaps more proper) use of it (read: macbook hibernation).
I think if you define "elegance" as being pretty, then of course the Mac is more elegant than XP. But if you define elegance as how the software lets you accomplish what you want... Well, here's a good example: In the alt-tab menu, when showing you open applications, which OS goes a step further and lets you click the icon to go to that program, and which OS forces you to cycle through then one-by-one to get to the one you want?
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