Comments on: Blast from the past: Mac vs Linux desktop

By: Pete Forsyth

Pete Forsyth — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 04:08:54 +0000

I use a Mac and an Ubuntu machine as my main systems, and I agree. Apple’s heavy focus on user experience has paid off in spades; there are just so many things that “just work right.” Like your dock example.

For a free system, the Gnome environment is incredibly usable; I like it a lot. I’ve never cared much for KDE, which feels more clunky and overburdened to me. But neither has the polish I’ve become accustomed to with my Mac.

I’m still astonished that Microsoft has not managed to improve its desktop experience to even remotely compete with these other systems.

By: Alecs Jonson

Alecs Jonson — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:19:05 +0000

Mac has a looks… Yes it is graphically appealing. But most important thing is that it is easy to use. There are no etc files you have to change if you want to modify settings, there are no many dialogs where you have to click yourself through, there are no right mouse functionality where not necessary.

It’s uslability, baby!

Btw, i don’t own a mac, because i somehow never manage to get me one…

By: brion

brion — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:02:30 +0000

The thing I love about the OS X dock isn’t the look, but rather the way that any running application can be “saved” as a launcher icon — with its correct application name, icon, command line, and sensible behavior if you click the icon again while the application’s already running.

No more “Firefox is already running!” dialog boxes because you forgot the secret “remote” parameter when you created the launcher for your manually-installed Firefox upgrade…

I don’t think there’s a good way to this in the X11 world, unless the freedesktop.org guys have defined an application protocol to let the window manager query an application for its .desktop file.

By: KDE-lover

KDE-lover — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 08:14:39 +0000

KDE4 will make things better, I hope.