Please Leopard, don't Suck

Apple’s next generation operating system is nearing its release date. Time to face the truth – is it as awesome as Steve told us?

Since I’m a Mac user (despite my Vista adventures), I can only repeat what the brave people of The Joy of Tech published in September: Please Leopard, don’t suck!

Tiger is already far better than Vista – it does the small things so much better than all Windows versions together. Of course on a competitive market these “features” don’t count. But for me as user these are the features I really really love on Mac OS X.

Here my list of these things make OS X the better operating system:

• OS X always prints in the right order – on Windows I often had to reverse the pages.
• I can print to PDF in almost all situations.
• Pressing Shift+Cmd+4 I can make screenshots of a part of my screen (press the spacebar to make pictures of whole windows).
• For certain tasks I’m simply so much faster on the (sane) command-line than by clicking through myriads of dialogs (but both ways are possible).
• Unix! ‘nuff said.
• Taste – yes, I know, this word was stressed a lot in combination with “Apple”, but it’s simply true – compare Windows to OS X. OS X isn’t just a conglomerate of desktop effects, but a fine-tuned composition of feedback-mechanisms. It’s like candy, but you can’t get sick by eating to much of it.
• Innovation – being so much smaller than MS, Apple has to put in considerable effort into their products, but – and this is what I like about them – they don’t suffer featuritis (indeed they had a big disaster because of featuritis in the nineties, but they learned their lessons well).

Well, the list got a bit esoteric at some point, but many many things “just work”. Of course Apple is all but perfect, their “closed-system” policy is dangerous and very annoying. Doing things they don’t want you to do (for good or bad reason) is very hard (try to keep a Macbook running while the lid is closed, for example).

Anyway, closed systems also have their advantages, and if you don’t like it, you can always switch to some other operating system on your Intel Mac. Windows is easily installed on a Mac, and for Linux there are some guides found on the net (depending on your actual hardware).

At some point I didn’t want to care about operating systems anymore (Linux was great, but very time consuming), I wanted something that “just worked” (which ruled out Windows). OS X came to the rescue – and here I am several years later, more happy with my OS than ever.

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Please Leopard, don’t suck!