I've often thought that any operating system without virtual desktops / workspaces is for all intents and purposes crippled. It seems that OS X is getting some in the next version, next spring.

It's nice. I guess. It's too bad Linux has had the same thing for over a decade. And in Linux it's far more powerful and far more customizable, I'd be willing to bet money. Oh, and Linux doesn't cost $129.

I did buy a Mac last year, and I tried to use it for a while. There are some things it's really good at. But I found that anything it could do, I could do in Linux. It may not be as pretty in Linux, but it sure works. And there are tons of things I can do easily in Linux that are hard or impossible to do in OS X.

The appeal of OS X is that it's polished and it's marketed really well. Linux is not polished; use it for ten minutes and that will be obvious. I use Linux exclusively and even I will admit that Linux is a God-awfully ugly beast. Well, it may be an ugly beast, but it's an agile, intelligent, and mightily powerful ugly beast. I'll take power over polish any day.

In the end I gave my Mac to my parents. I found that I never used it anyways.

(In other news, Windows still sucks.)

EDIT: Fixed typo.

I used iPhoto for a long while as my one and only method of fetching and storing all the photos from my digital camera. Eventually I started dumping wallpapers in iPhoto too, and any miscellaneous image file I needed to save for any reasons. There are some good and bad things about using a program like iPhoto for data storage / organization. I think the bad probably outweigh the good.

A motto of Perl is "Make the easy things easy, and make the hard things possible". iPhoto fails, like so many other programs, because it makes the easy things easy, but it makes many hard things IMPOSSIBLE.

I almost had to reboot my computer today. I had my Mac Mini mounted as a smbfs and I did something dumb, I can't remember what. Probably rebooted the Mini or something. In any case Gentoo freaked out for a while, thinking the Mini was still mounted when it wasn't. Trying to umount it gave screwy "device is busy" errors.

One of the few things I've found that can force a reboot in Linux are deadlocked processes (I assume that's what it means; the state is listed as D). I'm not 100% sure but I assume this means deadlocked waiting for an I/O operation to finish. Even this doesn't really FORCE a reboot. It just leaves an unkillable process sitting around. You can ignore the process and keep working. But it bugs me in an obsessive-compulsive kind of way. In any case I was rather nervous that this might be the case today, but ps didn't list any processes in D state. I haven't really experienced a D-state process for a long while. Likely a year or so.

Anyways, for some reason, after 5 or 10 minutes the problem (whatever it was) went away and it let me umount the drive properly. It makes me happy when things work properly.

The sound card in the Mac Mini (first generation) sucks. It sucks very very hard. It has a single headphone jack for output, and even with headphones it's not all that good. My other (PC) computer, on the other hand, has a nice Audigy 2 card with 5.1 outputs. I'd really love to play music from my Mac, because I rather like iTunes. But short of buying an external soundcard, that's not gonna happen.

So, what I do is use iTunes for one thing, which is actually just about the only reason you'd want to use iTunes anyways: Organizing music. iTunes is very good at organizing. It stores music exactly as I'd always stored it myself: ../artist/album/songtitle. It also plays nicely with ID3 tags, so when you change the Artist tag on a song, it moves the song to a new artist directory. I still shudder to think of all the crap I used to go through in the olden days with Perl scripts and command-line ID3 tag editors.

Having iTunes organize the music, all I need to do is point Amarok on my PC to look in the "iTunes Music" folder on the Mini, and have it play over the LAN. I get the best of both worlds this way; I can use program in Windows, Linux or OS X as a "frontend" to the iTunes-managed music files, so long as that client stays read-only.

I just got my printer set up in Linux just now (attached to a Mac Mini on my LAN, don't forget). Let's see. First I opened the Gentoo Printing Guide. Then I looked under "Setting Up a Remote Printer". Then I followed the directions word-for-word. I typed

sudo emerge -upv cups
sudo emerge cups</pre>

Then I changed one line in /etc/cups/client.conf to say

ServerName mini

Then I typed

sudo /etc/init.d/cupsd start

And then it worked. Why do people say Linux is hard to configure?

Now I can do things like echo "hello" | lpr.

*wipes away a tear of joy*

So I bought a new printer recently: a Canon PIXMA iP1600. I have a computer running dual-boot Windows XP and Gentoo, and a Mac Mini. Clearly the most logical setup is to put the printer on the Mac, and have my other computer share the printer; I just have to set up Gentoo and XP both to look for the Mac printer. Then I can print from all three operating systems.

In case you haven't guessed at this point, no, this is not going to be pretty.

If you have a first-generation Mac Mini (as I do) and you haven't dished out money for an extra (faster) hard drive, you're probably suffering with terrible performance. They put some kind of slow laptop hard drive in there to keep the thing small, or whatever.

This is a good tip on how to disable Spotlight (the post by jjccgg, NOT the original post), which should in theory boost performance by stopping the constant hard drive indexing. I've done this and I can indeed immediately see a performance boost. I haven't benchmarked it, but it's noticeable enough that I don't think I need to.

I find Spotlight to be nearly worthless. Searching is not the most efficient way to find files, in my opinion. It's good in the average case, but terrible in the worst case. I define "worst case" here to mean that you don't know the NAME of a file. If I organize things by folder, I only need to know the LOCATION of a file. It's more likely that I forget a file name or description than that I forget a file's general location, in the worst case.

For example, I can think of a bunch of wallpapers that I downloaded, and they likely have names like 1.jpg, 03984.png etc. I know where to get them (some subdir of the wallpaper directory), but searching would not find them easily. I can think of documents I've written, but I don't know the name of them or their titles. The solution to this (and what Spotlight expects, apparently) is for you to tag all your files so the search can find them easier. But in that case, we've fallen back to a pseudo-folder structure, only with greater room for error and lots more fuzzy areas.

That's my problem with desktop search, I guess: it's too fuzzy. You have to rely upon the strength of your search algorithm, and I don't have a heck of a lot of faith in search algorithms.