Well, well. There are two points i'll have to agree with you here. The uncontroversial one first: The Windows versions of most Apple Software are shit. That's Apple Software as in "software made by Apple, the company from Cupertino, CA" not as in "software for Mac OS from other parties". Just like MS Office for Mac has or had the tendency to be rather unstable (i've hears Office 2011 changed that, but that's hearsay) cause MS does not care about its MacOS products as much as it cares for its main line of Windows products, one gets the feeling Apple's for-Windows software is the red-headed stepchild of Apple's software family.
The second point we agree on is the questionable approval policy for the AppStore, which is the only officially supported way of installing software on iOS devices. Steve Jobs has publicly stated that he wants OS X to become more like iOS, which, in combination with the advent of the AppStore for OS X, makes me fear that the next or second-to-next version of OS X will become as closed as iOS, with the AppStore as the only "official" way to install software. But right now, that's wild speculation.
Equi, Nugget, what i missed in your posts is the fact that OS X is based on
NeXTstep, the brilliant os Steve Jobs' company NeXT devoloped in the 90s during his absence from Apple for it's even-more-brilliant
NeXTcube. NeXTstep (and thus, OS X) combine a mach kernel with a BSD-derivate environment, so it should be of no surprise that, given the right libs are installed, all BSD source should compile.
But back to Linux
I still got a few problems with Linux on my ThinkPad, any ideas?
- The gnome GPointingDevice control panel fails to activate two-finger scrolling, setting the EmulateTwoFingerMinZ parameter needed to enable two-finger scrolling on non-multitouch touchpads to a three-digit value that is not helpful. What makes it even less helpful is the fact that GPointingDevice overwrites the correct values i set in a modified /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf. For now i simply added "/usr/bin/synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1 EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=35" to the Gnome startup items. Sadly, when waking the system up from sleep, this settings are gone and i have to re-enter them by console. Any ideas how to fix this?
-Speaking of waking up from sleep, when a video DVD is inserted into the drive and i wake the machine up, Gnome autoplays it, which is extremely annoying. How do i disable autoplay-from-sleep"?
-I have not yet found a way to disable power management and the screensaver automatically when playing a file in VLC. Again, any ideas?
Linux, sooooo ready for the desktop *sigh*