I have been constantly plagued by several things in OS X that I cannot stand. My machine of choice is a Rev A iMac with stock (233MHz) CPU, a 120GB Maxtor, 512MB RAM, 6MB Video RAM, a slot-loading CD-RW, running 9.2.2 and 10.2.8. Any solutions to these 'pain-points' are greatly appreciated.
X. OS X does not drag and drop from volume to volume. This may be trivial to some, but one of the best things about Classic is that once you had set your volume, you could simply boot from a disk and then drag and drop the system folder to another volume. upgrading hard drives and backing up your system was sweetly easy. I had tried this with OS X, but it never lands right and when pulled from a backup copy and replaced to the original volume it hoses up. Classic would work anywhere you dropped it, making cloning your system setup to other machines just that easy. Not everyone needs security more robust than what was offered in 9. OS X drops a footprint into the Open Firmware that stays long after the system folder has been removed. Not long ago, I erased my boot volume to reinstall X and fix a specific problem unrelated to this gripe of a thread. When I installed, I found that my previous userid and password were still resident on the system even thought no user folder existed for them. I was unable to recycle these until I booted up in the root user, created a folder (manually) for these users, and then deleted the user using Accounts in Sys Prefs. Once done, I could then reuse the ids. But what a pain to have to deal with information stored on the system in such a way that I cannot REALLY manage it. Having a better way to backup ALL of the hard drive or even clone the hard drive to another machine would be great - oh, wait, I can do that in Classic. Silly me. I guess that some folks need the setup offered in "The World's Most Powerful Operating System", but I find it an inconvenient pain in my @$$.
9. Anytime I run Repair Disk from the OS X CD, it resizes my screen settings leaving a good half inch of dead screen around the image. This requires me to go into the geometry settings and resize my screen to fit the viewable size. I was told that it is a good idea to periodically boot from the CD to repair permissions and repair the volume, and I do find things that need to be fixed on occassion, but I should not have to resize my image after every repair session.
8. I like sounds. Not for everything, but just some customized effects here and there. I liked the sound sets under Classic and do have an application called Xounds for doing soundsets in X, but that not what I mean. When my machine boots up, it palys a system 7 sound and also when it shuts down. The sounds are communicative in nature and just one facet of how I had customized my machine. Under X, these sounds force the start up of iTunes. I did not have to have a special application in order to play a sound in Classic. It is more annoying than problematic.
7. Some games I have for the offspring claim to work in OS X, but when properly installed, the games gripe that the video card on my machine is not supported and (in the same message) suggests I try running the game in Classic. Wait a minute. If the card is not supported in one OS, why would it be supported in another OS? Sure enough, the game runs (albeit dog-@$$ slow) in 9.2.2. So much for the "World's Most Powerful Operating System" that can run Classic apps. I should not have to reboot into Classic to run a game that was designed to run in X (and made backwards compatible for 9 - I know it is not the other way around due to liner notes in the game package, and even if it was, it should still work). I have other games with the same type of problem.
6. UNIX is not an OS, it is gender-nuetral individual (actually, it is an individual tha was once male). (That may be a new entry for Jeff Foxworthy's list of words in the 'Redneck Dictionary'.) UNIX just does not have big enough ... for me. Okay, that is not really a problem, but it was just too good to pass up on. 
5. The OS is just too dead-gum big. What was wrong with an OS that could fit on a floppy? Even a CD? OS X is just too big to fit on a CD with all the utilities you really need to make it useful. I can always burn a bootable CD with utilities or special apps for Classic and I can get it to fit on a CD, but I cannot do this with X. It is too big. Maybe I am just hanging on to the past, but I remember fewer problems with older OSes because there was less to go wrong with them. This may be a nit to most, but any OS that gobbles up so much hard drive space that I am forced to buy a bigger drive just to use it is too big. Case-in-point, my blueberry iBook (1st generation) has the stock 3.2 GB in it. The only apps I can keep on the machine are Mail, Safari, AppleWorks 6, and the compliment of Utilities I need in said folder (yes, I have removed some items from here due to lack of need vs space). I do not keep more than about 50 MB of user files on here at any one time (these are actively used things - everytihng else is stored on removable network media). I cannot even download the latest software updates on this machine because that application keeps asking for more space than I have just to download the updates.
4. Trying to add extra pictures to the User folder causes the System Preferences to "unexpectedly quit". (Thjis is the part where you choose an avatar for your user login at start up when multiple users are on the machine.) Grant it I dropped in a few dozen extra pictures, but it should not just 'die' because I gave it too many choices to access. This same behavior is observed when I leave the user pictures folder as is and use the 'choos folder' option to navigate to a folder containing scanned/other pictures. Adding single pictures to the folder is fine, but the system seem to choke when asked to display previews for more than about 50 (fifty) pictures.
3. I cannot schedule the machine to startup or shutdown at any periodic interval. I can do this in 9, but not X. Even funnier, I can set a schedule in 9 and the machine will at least startup when scheduled and then boot into X. but I cannot control this from X, I have to boot into 9 to control it. I have not tried to see if it shuts down when scheduled, but the point is that I cannot set a schedule from X.
2. While speech recognition (PlainTalk/MacinTalk) seems to 'hear' better than in Classic, I cannot create custom commands. With Classic, you could create any custom script and make it speakable. I have about a good hundred or so in Classic for things like ejecting the disk and disconnecting the modem and other 'little' things. I have not found a way to get the flexibility in X that I enjoyed in Classic. Am I missing something or am I right in my feeling that it is a PITA to customize in Cocoa?
1. For no reason, the screen goes dead and the power button turns yellow. Folks tell me this is my fly-back transformer. I cry foul because this never happens when booted in any other OS besides X. It happens randomly, ususally when I am at a point where I can loose my work. It also never happens when booted in X from a CD, just when booted in X from the internal hard drive. Slicking the machine and installing a clean OS did not help. The observed behavior is like the machine went to sleep, but no mouse movement or keyboard pounding will awaken the machine. This has been verified to NOT be a hardware problem (unless it is that the hardware and software are not compatible - further justifying my complaint).
Do not get me wrong, OS X has some really cool things about it, but I still find most all of what I need can be done in Classic (although I prefer Safari above all other browsers).
-DDTM
Frankly, the iMac first edition sucks with os x.
The answer to problem no. 10 is a freeware app called Carbon Copy Cloner. http://www.bombich.com
7: The video chip in the original iMacs has *no* OpenGL support in OS X. Like it or not, Apple doesn't think it's worth supporting. It *does* have OpenGL and RAVE 3D support under Classic, which is why a dual-platform game might lamely suggest that.
That machine is too slow for anything more challenging then "Nanosaur" even with the lame 3D accelleration you can squeeze out of a Rage IIc/Pro, so the point is sort of moot. Should Apple "support" OpenGL in X on it? Probably, just for completeness' sake. Would the performance make anyone happy? No. So why waste the money and programming time?
5: MacOS 9 is too big to fit very comfortably on the drives included with the oldest machines it'll run on. (Try fitting a full 9.1 + equivilents of all the software that comes with X onto the 250MB drive included with a 6100.)
Life goes on, deal with it.
4: Your hardware is most likely flaky. I seem to recall you complaining about certain things that wouldn't work with all your RAM installed, for instance...
1: How have you "Verified" that this isn't a hardware problem, exactly? It's probably an overheating or related problem that's only triggered under OS X. (Keep in mind that it's being worked a heck of a lot harder then it is under 9.)
Those old iMacs are, to be blunt, cheap. They were ment to be cheap and disposable when they were brand new, and now they're six years old. Ditto the "clamshell" iBooks. (Although they're not quite as old.) You can't really expect them to run OS X very well, particularly since the whole point of OS X is to drive the sale of new hardware.
Ugly but true. Apple isn't going to stick around if people don't cough up regular infusions of cash, and I'm sure that OS X even at $129 a copy is probably sold at something close to a loss unless a nice shiny machine goes out of the store with it.
Anyway.
--Peace
ah, Eudimorphodon, the painful voice of reason echos out...
7. I have been toying with droping this machine down to 9 for good, but was hoping to keep it on X. I do not do much gaming, but the graphics support may be the needed reason to stay on 9.
5. It still sucks.
4. True, many RAM problems I had in the past were under X. Otherwise, the hardware seems good.
1. Your point about overheating in X is excellent since I have noticed more warmth in the room as the days are getting warmer here in north Florida - I will pay closer attention to this. I may look into a blower and see if that helps in the short term. That being one of my biggest gripes, temperature control may solve this probelm.
The iBook behaves, it is just crowded and I am to cheap to upgrade the hard drive. I do recognize that one day I MUST buy a new machine or upgrade the drive, but I will squeeze every last value out of the money I spent on that one.
--DDTM
If I might add a little something to your list...
X1. OS X does not support font manipulation anywhere near what you can do in OS 9. I work in a prepress shop, and we have literally millions of fonts, and hundreds of thousands of jobs that each use a somewhat unique assortment of those fonts. In OS 9 it was fairly simple to grab just the screen fonts you needed for a job and drop them into a virgin suitcase file, along with any printer fonts that were needed. With OS X you have to rely on 3rd party utilites to do a half-baked job of the same thing, usually ending up with way more screen fonts than are needed.
Maybe this isn't an earth-shattering problem, and I'm just being a little anal over the whole issue, but it just bugs me that such a seemingly simple thing as moving font files between suitcases disappeared on an "upgrade."
Take that iMac back to OS 9. Right now.
It's just cruel making one of those run OS X. Your small and therefore somewhat old hard drive is being WAY overstressed by the virtual memory usage in OS X- in 9 you can turn it right down or OFF.
Notice how slowly your iMac scrolls through documents and Web pages under X? Reboot into 9 and notice the massive increase in speed? You NEED video acceleration.
The extra heat(a lot of it) the CPU and motherboard pump out when forcing X around on-screen goes STRAIGHT up into the monitor. Notice the location of the fan? Exactly. What's this again? A trayloading iMac? You can expect to blow the flyback transformer far quicker that way.
Safari? Feh. Internet Explorer for Windows kicks its butt. I don't care if it looks better or does more things. OS9 browsers are about as fast as Win versions. Why? God only knows, but OS X sucks for the internet. (to keep the angry hoardes away from me- this IS only in MY opinion)
Your iMac probably shipped with OS 8.1. OS 9 is a hog compared to that. It's quick, but it's still more stress than even your machine was built for. OS X seems even more ridiculous by comparison. It's just crazy.
Please, for the good of old G3s everywhere, do NOT install Mac OS X on them. Even my 600MHz iMac can't handle Puma, Jag or Panth properly- I've tried all three. Stupid. To think Apple even shipped it with X...
My point? Don't complain about it. OS X is for >667MHz G4 Macintoshes. Screw the minimum stated requirements.
actually, i sadly agree. OS 10.2 ran frighteningly slow on my imac, (i brought it down to 9.2 after a reformat. It's what it needed.) but if you plan on running anything gamewise in classic other than Total Annihilation (which isn't a very big resource hog. it runs fine on a beige G3), you're kinda SOL. I've found Descent 3 to be incredibly choppy at times under classic, but when I boot directly into 9, it's better than fine. if i was totally migrated over to X, and didn't even have to boot classic, I, and Doug, would most likely be fine.
From another perspective, I think that's rather funny. I worked in a full print shop (we run jobs right from the machine they were made from onto film, burn 'em onto plate in the next room over, and have the presses in the warehouse 10 feet away) and I always found OS X much more convienent for fonts.
Not to be insulting (it's quite possible you know exactly what you're doing and if that's the case, I would have loved for you to have done prepress work for us), but I rarely saw a job come in from a design shop or graphic artist somewhere offsite that actually included all the proper fonts. It ususally required me to track down at least one or two fonts to get everything smooth enough to run to film.
Not that that's a huge deal. I kept 2 CD's labelled "FONTS" next to my G4 at all times. But still, it did take time. Granted, with OS X, we have the same problem. Mostly because people who give us jobs seem to believe that simply giving us a copy of the basic size 12 of a font is going to let it run off as smootly as thier proof did.
Besides, sometimes all those extra fonts are useful. It seems like nobody knows what camera ready means anymore.
Also, so far as speakable items goes, I just dragged an Applescript into my Speakable Items folder, quit speakable items, turned them back on, and said it, and it launched.
Using 10.3.3.
I'll agree that OS X is for G4's....
but my 9600 and 8600 upgraded to G4/450's running Panther rule... I am very very happy with their performance, considering the boxes themselves were less than $100, and the processors were @ $150/each, and the RAM was supercheap.
I'm running an anonymous ftp server on one (not perfect, but functional, no crashing, some logging issues) along with sshd, web serving and VNC. It is multi-user multi-tasking, I see it everyday, dozens of users simultaneously. Try that with OS 9. I run with the old Mac II Greyscale monitor, set to thousands of colors, a greyscale desktop picture, and Universal Access set to greyscale, for just a tiny amount of optimization (maybe thats just through vnc). What I really like about it is the filesharing (not AppleTalk)... fast enough to play big QT movies off that server (with a 100BaseT NIC).
The other is just running a VNC... set up for my bro over 1000 miles away, salve for the burn of his dual 2.5 G5 having not arrived when promised (He's switching from Windows, FINALLY). (If you want to get on Apple's butt, there is a good reason... Why do they insist on missing every frigging ship date they set?)
http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/
lol
HA HA HA HA HA thanks for making my side hurt... Darwin is hands down the fastest internet and networking OS available... maybe the G3 can't handle the OS X GUI, but the benchmarks are out there. Safari is one of the best browsers for OS X... and ANY tabbed browser makes IE look like a crusy dinosaur... try Mozilla's Firefox for Windows, much faster and more useful (smaller, tabbed, pop-up blocking) though IE is pretty fast on OS 9.
I'm not angry, I just wish someone would show you (and everyone else) the truth.
Please, do back this up.
--Peace
Yes, please do. Your sudden outburst doesn't even hold as much credit as my own opinion- which is what that was. I find any Internet on a new Mac just too slow- YES this includes my 1.25Ghz, v92-capable eMac with Panther and Safari. Firefox for Windows I downloaded a few weeks ago...blerk! Shockingly slow to load pages, missing some key features(you DON'T need Flash, now?!) and crashed two or three times for no apparent reason.
I'm done now.
The hard drive is okay and is at 120GB, I have plenty of space and performance is acceptable (for me) when comapring X to 9 for document and internet stuff. But I fully agree with the rest of yout points. I have been toying with the idea of a G4 500MHz upgrade card (I know I will not get true G4 throughput), but do not want to fork out the cash just yet (It may be a boon for 9 if I do it anyways).
--DDTM
That is a cool link!!!
Thanks!
--DDTM
"3. I cannot schedule the machine to startup or shutdown at any periodic interval."
The control panel energy saver has a schedule function were you can turn of and on the computer daily and variants thereof, like every weekday. And in X Terminal try typing "man cron" if you want to do really wierd stuff ::)
"5. The OS is just too dead-gum big"
So is OS 7.5 if you intall it on a Plus, filling up that wast 20 MB HD >:(
A 233 MHz is as hopeless in X as OS 7.5 is on a 8 MHz Plus. Even on a G4/400 AGP X is slow, give it a GHz or more and it feels so much better.
The OS X is far from perfect but each new version is better than the previous and stability multitasking and many other features makes it so much better than 9. I Have X running on a 7600/200 (very slow) and a 7500/G3-300 that is not that much faster due to the very slow graphics on the motherboard, at 400 MHz and AGP its get better and at 1 GHz it is good.
word03, this may be the case with some G3s... by my Blue and White G3 has always run tolerably fast in OS X, often more so than I expected. Puma, Jaguar, and Panther haven't caused me any grief on this machine. UNIX and other intensely multithreaded OSs use a lot of hard drive, and especially a lot of RAM. That's why it has always been relegated to "workstations" until recently.
My B&W came with a G3 400 MHZ ,512 MB of RAM, and a Rage128 graphics card. I have had no problems doing internet stuff, music, and even everybody's fave benchmark - gaming! Even stock I could play Quake3 or Oni. Sure, OS 9 is a little snappier because it is leas complicated. Out of the box, OS X versions come closer to doing what I want out of the box than OS 9 did. Instead of waiting for the util I need I can customize the behaviors of the OS instead.
And unlike the iMacs and clamshell iBooks, the B&W is expandable. Now I am running a G4 600 MHZ CPU and Radeon 9100 PCI graphics card. The machine flies except if I really bog it down hard, and it is the most reliable mac I have yet had. Now I use my 8600 as my dedicated OS 9 machine, it also runs quite well.
I think what you need to be careful of are some first generation technologies. The beige G3 came out just before the B&W, and even though it is expandanle, it is not reliable. First attempts at integrating a new kind of bus, CPU, RAM, controller, etc are not always great - but the stuff gets better. If you prefer the features of an older system, then you can still use them. Run OS 6 on a 540c. I use an Atari Falcon and a C64 for music tasks I can't do on my newest hardware. Find out what you like before you buy!
I have a solution for your gripe about the lack of sound. Try this- http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/9317
Daniel
well, it seems to me as though all yur gripes have nothing to do with OSX for the most part, but more along the lines of using a machine that is way to old to run it properly. Drag and dropping the OS works fine if you drag the whole OS, unless your logged in as root you cant see all the files, this is done for a reason.
hmm ... my iBook is very speedy on the net ... what do you mean by slow? ... takes ages to load pages ... that might be your 56k connection
IMHO Firefox is great on Windows ... i use it on the PCs at school because IE is so goddamn slow and buggy ... as for the crashes, its still in Beta, so crashes are to be expected! ... and Flash *can* be installed for Firefox
TOM
I doubt it's the 56k connection. I'm running an iBook G4 with a 56k connection and unless I'm downloading large files, I rarely notice how it's a 'slow' connection.
i know ... I'm on a 56k too
TOM