I went home this weekend to do income taxes with Mom and Dad, and of course ended up helping Mom out as family tech support, something that’s become pretty regular now. Mom wanted to upgrade to a wireless network for convenient freedom to work anywhere in the house with her new realtor business, and of course I was the best qualified to handle the installation. However, she’s a committed OS X user, and I still really detest that OS. Why, the reader may ask, especially when I’m a major Linux user and OS X is after all based on BSD Unix, a close relative? Why, when I don’t really like Windows, do I detest the second biggest mainstream alternative?
BECAUSE OS X DIDN’T FUCKING IMPLEMENT THE DAMN HOME AND END KEY ON THE KEYBOARD PROPERLY. That’s reason number one; just you try hitting End or Home keys on the keyboard in a text editor or the Safari web browser in a text box and watch nothing happen. That one pisses me off big time; I use Home and End all the time. I use it to edit this blog entry even; I’m not big into precision mouse clicking when it comes to text editing. This problem alone is a source of endless frustration every time I use the system.
Reason two is the command line in OS X. Despite being tantalizingly similar to the Linux command line, it is missing too many of the familiar utilities that make things work. I refuse to hunt all this down myself and install it; it’s not my system. More important is the fact that the regular places for things aren’t there: for example, no init.d directory in /etc with all the services, and no plain text configuration files. Everything has to be done, like in Windows, through the damn GUI, and I detest the OS X GUI. This is probably due to the fact that I don’t know it, but some things are unforgiveable about it. For example, today before I left Mom wanted to try printer sharing between the Mac OS X laptop and the OS X desktop. So we enabled printer sharing in the services and for the firewall under Sharing in System Preferences. Then I added the printer on the laptop using the exact IP address of the desktop, and tried to print a test page, and was promptly stunned when we couldn’t find a button or menu option to print a test page. C’mon, no test page print option? Even Microsoft knows better than that! When will Apple copy this unique mind-blowing modern feature from Microsoft? WTF is wrong with these people?!
Then we tried to print a regular web page in lieu of that, and it didn’t work. Now, at least bash in OS X has netcat; thank goodness for small favors. A port scan of the appropriate printer server ports gave a connection refused message, despite the fact that the desktop OS X said the service was unblocked and working. Again, WTF. And no init.d script to restart or way to fiddle with it besides the GUI which had just clearly failed us. Yeeha! What fun!
More trivial annoyances occurred yesterday. For example, Safari didn’t implement the bloody little buttons on the Belkin router screen for the MAC filtering properly, resulting in me being pissed off until I finally ended up configuring the router through the Macbook Pro in Windows using Firefox. I got WEP working flawlessly for Windows and the router; found the router with no problems. Absolutely beautiful; yes I’m too lazy to put in WPA for Windows. 
So WEP in Windows went without a hitch; then onto the OS X side.
It really sucked. Despite the fact that the router was broadcasting its SSID and the laptop was sitting not a foot away from it (I had the router right behind the laptop in the room I was setting it up in), OS X would not automatically detect the SSID. Maybe I just didn’t find the right config page in OS X to get the stupid thing to scan its surroundings for wireless APs; after all, Windows XP found it just fine. But I kept getting a damn manual text box to enter the SSID myself for the stupid OS X wireless setup. No option to autodetect, and I looked. Why do people say Macs are so great? They’re fucking shitboxes! And all the Mac fans claim that Windows copies Mac. Yeah? Well let Mac copy a little from Windows! Mac can’t get crap right that Windows does just fine!
And so the SSID broadcast meant jack shit to me the admin trying to set things up, even though I specifically left the SSID broadcasting to help me tremendously. So then I got pissed even more, and manually looked up and entered the SSID. At least WEP on the thing worked the first time.
And so I still hate OS X the most of all operating systems. Windows is tolerable; works well if you take care of it and treat it carefully. Keeping a Windows box clean and operating properly is alot like following good hygiene practices to avoid getting STDs really; don’t go running any damn thing and you’ll be fine most of the time. There are exceptions, of course, like that big thing they had with certain graphic files running arbitraty code when displayed, but that’s Microsoft’s code base for you. It’s not perfect, but it runs AutoCAD and everyone uses it. Vista is a whole other beast these days… But I’ll comment on that when I give it a try somewhere. I have a hunch, though, that since they tried to make the interface more like Apple’s OS X, I’m going to really hate it. But I hope to be wrong.
I still think Windows, especially certain versions like 2000 and XP, is a good #2 operating system. Of course, this is primarily for compatibility purposes… But even so, I’d take Windows over Mac any day. Geez Macs suck…