Yesterday I installed Tiger on my Powerbook. It was one of the slowest installs I have ever experieced with any OS. For what its worth, DVD verification should be optional.
There are two things that blow - Safari's RSS stuff and Dashboard:
The RSS feature is the most user-unfriendly approaches to RSS I have ever experienced. After a good 10 minutes looking at it I still don't quite understand it. Luckily for me I am a firefox user.
Dashboard is simply dumb - what good is an info widget if I have to hit f12 and watch all my other windows dim away? I can see the weather in better ways. By the way, does anyone know how to turn the damn thing off?
There are also things that rock. In particular, spotlight is phenomenal. I remember when we worked on quick filesystem searching at Red Hat and what we learned was that it is not a trivial problem. Apple has solved it with kernel level tweaks and this, to me, shows off a fundamental flaw in Linux development - the divided camps of development. For us to have done anything as cool as what they have done to the filesystem and desktop would have meant playing the politics of linux kernel development. The plan would have had to have been accepted by the majority of kernel developers (most not working for Red Hat) and then slowly integrated (with us integrating it first and getting all sorts of shit for doing so). The fact is, the majority of kernel developers had/have no interest in the things that really interest the regular user which resulted/results in these technologies being routinely rejected. The sad part was that the community's divided development had also worked its way into the Red Hat development organization as well. I will always see that as our biggest failure as managers.
But I digress... even if you aren't an Apple user you should go down to the Apple store and enter any search into the Finder search input. It is simply brilliant. If infrastructure things excite the geek inside of you you should run out an get Tiger. If you are more concerned about good interface and tools that help you work I wouldn't worry about it.
Posted by dmason at May 4, 2005 02:49 PM