A Leauki's Writings
What are your complaints?
Published on October 1, 2009 By Leauki In Personal Computing

I use Windows at work and Mac OS X at home. I have been a Mac user since 1998 if I include my time with BeOS on a Mac clone.

I have used Linux, NetBSD, and Solaris at home, school, and work over the years. I have used OS/2 during the Warp 3 and Warp 4 years.

Yet with all the experience, especially with Windows, I keep finding my way back to the Mac and cannot imagine computing life without Mac OS X.

Ironically, and despite common assumptions to the contrary, I ultimately find that Windows is easier for programmers and UNIX is easier to use.

Anyway, I have my pet peeves and complaints with and about all operating systems and platforms.

What are yours?

Give a list of ten complaints for each operating system you have used at home or at work (for longer than a few months). Windows 95/98/Millenium count as one, as do Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7 and their server versions. Linux counts as one OS, distribution-specific annoyances do not count unless all major distributions have them. It must be ten complaints for each system, not more, not less.

I'll reply once I see a few comments. I try to come up with ten complaints about Mac OS X, Windows XP/Vista, Linux (in general), and Solaris. (I can add OS/2 if readers request it.)

 

 


Comments (Page 2)
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on Oct 01, 2009

Mac? Linux? Windows?

Each one of these O/S's have the same problem...

...the knobheads who use them

on Oct 01, 2009

Security (duh)

well just because everyone goes to the porn sites on their windows machines.

unintelligent OS management (how many clicks does it take to get to....)

and using several fingers to right click something?

on Oct 01, 2009

My OS complaint list is as follows;

1: They cost too much.

2: They cost too much.

3: They cost too much.

4: They cost too much.

5: They cost too much.

6: They cost too much.

8: They cost too much.

9: They cost too much.

10: They cost too much.        

on Oct 01, 2009

Wizard1956
My OS complaint list is as follows;

1: They cost too much.

2: They cost too much.

3: They cost too much.

4: They cost too much.

5: They cost too much.

6: They cost too much.

8: They cost too much.

9: They cost too much.

10: They cost too much.        [e digicons]>[/e]

Too damn right.

Me thinks Wiz iz right on.

OS Wars/Unhappinesses/complaints....meh. Who has the time/strength. Ain't gonna change Jack anyhow.

Gotta agree with Jafo, also.

on Oct 01, 2009

Ain't gonna change Jack anyhow.

Hey! Don't talk about Jack that way!

on Oct 01, 2009

Fuzzy Logic
Mac? Linux? Windows?

Each one of these O/S's have the same problem...

...the knobheads who use them

I definitly agree, although Mac OSX with its compatibility problems is almost as bad.

on Oct 01, 2009

Fuzzy Logic
Mac? Linux? Windows?

Each one of these O/S's have the same problem...

...the knobheads who use them

on Oct 02, 2009

I can not agree to that. I have had Windows 95b, Windows 98 and Windows Me running. Basically Windows Me was Windows 98 with a deactivated DOS Mode and with that file protection system that should help to recover Windows when it is damaged. I hat not more or less issues with Windows Me then with Windows 98. In contrary Windows Me worked more stable than Windows 98 for me, and therefore was better.

I once sat there and watched a ME OS install choke itself to death under its own avalanche of Restore Points until the system froze with no free drive space.....quaint as hell for a cocked-up OS....but ultimately a waste of time.

If a ME install worked for you then write a book about it.....it'll be a unique experience....

on Oct 02, 2009

Fuzzy Logic
Mac? Linux? Windows?

Each one of these O/S's have the same problem...

...the knobheads who use them

 

Exactly. They all work, just find one that suits your needs, actually learn how to use it, and use it.

on Oct 02, 2009


I can not agree to that. I have had Windows 95b, Windows 98 and Windows Me running. Basically Windows Me was Windows 98 with a deactivated DOS Mode and with that file protection system that should help to recover Windows when it is damaged. I hat not more or less issues with Windows Me then with Windows 98. In contrary Windows Me worked more stable than Windows 98 for me, and therefore was better.


I once sat there and watched a ME OS install choke itself to death under its own avalanche of Restore Points until the system froze with no free drive space.....quaint as hell for a cocked-up OS....but ultimately a waste of time.

If a ME install worked for you then write a book about it.....it'll be a unique experience....

Maybe I should too, had a system that was Windoes ME and it worked great for almost a year and half before I upgraded to XP. The ironic thing about it was that I was using my dads windows ME disk and he got rid of it in 2 weeks and went back to 98.

on Oct 02, 2009

Been using OS X for over 2 years now...

 

Is it perfect?

Of course not...

 

Is it the best thing available today?

Yes! By far as well...

 

Haven't had single security issue, virus issue, loss of data issue, crash issue or anything similar... Thing simply works and does any job you through upon it.

I can't complain and will stick with it for a very long time by look of it

on Oct 02, 2009

Hmm... well.

In Vista:

- I hate the start menu.  The flyout menus of pre-Vista worked just fine, but now rearranging my start menu and finding programs is 3x harder.

- Its a resource hog.  This is obvious.  Just about everything OS related is stupid-slow.  Of course, it doesn't help that my computer only has 1 GB of RAM either.

- Occasional compatibility issues with hardware/software.

In OS X:

- Mouse cursor smoothing.  Good lord.  As a graphic designer/animator who uses the computer extensively, I absolutely cannot stand this.  It is utterly impossible to move the cursor only 1-2 pixels, because Apple decided it looked better if the cursor flowed neatly across your screen.

- Mouse cursor smoothing.  Oh, wait, I said that already.  I hate it, and I can't figure out how to turn it off.

- Various program options having to be accessed through the top menu bar instead of the program itself, particularly the "close" function.  More of an irritant than a real problem.

- No right-click functions.  This makes many high-end programs more difficult to navigate through, such as Illustrator.

 

Of course, Windows gets a bad rap for being slower and less reliable.  Yeah, that's the two-edged sword of the open-platform idea.  If OS X was required to support the ludicrously large number of hardware and software combos that Windows does, it would be just as bad.

on Oct 14, 2009

- Various program options having to be accessed through the top menu bar instead of the program itself, particularly the "close" function. More of an irritant than a real problem.

The top menu bar is the program's menu bar. The idea is that the top menu bar is easier to target since it is a "mile high".

 

on Oct 14, 2009

Mac OS X

I tried to make a list of ten points, but simply couldn't find anything that I find consistently annoying beyond these:

 

1. There is no keyboard interrupt that can be used to deal with a GUI or login screen hang. Windows has ctrl+alt+del. Mac OS X has nothing of the sort.

2. Finder keeps hanging whenever it wants. Snow Leopard comes with an allegedly rewritten Finder, but it still hangs when I expected the old Finder to hang. I had a script that would kill -9 my loginwindow for those cases, but in Snow Leopard loginwindow is now owned by root and I cannot kill it any more without sudo.

3. The remote desktop software is really VNC and thus very slow. Windows has a much faster remote desktop server.

4. Apple design software well but have on obvious disinterest in testing software. Most of Mac OS X and most Apple applications have easily-found bugs and annoyances that would have been spotted immediately if someone had tested the software professionally before release.

5. Apple's main development platform is not portable and Apple totally ignore Microsoft .NET instead of offering at least lukewarm native support.

on Oct 14, 2009

Windows

  1. Application windows jump to the foreground whenever they want, interrupting whatever I am doing. Mac OS X is able to start an application in the background with new windows opened by the application appearing BEHIND the window I am currently interacting with.
  2. Upgrading from x86 (32 bit) to x64 (64 bit) requires a re-install and the x86 (32 bit) OS cannot run 64 bit programs. 32 bit Mac OS X can run 64 bit programs and upgrading to the full 64 bit OS requires but a reboot with Snow Leopard.
  3. The Windows command line window sucks. There is no decent support for copying and pasting (in fact the window doesn't even know it contains lines of text and thinks of blocks of text instead).
  4. Windows still has no built-in support for SSH.
  5. When I double-click on a word in a text the entire word and the space behind it will be selected automatically. When there is no space behind the word (perhaps a full stop follows or a newline), no such space is selected. The result is that copying individual words quickly means that the word in the clipboard contains either a space at the end or not and the user has to remember whether the word was in the middle of a line and sentence or not in order to paste it quickly. Also, Windows doesn't have much knowgedge of grammar and concepts like email addresses and there is no system-wide standard of what exactly will happen when I double-click some text. (Doubleclicking the "double" in "double-click" selects only "double" in Firefox but selects "double-" in Notepad.)
  6. Deleting and moving files is a period of time in Windows and a point in time in Mac OS X.
  7. Not I, the user, but Windows is the ultimate judge of which files can be deleted. In Mac OS X I can log in as root and do what I want with my computer. In Windows there are always files that even the top-level administrator cannot delete. In Mac OS X administrators cannot delete some files either, but a root account can be activated if a power user insists.
  8. Everything takes an installer. I cannot just copy an application into "Program Files" and later delete it again in order to get rid of it.
  9. Speaking of "Program Files". For some reason Windows traditionally insisted (since Windows 95) on directory names with spaces even though Windows has tremendous trouble dealing with these spaces (how many people know that ^ is the escape character?). At least "Documents and Settings" became "Users". "My Documents" became "Documents" but is again displayed as "My Documents". Why not show the user what's really there and make what's really there showable?
  10. The control panel is a mess and everything is difficult to reach. Mac OS X' System Preferences are MUCH easier to navigate.

 

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