A month ago Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim torched off a mini-firestorm in the blogosphere by announcing that they were switching away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu.
Hawk Wings covered it because of Mail.app’s central role in Mark Pilgrim’s decision to switch away.
Now Tim Bray is almost having second thoughts. He has posted 
a list of things that Mac OS X does better and things that Ubuntu does better. Mac OS X wins out in some important areas.
Mail.app and iCal don’t fare so well though:
I have so had it with Apple applications. A couple weeks with Thunderbird made it obvious I should have long since dumped Mail.app. Every week iCal gets slower and every week I hate it more. When I was on Ubuntu, I maintained my schedule by typing it into a plain-text document in Emacs, and that was so much less painful.
No love lost there!
Given that the Mac vs. Ubuntu debate got caught up in the unrelated “proprietary vs. open format” issue, perhaps the most interesting sentence in the post is this:
now that I’ve realized that I can have a decent application suite that doesn’t lock up my data and runs on whatever OS/Hardware, my desire to get off the Mac has moderated.
What was ever resolved about one of these authors’ complaints about Mail.app’s non-proprietary format? I thought the whole issue could be resolved by dragging the mailbox to the desktop which then gives the mailbox the .mbox format. I never heard a follow-up to this.
Scott — For a few messages, this way works well.
For a large number, I think that Andreas Amann’s excellent Archive script (part of Mail Scripts
) offers the easiest solution.
Hey, if he could ever get Emacs or some other text editor to work on OS X, he could have made his text file without switching :-)
Well, the GIMP can run on OS X, both via fink or the Gimp.app options which bundle all the dependencies and stuff into one double-clickable .app file… though it still needs X11 of course.
I don’t need to migrate my email away from Mail. Every mailbox I drag to the desktop turns into an .mbox though. So I still don’t see the problem, unless as Tim’s first link suggests for some reason this doesn’t work for everyone?
The folder has an .mbox extension but it is not in fact a standard mbox mailbox. If you open it up you can see that it still contains each email message as an emlx file.
More commentary in this macOSXHints tip
.
While Mark is right about the “proprietary” nature of Mail’s file format, the solution is not hard to find or particularly troubling to implement. There is no danger of your email being “locked away” or somehow not “future-proof”.
william — if he doesn’t like the built-in version, he could take his pick of emacs ports
:)
Wow. This guy would rather type commands and text into emacs to update his calendar?
Why was he using a Mac to begin with?
Emacs is built into OS X, so I don’t get it.
Fire up the Terminal and do some exploring.
I just read the blog posting about OSX vs. Ubuntu and have come to the conclusion the guy is a bit wonky. His complaint about the control keys being different in terminal vs the rest of OSX is stupid. It is different so that terminal and emacs comply with unix standars. You can change them to your personal preference though with a little hacking of some config files in terminal. His complaints about Calendar are just weird though, a text file is better than iCal for managing your schedule? I don’t get it. As for Thunderbird vs. Mail, I had been using Thunderbird for quite some time on eComStation(OS/2) and there were things about it that drove me nuts, but it mostly worked. One thing that always worried me was the mbox format for message storage. I switched from an app called PMMail that stored messages in individual files and I prefered that method for several reasons. First, it is safer, corrupt one file and you lose one message. Mbox can eat all your messges if you corrupt the mbox file. Second, it allows you to search and read a mail message out side of the email application. Anyway, when I got my Mac mini back in december, I kept using Thunderbird, until one day, several mail boxes showed 3 months of email missing, including one containing all the mail from a business client. After much searching, I found a utility called emailchemy that allowed me to recover much of my missing email, but not the missing messages from that client. I switched over to Mail that very day and have been mostly happy ever since. The only real complaints I have are there is no outgoing filtering(thunderbird didn’t do this either) and folders that haven’t been accessed in a while take some time to index before displaying.
Anyway, I think that these two guys that switched only did it for the attention. I’ve used various linux/unix distributions recently and while they are getting better, none of them are close to OSX in ease of use and total user experience. Just look at what’s involved in installing a new application on any linux/unix distro vs. OSX.
Wow switching OS’s based on a mail program, thats a new one. I am a bit of a command line junkie, I use OS X, Debian and Gentoo linux, in all of them I use Pine.
OS X has enough of a Unix base that there is nothing that can’t be ported with relative ease from a Linux OS. Thus there is no excuse to go from apple’s beautiful UI to Ubuntu’s ugliness.
One comment I must make in regards to Chris StumpF’s post;
“Just look at what’s involved in installing a new application on any linux/unix distro vs. OSX.”
Yea, I know, popping up a web browser and downloading/installing(usually just drag and drop) a piece of software on a mac is sooo much easier then typing “apt-get install applicationx” right?
Wait, no it isn’t.
Even for those who HATE the command line there are a sleu of great GUI package managers. Having everything in a nice convenient, searchable, consistent database that you can install from at the click of a button just is not beatable.
In the case that your application is not in this HUGE db, you have a few options, install from source (not as scary as it sounds, with no special flags this requires three quick commands that can easily be made into a script, then you can just drag the source dir on to that scipt and voila) Or Klik, basically .app’s for linux.
To rebuff Chris Martin’s arguement against my assertation that installing software on OSX is easier than on Linux, I have this to say. You are thinking like a techy. Think about it from the point of view of your 78 year old grandma who didn’t grow up with or use computers ever in her life. Now take a Mac and take a PC running say the latest greatest Ubuntu. Now tell her to install a program that you already downloaded and the install package is on the desktop. Given no other than the basic instructions on how to interact with a computer, which do you think she will figure out first?
My money is on the Mac.
1.) Double click on the dmg, which mounts the image and opens a finder window.
2.) drag program icon to applications folder, which is indicated by the graphic diplayed in the background of the open finder window.
3.) click eject button on mounted dmg in finder
4.) double click on the program icon in the applications folder.
Or for more complicated programs, an installer will run that will step you through the install, which in most cases is so you can be given an opportunity to read the eula and select a drive to install to.
Now compare that with your plan, which involves finding, downloading and installing a package manager. And that assumes grandma knows she needs a package manager in the first place and then knows how to find one.
Tech geeks need to remember that just because something is easy to them with their knowledge and experience, doesn’t mean it is for an average non-tech person. Hell, even people that work with computers daily in their jobs don’t understand squat about how the system works, they just know how to turn it on, shut it down and use the applications pertinet to their job. And some of them don’t even know how to do the first part correctly.
A proper defination of easy in regards to computers is that doing the task should be fairly obvious and able to be figured out by someone with no technical understanding of how a computer work, source code, scripts, make files or any other technical stuff. Just because YOU can make installing software or compiling source about as easy as installing an application on OSX doesn’t mean someone without our techinical abilities and knowledge can do so. To them it is an impossible task.
And understanding a command line is just as impossible because they have to know what commands to enter, what the correct path is and a bunch of other technical stuff. If it requires technical knowledge and experience beyond click and drag and answering a few questions, then it is NOT easy.
In all fairness, Ubuntu comes with a pretty decent Package Manager in the basic install. Just so long as Grandma knows that’s how she installs something new, no problem. Although the chances of Grandma installing a new application are probably pretty slim.
However, certain things like the Flash plugin can only be installed via command-line and this will really be a problem on the linux side.
Exactly how does Grandma know what to do with a dmg? You told her. Exactly how does Grandma know how to use/get a package manager? You told her.
“Hey Grandma click on that little black icon with a grayish rim around it, ok now type apt-get install synaptic. ”
“Or hey Grandma click on that thing in your menu (that she is using long before she needs to install more software) that looks like ::description of package manager icon::”
I have to agree with Scott though, what is Grandma doing installing new programs?
The beautiful thing about Grandma (this is speaking from my experience about my grandma) is that she has never used a computer before and thus has no preconcieved notions of how things work. She does things exactly the way you tell her to. And worse case scenario she clicks on that gaim button and asks you to VNC over to her computer and do xyz.
Now the cool thing is the same is true with OS X, grandma isn’t looking for a start menu, she is just doing what you tell her (that is until she knows enough that she starts fooling around and learning things for herself) And worse case IChat and ask for you to VNC. . .
The only real benefit if you have no preconcieved notions, is the intuitive nature of the mac interface in general, any one specific trait can be duplicated or bested in some version of linux.
[...] Remember a few months ago there was an apparent stampede of people, headed by Mark Pilgrim, who were abandoning Macs for Ubuntu? (Although some later came back.) [...]