All That Keeps Me On OS X
Chris has a new MacBook for work. He likes Mac OS X, and he especially loves Adium. I agreed, and told him Adium is one of the very few apps that keeps me from switching to Linux. He asked what the others were. Here’s the final list I came up with:
- Adium: multiprotocol chat client par excellence. The interface is beautiful and logical; it ties in with Apple’s Address Book; and these days it’s actually pretty stable.
Alternatives: bitlbee. Every graphical client I tried on Linux just left me cold. Bitlbee is at least a novel way to solve the problem of user interface. I used it for a few weeks and didn’t hate it. I’d miss text formatting and the occasional image or file transfer. I’d really miss metacontacts. - Safari and Camino: browsers that aren’t ugly and slow. Sorry, Firefox. You were a pure joy to use back in the 0.7 days. Now, somehow, you’re bloated and slow and not very pretty… just like SeaMonkey you tried to replace.
Alternatives: Firefox sucks, Konqueror does too much that isn’t viewing HTML (just the browser, ma’am), and that’s about it for Linux browsers. - Quicksilver: difficult to describe launcher-and-kitchen-sink. It just does stuff. Awesome stuff.
Alternatives: none I know of. - Finder’s Column View. The rest of the app sucks rocks, but I still love Column View.
Alternatives: Eh, there’s probably something for Linux by now.
These four thin but strong threads keep me on Mac OS X. I could switch to Linux tomorrow—I would have switched a year ago—if not for these few programs I love so much.
September 18th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
I’d like to add Mail.app and iCal.app to that list. They’re what kept me coming back.
Theres no alternative that I know of in linux for column view.
The one thing I miss in bitlbee is grouping contacts, but I cant think of a good way to do that within the IRC spec.
Epiphany is a nice and light, but it renders badly a lot, and doesnt have any plugins for flash or java. Flash and Java are STILL a pain in the ass on firefox on linux, even after all this time. I hate hate hate hate…..
… yeah.
September 18th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
hmmm
September 20th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Mail and Thunderbird are a tie. I recently drastically changed the way I handle email (all goes into one IMAP account), and suddenly T-bird is looking like a better IMAP client than Mail. I’d still like the AB tie-in, but if AB went away I could set up LDAP. The trick is then pushing it to the Palm. Then again, in a few years I won’t have the Palm, and hopefully I’ll have a proper Linux device that can be an LDAP client. But I digress…
iCal’s very very nice. Sunbird and Evolution are awful bloated crap in comparison. I’d miss iCal a whole heck of a lot, but I don’t think it’s a deal-killer in the same way browsers are. If anything, iCal plus Cog adds up to a full #4.
September 23rd, 2006 at 3:24 am
Stable? It’s as unstable as it ever was. A few minutes after successful file transfer, there goes the awesome flaming duck.
I’ve been going back to firefox lately, camino has so many irritating little issues for me. When safari gets find as you type, I think I will jump on it and never let go. Better click confirmation would be nice too. It’s faster than the other two, its photo rendering is so much better, it still looks better than camino, and it’s a lot more stable (though my camino could just be broken there lately).
Yeah, Quicksilver is just awesome.