I’ve been using the Windows line of operating systems for nigh on 2 decades now for my own personal PC and apart from the occasional tinkering I haven’t bothered trying anything else. My professional life is a different story as with VMware being a heavily modified version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux I’ve had to become more familiar with the open source alternative so that I can troubleshoot the more esoteric problems that it might throw at me. Additionally I had the (mis)fortune of managing one of Apple’s token stab at the enterprise market the Xserve which, whilst didn’t give me any large amount of grief, had its own way of doing things that made most trivial tasks take hours. That was probably the most experience I had had with an Apple OS up until I took my shiny new MacBook Pro (separate review coming soon) with me on my trip around America where I decided I would thoroughly test Mac OS X as my primary operating system.

The initial experience of starting up OS X for the first time is a world away from what I’m used to with Windows installs. You’re greeted with a short video presentation showing the various aspects of the OS which is then followed by the sign up process. I do remember it asking me for my iTunes account name and password during part of this which I thought was a no-no ever since Microsoft got into trouble for trying to get everyone to have a MSN accountΒΉ. Less than 5 minutes later I was ready to start bumbling my way through a new OS, and bumble I did.

My first initial task was to install Windows 7 on it since I know OS X wouldn’t be able to run everything I wanted it to. Getting bootcamp configured was pretty painless with the help of the guide Apple provides so there’s some big props for them there. About 20 minutes later I had a full Windows 7 installation running with all the drivers I needed, although I did update the video card with NVIDIA’s latest offerings. Satisfied that everything was fine on the Windows side I flipped back over to OS X to give it the initial shakedown.

First I tried browsing the web using the inbuilt browser, Safari. It opened up in a not-so-fullscreen manner so I hit what I thought was the maximise button to get it to fill the screen. It didn’t do anything and after researching around a bit I found that OS X doesn’t really have a concept of fullscreen and that button really only serves to switch between window sizes. I could get a close approximation to the maximise button by stretching everything out but that could also end up a window bigger than the screen it was on, especially with the lack of precision granted by the trackpad I was using.

Here is where I feel Apple is let down by its community. Whilst I’m not an easily offended person my searches for a solution to the fullscreen problem brought me to this forum thread in which it takes no less than a single post for a OS X user to abuse someone for trying to find a feature similar to Windows. I’d love to say that it was an isolated incident but time after time when I found myself looking for the answer to some problem I could easily solve in Windows this kind of elitism seems to follow quite closely. Granted I’m not saying all OS X users are like this but there’s enough of them to do a royal disservice to those of us who aren’t complete novices when it comes to computers but are unfamiliar with the world of OS X.

Undeterred from those experiences I went ahead and signed up for the Apple Developer Program and downloaded the latest version of Xcode. Installation was pretty easy and I was able to build a simple program about 10 minutes later with little hassles. Regular readers will know of the trials and tribulations I’ve been through since then but overall I’d count Xcode as a decent IDE but still needing some work to be up to the standard I’ve come to expect. Thankfully most of my questions regarding the IDE (such as deploying code to a real iPhone) were already answered in the online documentation which goes a long way to bridging the gaps.

Not long after using the laptop as a development machine I packed it up and took it with me on a trip around the USA and Canada. Here OS X started to show some of it’s convenience features that I really started to appreciate. The first was it opening up iPhoto when I plugged in my camera, where upon it began walking me through creating events and some of the other features it has. Unfortunately it didn’t like the way my camera stores movies (and iMovie doesn’t like the format) so they had to remain on the camera. Still it was nice to be able to load all the photos on the laptop at the end of the day and have them nicely arranged in a bunch of tiles.

The fun really started when I began trying to do things I had never attempted in another operating system before. Mostly this was troubleshooting things like why my camera wasn’t showing up (needed a reboot) or when I was trying to spoof my MAC address so that I didn’t have to pay the exorbitant price for the hotel Internet connection (why a $50/night place gives me Internet for free and a $400/night place doesn’t is beyond me). It seems in these areas of esoteric OS X issues and chicanery the community is much better than what I had initially encountered with me being able to Google up several solutions without any high and mighty Apple attitudes creeping in.

All the rudimentary programs (Finder, TextEditor, StickyNotes) function as expected and are pretty much identical to their counterparts on Windows. The same can be said for the system settings as once you click on it you’ve basically got a Windows control panel staring back at you. So whilst the visuals might be different the administration of OS X settings isn’t too far removed from what many of us long time Windowers are used to. Of course a bit of familiarity with the *nix terminal won’t go astray when you’re trying to do something really out of left field, but if you’ve used the command prompt or written a script in windows I don’t think you’d have too much trouble.

Overall I found OS X to be quite satisfactory as a desktop OS as it provided all the functionality I required of it whilst providing some value add that I wasn’t expecting. Still the experience wasn’t exactly mind blowing and there are many differences that are there just for differences sake (using the command key instead of control, close/minimise/maximise buttons on wrong side) that don’t do them any favours. I won’t be removing OS X completely as it works extremely well for what I use it for but I won’t be replacing Windows 7 as my current default OS. Would I recommend it for others? Hard to tell and it’s something that I’ll probably explore in a future post.

ΒΉI did this set up over 2 months ago now so I might just be remembering this incorrectly but I did give up my iTunes account info well before I saw the desktop. It may not be required to use OS X but I wouldn’t have put it in unless I thought it was required.

About the Author

David Klemke

David is an avid gamer and technology enthusiast in Australia. He got his first taste for both of those passions when his father, a radio engineer from the University of Melbourne, gave him an old DOS box to play games on.

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