Operating System By-pass Surgery

Here's another, for the sake of completeness:

I'm prepared to admit, by now, that Mac OS X has all kinds of benefits. If it had been like Panther (or even Jaguar) when it was first released, my negative feelings mightn't have been so strong. I'm still not fond of the look and feel of the thing, but the fact that it never crashes can't be ignored, and the occasional flaky application can just be relaunched, with no issues.

But you can't have everything, and much has been lost. I feel sorry for you if you never had the "classic" Mac OS experience, because it was just beautiful. It all went horribly wrong when the innernet came along, of course, but I can still remember early System 7 and 7.5 experiences, when the operating system used up barely any RAM, and having 8MB felt like a luxury.

There came the day when I upped my RAM, expensively, to 12MB, and it felt incredible to have that much. I used to run the OS lean and clean. I switched off fancy graphics extensions (QuickDraw GX, which nothing important supported) and even QuickTime. I switched off Applescript, I turned off menu blinking, I saved nanoseconds here and there to make the thing feel slick and smooth.

The main problem with X is that you no longer get that level of control. The other problem is that you can't survive without things like QuickTime and AppleScript, because they've been integrated, bit by byte, in that Microsofty, "Oh, but it's part of the operating system" way.

And of course Safari looks like iTunes which looks like the Finder which looks like iPhoto etc. Everything is a database and everything looks like a database.

I hate the Dock, but I've learned to live with it positioned on the right hand side of the screen, but I turn off the genie effect and I turn off magnification effects. so my Dock is fixed and static. Personally, I long to have a tabbed folder at the bottom of my screen, which I have on my old OS 9 install. And I long for a proper, working Apple Menu. You can get a 3rd party thing, but it's not the same. It's not the same because my Apple Menu experience was about what I took out of the menu listing, not what I put in. I want to be able to remove everything I don't use, every little utility, menu item and icon. I like it when people come to play DVDs on my Mac at work and I say, "I threw the DVD Player software away."

I've a colleague who has shrunken his dock so that the icons are the size of lentils, but it's unusable that way, and you do need to use it. At the other extreme, I scream with rage faced with huge docks with huge magnifications, and Hiding drives me insane. People who hide the Dock (so that it pops up only when your mouse is in that direction) don't seem to realise that you still can't use that part of your screen, because the Dock pops up when your mouse is in that area. Anyway, I resent the processor cycles it takes to show/hide the dock.

Other things I'd turn off include the drop shadows on windows and that horrible brushed aluminium effect, which I have hated since it was introduced with QuickTime. Lord preserve me from the tasteless nerds who write software and say "cool" a lot.

Finally, the saddest thing is that the damn operating system doesn't work properly unless you have 1GB of RAM installed. I was just doing some recording on a Mac downstairs (Si was playing guitar, I was hitting "3" for Record), and it had just 256MB installed. Flaky, slow, with multiple instances of the Spinning Beachball of Death. Never again.