Trying to be a Mac User--Decision to Give Up

In November I went all-in on switching from Linux to the Mac. Linux quality is ever-declining, and I had a laptop on which Linux Mint was almost completely unusable. But Mac usability is surprisingly poor, and I expect to return to Linux, mostly completely.

This is the first of a series of short articles on Mac usability deficiencies. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_and_click#Fitts.27s_Law:

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Fitts's Law

Fitts's law can be used to quantify the time required to perform a point-and-click action.
where:

• is the average time taken to complete the movement.
• represents the start/stop time of the device and stands for the inherent speed of the device. These constants can be determined experimentally by fitting a straight line to measured data.
• is the distance from the starting point to the center of the target.
• is the width of the target measured along the axis of motion. can also be thought of as the allowed error tolerance in the final position, since the final point of the motion must fall within of the target's centre.

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Why is this important? Regardless of where a window is on the screen, OS X places the menu in the far upper left. Mousing to the menu is more time-consuming than if the menu were attached to the window itself, putting OS X at a disadvantage compared to other popular desktop operating systems, especially those with large screens.

Clementine and Guayadeque, Close, but not Quite

I continue to have issues with Rhythmbox 2.96 on Ubuntu and Mint (Mate in both cases) and I will give up on it if I find something better, or maybe they'll finally get around to addressing some of these bugs. It doesn't see new songs added to the library reliably, if I force it to rescan the library it crashes, and it often stops between songs for no explicable reason. A lot of these problems have been around for awhile, which makes me wonder if development or support for Rhythmbox is weak. The last straw was that it seemed to be missing three songs from the Roxy Music "Street Life" album, both on my desktop at home and at work, and the files were there and fine--at least so far as Totem was concerned.

I just tried out Clementine, and with lots of features disabled it looks clean and seems to work well. However, I don't see how to display songs in order of least recently played to most recently played. However, Clementine did show the songs that Rhythmbox was "missing," and I now suspect the issue was that Rhythmbox was categorizing them as Bryan Ferry songs, not Roxy Music. Clementine was smart enough to include them in the Roxy Music search.

Double-checking with Rhythmbox, they are indeed under Bryan Ferry and not missing. So this is not a new Rhythmbox bug.

Guayadeque is promising, but it forces a listening model on the user. Also, I can't get it to use the screen efficiently. If one doesn't keep a bunch of useless crap on-screen, instead there's a big blank area. If there is discussion of layout, saving layouts, restoring layouts, etc., why isn't the layout configurable? I might have another look in the future.

Please don't mention Banshee. It's got too many features I don't need, takes forever to load, takes forever to search a large library, and so far as I can tell does nothing well.

Upshot: I'll keep using Rhythmbox since I don't have time to mess with Guayadeque right now. I'll uninstall Clementine. I'll keep Guayadeque to mess with in the future.

2.96 might be an oldish version of Rhythmbox, but it's what's in the Mint 13 repositories, and there's no sense in wasting much time tweaking a media player--it works or it doesn't  In the next OS upgrade (later this month for me), it'll either work or it won't.

100% Mono-Free

[ I didn't write the below with the intention of coming across as bragging, but if your Linux has Mono and mine doesn't, mine's better. So there.]

I had mono as a college student, and can't say it was a great experience. Lately my Mint and Ubuntu systems have also gotten mono, which is apparently required for Banshee, and is also not a great experience. I'm not sure if it's Banshee that's sickly-slow or mono, but either way, the first thing I do with a new install is make sure neither is present.

Maybe some day Banshee will work well. But that day is not upon us, and so since I prefer to hear a song in the same week in which I click play, it's other players for me.

Early Impressions of LXDE

I'm using LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) on my laptop. First of all, it seems to be a resurrection of the long dead Unix philosophy: simple tools that do specific things well. Second of all, it makes no sense to use Mint on a laptop until Mint makes whole-disk encryption easier. It's a piece of cake in Lubuntu.

LXDE seems to be missing some very basic things, but it also does some very basic things right. In Mint, there are no themes (okay, maybe if I wanted to spend my life looking through themes designed for 12-year-olds) that provide significant contrast between the window with focus and the other windows. LXDE does this in an attractive fashion. It has panels, rather than the brain-damaged crap the Gnome project is trying to foist on people.

Why am I more willing to spend time adding functionality to LXDE than to figure out how to customize, say, Mate? Mate is a very heavy-weight environment. Overall Mate is well thought-out and well-implemented, and it is available for more secure environments than Mint, but it is yet another attempt to make Linux into a Windows clone.

With a new Mate installation, I have to spend hours uninstall useless crap, disabling useless background daemons, etc. LXDE saves this hassle--I have a machine I can halfway trust before pounding on it for a week.

LXDE is a better idea than Mate, and a much, much better idea than Gnome Shell. It's worth spending time on. Or so I think so far.

Another Drawback to Cinnamon

When using Cinnamon, and downloading from a web page, the download window was immobile. If it was covering up a piece of information I wanted, perhaps to use for a directory or file name, unlike every other environment, I couldn't just move the download window over.

Why I'm Not Using Cinnamon

I was using Cinnamon on my desktops, and went back to Gnome classic no effects. This with Linux Mint 12.

I installed Linux Mint 13 RC on my laptop, and switched to Mate.

Mate works fine on my laptop. Mate keyboard shortcuts for volume up/down and play/pause do not work on my desktops.

So, why is switching to Cinnamon a bad idea, IMHO?

• Cinnamon has no no grouping of menu items on the panel.
• Bumping a window being dragged against the top panel causes it to maximize--a most annoying bug.
• Nautilus 3.2.1 under Cinnamon shows selected files as pink with no text, or perhaps pink text on a pink background. Sometimes I like to be able to see the name of and related info for a selected file. Really. This is with the list view, which is my preferred default.
• Under Cinnamon, ImageMagick's pan icon is missing window controls (e.g., close) which should be in the upper right.
• [ Added 2012-06-02: Cinnamon removes the ability to move the save file dialog within a web browser. ]

I do like the hot corner, but it doesn't outweigh just the lack of grouping of menu items let alone the other problems I'm seeing with Cinnamon.