It's official. I'm beginning to really hate my mac.
i'm about 10 seconds away from "un-switching".
after over a year of running and preaching for Mac OS X, this weekend i decided to straight un-install it.
now don't get me wrong, i really like OS X. it's rock solid. i love being able to ssh into my machine and kill any misbehaving processes. and visually, it is a gorgeous OS. but it's goddamn slow.
running it on my 450mHz G4 here at home, i haven't done much more than browse the web, or tinker around. In the office, i had a 933mHz G4 which made quite a difference. but now that i'm actually trying to use this machine as a productions system, i'm running into some nasty fucking problems.
To begin with, photoshop 7 is unbearably slow. illustrator 10 is even worse. these apps seem just awful in X. they were tolerable on the 933 machine, but on my 450, trying to do any "real" print work just isn't working. and then, of course, Quark and Adobe Acrobat Distiller don't even run in X. so i get to run them in classic mode. which makes them slow as ass.
as an added bonus, my lovely work horse of a printer, a GCC EliteXL 808, doesn't support the postScript coming out of OS X print center. printing anything results in a solid black page. nice.
i'm in the middle of a deadline to get these ads finished, and i just gave up. i just couldn't stand using OS X anymore. it was too goddamn slow. so i decided to go back and boot in to Mac OS 9. but you can never go back. and i should have known this.
i haven't been in OS 9 for several months now, so it's safe to say that my 9 system was a little hosed. my versions of suitcase, toast and other apps were mismatched to my OS X versions. but i trudged on. i had to get this ad out.
so i settled in, and got started.
right off the bat, opening illustrator 10 resulted in hanging the system. scratching my head, i went through all the old mac tricks, remove the prefs, reboot. nope. still hangs the system. reboot. maybe it's the suitcase plug-in. removed it. hung again. ok. no big deal, i still have illustrator 9, i can just use that. but, oh wait, illustrator 9 can't open illustrator 10 files. nice.
at this point, it's approaching noon. and now i'm thinking, ok, no big deal, i'll just rebuild the system with a new copy of os 9, and reinstall only the apps that i need today. (illustrator, quark, photoshop and acrobat)
this ends up taking hours because it's never that simple. there's control panels for my Logitech mouse. control panels for my Microsoft Natural Keyboard. extensions for my CD burner. oh, and all my software CDs and registration numbers? i can't find them. Quark 5 CD? Acrobat 5 CD? i still haven't found them.
so after a trip to go borrow some of james's CDs, it's now getting close to 5:00pm. and i haven't even started on the ad.
i spend the next couple of hours tinkering on my system. and guess what. it just fucking sucks; my Griffin PowerMate hangs the system; my Yamaha FireWire CDRW? not supported in OS 9. oh and then there's that little issue of no more built-in Samba support, so i can't even talk to my windows machines anymore. nice.
it's now 9:00pm. i'm exhausted, and feeling fairly defeated, knowing that, even after all of this, i'm going to have to boot back into OS X any time I want to copy files to my PC, or to use my cd burner.
in the mean time, my windows 2000 machine is just sitting these looking at me. and i think i can hear it laughing.