An old half-finished post I found from around probably mid 2008 about my first couple weeks with OS X Leopard. Still one of my favorite Mac OS’s.

After two weeks, I can say that OS X is hands down my favorite operating system. Why? The little things.

  1. Stuff just works: I love Linux. I really do. I don’t like tracking down dependancies. I haven’t had to spend 3 days getting anything to work correctly on OS X. I spent 2 seconds dragging a program to OS X’s Applications folder. Done.

  2. Goodbye taskbar: Coming from 10 years of Windows, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this at first. I tried it on Linux, and found I needed a taskbar to keep track of what I was doing. OS X’s Dock is simply genius. No more taskbar with 30 windows open. I can see everything open right in the Dock, or with…

  3. Exposé: This was the reason I spent a month trying to get Compiz working last year, and one of my favorite features of OS X. Press F9 (or a button I have mapped on my mouse) and all open windows on the current desktop are shrunk to thumbnails on the screen. Simple mouseover and release on the window you want to use, and it is snapped to the front. Genius - way better than alt+tabbing in Windows or Linux.

  4. Spaces: Multiple Desktops. Apparently this is new for Leopard users. I’ve been using this on Linux for years. OS X did step it up a bit — you can press F8 to show all of your desktops at once, then you can drag a window from desktop to desktop (this is also a compiz-fusion effect for Linux). Nothing too spectacular — but I would have been pissed to come over to Tiger and not have it.

  5. iTunes: I’ve hated iTunes for years. I got an iPod last December for graduation, and I hated iTunes even more when I had to use it. Well… That was on Windows. iTunes is a delight on OS X. It’s fast and responsive. I think they have a code fragment in it similar to this: if ( OS ~= /MS/ ) then $mem_usage = 99.9;.

  6. Adobe loves you more if you use a Mac. Don’t believe my? Put a Windows box and an OS X box next to eachother and open Photoshop CS3 at the same time. Bring a book or something to read while you wait for the Windows version to finish loading. This isn’t just Photoshop either — Fireworks (my weapon of choice) is a lot faster on OS X than it was on Windows.