Sun Feb 26, 2012
This list has been sitting on my computer for a long time. It’s from a text file where I collected all the things that annoyed me about OS X. These are some of the reasons why I sold my “designed in California” computer. Some of them may no longer be valid, or may as well happen with other operating systems. If this Mac had been my first computer this list would probably not exist. But it wasn’t, so here it is:
- Inconsistent keyboard shortcuts.
- Firefox: Sometimes accents don’t appear while typing Spanish text. If I click in the search box and then back in the text field it works fine.
- When the computer is sleeping and I unplug a USB cable, it wakes up. The same thing happens sometimes when I turn on or off a light in the room. Any power fluctuation turns it on. Funny, except that it’s not.
- Flash CS3: Cmd+S does not save sometimes when the wrong window has focus (after compiling).
- Flash CS3: When I switch momentarily to another application, all Flash tool windows disappear. When I come back to Flash they all appear. This is very annoying. I want windows to stay there. If I don’t want them, I will minimize or hide.
- Web browsers: While selecting a file to be uploaded I can not sort the files by age or type, so I have to click one by one 200 files in the folder to find the one I want looking at the preview.
- Cmd+Tab shows only programs, not windows, so I can’t use the keyboard to switch to a specific window.
- I can’t access program menus directly using the keyboard, which is possible in other OSes. It is possible to open the menus pressing a key, then use the arrow keys to get to the right menu and submenu. But this it’s extremely slow.
- OS X has become slower with time. I thought this did not happen on OS X.
- Feels slower than Windows XP on a slower machine.
- I have a script with a shortcut. When I press a key, the script tells iTunes to jump to next song. It used to be instant. After updating OS X it takes 5 seconds to react. Every single time.
- Windows must be resized from the bottom right corner, which is always out of the screen. That means I have to move the window, then resize, then move the window again to the original position. Slow. In Ubuntu I can drag and resize windows from any point in the window.
- Clicking on a button in a non active window has an unexpected effect: it activates the window. Then I have to click again to press that button. If the button was not clickable in the first place, it should have been somehow obvious.
- Lately clicking in a window in the background doesn’t bring it to front. This is very bad when I click in another window to delete a file and press delete. Since the window does not get selected, I delete the wrong file or folder!
- Upgrade to OS X 10.6 breaks MySQL and requires reinstall. Very annoying. After that, the panel asks me to reopen the panel each time I want to turn on MySQL.
- Folder gets created on wrong location when I right-click and choose “create folder”.
- For some reason, TextMate keeps converting my line endings to CR only, no matter how many times I change its settings. This is destroying my GIT workflow. I waste hours fixing it.
But my main complain is that OS X is really not meant to be controlled with a keyboard which is a show stopper for me.
I will explain why I switched to GNU/Linux and write about my last two years of freedom in another post.