Mac osX impressions...

[homercles337]

At work im forced to use osX and have to say that im really thoroughly not impressed. When moving large numbers of small files from one dir to another on the same drive it takes minutes to hours! This is a dual 2Ghz G5 with a ton a ram. Not to mention applications are ALWAYS crashing on me (different apps 3-4 times a day--firefox just bombed during the first composition of this post). Why do people use these things when there is so little software for such an expensive proprietary machine? This is kind of a rant, but the prof i work with used to run windows machines with macs, but buying two copies of software got to be too expensive so he dropped windows all together. All he does is bad mouth windows while praising mac, but he is a VERY smart guy. So im truly curious about this.

 

[Ecgtheow]

When moving large numbers of small files from one dir to another on the same drive it takes minutes to hours!

How many is "large numbers"? The Finder definitely craps out when dealing with stuff like that; the fact that it hasn't been fixed yet sucks too.

Not to mention applications are ALWAYS crashing on me (different apps 3-4 times a day--firefox just bombed during the first composition of this post).

I think the OS X version is a piece of crap, but what other apps are you using? All that crashing certainly isn't normal.

Why do people use these things when there is so little software for such an expensive proprietary machine?

It runs the software they use? It's so much of a subjective decision it's almost impossible to debate.

 

[Zugzwang152]

Originally posted by: homercles337
At work im forced to use osX and have to say that im really thoroughly not impressed. When moving large numbers of small files from one dir to another on the same drive it takes minutes to hours! This is a dual 2Ghz G5 with a ton a ram. Not to mention applications are ALWAYS crashing on me (different apps 3-4 times a day--firefox just bombed during the first composition of this post). Why do people use these things when there is so little software for such an expensive proprietary machine? This is kind of a rant, but the prof i work with used to run windows machines with macs, but buying two copies of software got to be too expensive so he dropped windows all together. All he does is bad mouth windows while praising mac, but he is a VERY smart guy. So im truly curious about this.

Macs work flawlessly in my experience with the first-party software it comes built with. For a lot of Mac users this is all they need (read: Safari, Mail and ixxxx), without the security problems of Windows, and without the horrible end-user experience Linux gives. The problems tend to lie in using third party software and hardware, heh.

Generally I'd agree that power users will tend to avoid the Mac, but power users don't make a significant part of Apple's marketing strategy I'd bet.

 

[n0cmonkey]

It isn't really any more proprietary than an x86 PC.
Firefox sucks. Camino rules.

 

[halfadder]

My main machines are a 2.8 GHz P4 and a 3.06 GHz P4, both run WinXP SP2. But my notebook is an Apple PowerBook G4, I use all the time when I'm on the road and sometimes when I'm at work. I like using both Mac and Windows, it's interesting to use the two different worlds. I haven't really had a problem finding Mac software, there's something like 10,000 programs and utilities for Mac OS X now, and something like 600 of those were games. And that's not counting the tens of thousands of command line and X11 gui programs from the unix world or all of the java and flash games that would also work. Sites like MacUpdate and Softpedia and Mac OS X Software keep track of the more popular programs.

I've never really had any problems with my PowerBook running Mac OS X 10.3 crashing applications or acting slow, and it's just a 1.25 GHz G4, and gosh knows I've tried and use all kinds of different programs and utilities on it. Maybe I'm just lucky?

I use Apple's Safari browser most of the time, but I do sometimes use a recent build of Firefox or Camino. These days Camino isn't the fastest anymore, but it works well. Firefox sometimes gives me bugs with contextual menus not drawing right, but I've never had it crash on me.
IBM PowerPC 970 ("G5") Optimized Firefox:
http://homepage.mac.com/thenonsuch/firefox/

PPC 7400 (older "G4") and PPC 7450 (newer "G4+") Optimized Firefox:
http://homepage.mac.com/krmathis/

PPC 750 / 7400 / 970 Camino:
http://camino.ilnm.com/

As for moving files taking a long time, that sounds really really strange considering the unix underpinnings of Mac OS X. I've been learning to use the command line a lot more and I recently moved around GOBS of little files when I was playing with the sourcecode to OpenOffice (experimenting with large projects in Xcode 1.5). Using the command line I was able to move tens of thousands of little files (about 300 MB worth) almost instantly from one spot on the drive to another. Using the GUI that sort of thing is a little slower because the OS tries to show the icons and it also puts up a little status "thermometer" window, but it still happened pretty fast. I've even copied my entire photo archive (about 3 GB made up of hundreds and hundreds of JPEGs) to my external Firewire hard drive and it only took about 2 minutes.

Maybe you have some OS corruption? Or bad RAM? Maybe something's wrong with the hard drive? I don't know...

 

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: Ecgtheow

When moving large numbers of small files from one dir to another on the same drive it takes minutes to hours!

How many is "large numbers"? The Finder definitely craps out when dealing with stuff like that; the fact that it hasn't been fixed yet sucks too.

It was around 25-53k files. Each about 8-16KB. I have given up on finder for this kind of stuff now--just command line. But i sometimes find the dir structure doesnt make sense and i have used *nix machines for better than 8 years. In fact, earlier today i highlighted maybe 250 files, each was maybe 1MB. I drag them "toward" the trash can and that stupid little colored circle pops up. I waited (with the damn cursor over the can) for about a minute and just gave up and forced finder to quit. This was before it crashed on me earlier. But mostly, i guess it is third party stuff that dies--MatLab, Firefox, VirtualPC, Adobe, etc. Regardless, windows is still about thousand times faster at the moving files, copy/paste thing. Even when deleting files i go to command line.

@n0cmonkey, you ever tried to do a hardware upgrade for a mac? I havent but i do know that your choices are SEVERELY limited--if not restricted to mac only. Not to mention x86 has linux and amd, plus a huge number of memory and peripherial manufacturers.

@halfadder, i swear that this machine is only marginally faster than my 3+ year old P4 2GHz. Are there any benchmarks for osX? Because i have a new nForce4 at home (waiting for software--office, adobe, endnote, matlab, etc--before i really make the move from my P4 though). Im not even sure how to "preview" the system config. Maybe only one of the CPUs running properly--hell, i dont know. All i know is that this machine is definately not fast by PC standards.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: homercles337
@n0cmonkey, you ever tried to do a hardware upgrade for a mac?

No, I only have notebooks.

I havent but i do know that your choices are SEVERELY limited--if not restricted to mac only.

The ram is the same. The hard drives are the same. The powerpc spec is fairly open. Hardware manufacturers might choose not to make Mac versions, but that doesn't make it proprietary.

Not to mention x86 has linux and amd, plus a huge number of memory and peripherial manufacturers.

I use crucial ram in my iBook. I had kingston in this powerbook. I have regular notebook hard drives. The USB controller is made by TI (IIRC). The iBooks are even made by Asus these days (again, IIRC).

I can run Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, maybe FreeBSD or DragonflyBSd, and Darwin on this notebook. I have the same options on x86 hardware. No more proprietary than x86 stuff.

@halfadder, i swear that this machine is only marginally faster than my 3+ year old P4 2GHz. Are there any benchmarks for osX? Because i have a new nForce4 at home (waiting for software--office, adobe, endnote, matlab, etc--before i really make the move from my P4 though). Im not even sure how to "preview" the system config. Maybe only one of the CPUs running properly--hell, i dont know. All i know is that this machine is definately not fast by PC standards.

How quickly does your p4 run Mac OS X? Or FCP?

 

[Nothinman]

@n0cmonkey, you ever tried to do a hardware upgrade for a mac? I havent but i do know that your choices are SEVERELY limited--if not restricted to mac only. Not to mention x86 has linux and amd, plus a huge number of memory and peripherial manufacturers.

wtf does "x86 has linux and amd" mean? You can run Linux on PPC and if you do that your hardware choices open up greatly because 99% of the Linux drivers work on all platforms that Linux supports.

 

[halfadder]

Something sounds fuxored with your dual processor G5. Overall my 1.25 GHz PowerBook feels slightly faster than my old 2.4 GHz P4. Your G5 should be at least 3 or 4x faster than my PowerBook. Plus you have way more ram and a faster hard drive...

Matlab and Mathematica should run quite fast on Mac OS X. However, because Matlab uses X11 for it's GUI, you should be using at least Mac OS X 10.3.5 and you should use Matlab R14 (7.0). The newest 7.0.1 is even better if you have access to the updates. Mathematica 5.1 is fast on my PowerBook. The latest version of Maple uses Java for its GUI and is slow on anything but Athlon64 3200 or better, heh.

VirtualPC is slow on any Mac. Very slow. Dog slow. Glacial sloooooow. The G5 CPU is quite a bit faster than the G4 overall... but the G5 doen't have biendian support, so it's actually slower than the G4 for running VirtualPC!! Avoid VirtualPC like the plague. Hide a Windows PC in the closet and use Remote Desktop or VNC

Some of the earlier versions of cross platform apps sucked on Mac OS X (Photoshop 7, QuarkXpress 6, Mac MS Office v.X) but most of the current versions (Photoshop CS, Quark 6.5, MS Office 2004, Macromedia Studio MX, Maya 6, etc) are pretty darn nice and stable.

Just now I did some quick tests moving a bunch of files to the trash. 716.1 MB worth of 1638 photos and pdf files. Duplicating the directory using the GUI (so I wouldn't lose the original contents... right-click, duplicate) took about 58 seconds according to my wristwatch. A little sluggish, but not bad for 4200 RPM. Deleting the files using rm -rf from the command line took about half a second. I copied the directory again and this time dragged the files to the trash. I noticed that the icons didn't follow my cursor, but when I let go above the trash can, a window came up "moving files to trash" for about 3 seconds. I was able to open the trash can and drag the files back into their original directory, this happened instantly. Finally, I did a select all again, right clicked on the icons and moved them all to the trash once again by selecting "move to trash"... they instantly moved to the trash can. When I right clicked on the trash can and selected "empty trash" a window came up "emptying trash" for about 2 seconds.

This is on a 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4 with 512 MB RAM and Mac OS X 10.3.8 and a 4200 RPM hard drive. Something's wrong with your G5. Call Apple and demand some satisfaction.

 

[gwag]

Sounds like you have a problem you mighttry to get a hold of an apple hardware test CD, sounds like ram issue maybe.

 

[MonkeyButler]

its always such a weird "coincidence" that the only macs that crash are the ones used by mac haters. i wonder why.

 

[halfadder]

In my high school and college, I used to use Macs that ran Mac OS 7 through Mac OS 9.2.2. They crashed ALL THE TIME. Those beats were horrible. Even on a well maintianed machine you could expect a crash a day. On a system configured by The Ultimate Mac Guru, you could expect at least one crash a week. Nasty stuff.

I've never used Mac OS X 10.0, 10.1, or 10.2 for more than a few minutes, so I can't comment on them. My PowerBook G4 came with Mac OS X 10.3.1 and it has worked its way up to its current Mac OS X 10.3.8. I don't use Classic (the Mac OS 9 emulatior / virtual machine) and I only new very recent Mac OS X applications (ie, Photoshop CS, not Photoshop 7, etc). I haven't had a single OS crash and I've only had two applications die/quit/crash in the past 14 months.

*shrug*

 

[drag]

OS 9 and OS 8 were utter crap.

Better then Win9x most of the time, though.


Whenever I get crashes in Macs I boot up with the install cd and run a disk check and repair.

then when that is finished, you boot up, go to the applications then utilities folder and run the disk utility there and run a 'permissions repair'. Don't run the permissions repair from the install cds.

This fixes most things.

 

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: MonkeyButler
its always such a weird "coincidence" that the only macs that crash are the ones used by mac haters. i wonder why.

Not a hater, did you even read my OP? In lab meeting every week the first order of business is usually, "how is everything running now?" This is usually followed by a 10 minute discussion about how app X is acting weird and crashing, and how app Y will only launch if you do a, then b, without c. I just think that macophiles are more willing to deal with these things, maybe by mac osY ( ) these apps will run like they do on XP. Until then, just consider me unsupportive of osX and all the instability and slow downs that come with it.

I am willing to concede on the hardware issue, but only moderately. The available hardware for macs is very limited and pricey. The only companies even making gfx cards are apple and ati. The 6800 vanilla by apple for AGP was nearly twice the price i paid for my 600GT PCIe card. [edit] Unless, you are claiming that any AGP card, mem stick, etc will run on mac no problem. If so, then i concede completely [/edit] a I just wonder why hardcore linux users would move to this platform--seems like you wouuld be better off with a Dell. At least then you wouldnt be tied to osX and if you wanted to upgrade your hardware--have at it (save for mobo, case, or psu mind you).

BTW, im also tired of having to hit F9 like a million a times a day to view sub-windows in apps (eg, matlab, firefox, etc).

 

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: halfadder
Something sounds fuxored with your dual processor G5. Overall my 1.25 GHz PowerBook feels slightly faster than my old 2.4 GHz P4. Your G5 should be at least 3 or 4x faster than my PowerBook. Plus you have way more ram and a faster hard drive...

Matlab and Mathematica should run quite fast on Mac OS X. However, because Matlab uses X11 for it's GUI, you should be using at least Mac OS X 10.3.5 and you should use Matlab R14 (7.0). The newest 7.0.1 is even better if you have access to the updates. Mathematica 5.1 is fast on my PowerBook. The latest version of Maple uses Java for its GUI and is slow on anything but Athlon64 3200 or better, heh.

VirtualPC is slow on any Mac. Very slow. Dog slow. Glacial sloooooow. The G5 CPU is quite a bit faster than the G4 overall... but the G5 doen't have biendian support, so it's actually slower than the G4 for running VirtualPC!! Avoid VirtualPC like the plague. Hide a Windows PC in the closet and use Remote Desktop or VNC

Some of the earlier versions of cross platform apps sucked on Mac OS X (Photoshop 7, QuarkXpress 6, Mac MS Office v.X) but most of the current versions (Photoshop CS, Quark 6.5, MS Office 2004, Macromedia Studio MX, Maya 6, etc) are pretty darn nice and stable.

Just now I did some quick tests moving a bunch of files to the trash. 716.1 MB worth of 1638 photos and pdf files. Duplicating the directory using the GUI (so I wouldn't lose the original contents... right-click, duplicate) took about 58 seconds according to my wristwatch. A little sluggish, but not bad for 4200 RPM. Deleting the files using rm -rf from the command line took about half a second. I copied the directory again and this time dragged the files to the trash. I noticed that the icons didn't follow my cursor, but when I let go above the trash can, a window came up "moving files to trash" for about 3 seconds. I was able to open the trash can and drag the files back into their original directory, this happened instantly. Finally, I did a select all again, right clicked on the icons and moved them all to the trash once again by selecting "move to trash"... they instantly moved to the trash can. When I right clicked on the trash can and selected "empty trash" a window came up "emptying trash" for about 2 seconds.

This is on a 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4 with 512 MB RAM and Mac OS X 10.3.8 and a 4200 RPM hard drive. Something's wrong with your G5. Call Apple and demand some satisfaction.

Arent there any benchmarks? This is not my machine, but stuff that i run in matlab is only marginally faster here. And it does not run like i imagined a dual CPU rig would run. When i go to "apple" and "about this mac" it says it is running both CPUs and 1.5G ram. Everything else on that page seems to indicate that all is fine, but then i cant go around and diagnose problems with macs like can windows. I will talk to the guy i work with and see if he has any benchies/diagnostic tools.

As far as the moving, deleting, copy issue. I was moving so many files that the stack was too big for command line rm *.* I had to do rm for chunks of file names. Still leaps and boudns faster than using the OS. What is so "great" about this OS anyway. I went to a presentation for osX in Berkeley before the release. I found it a bit odd since many macophiles like to say windows just copies mac. Well, everything at the presentation that was touted as "new" and "great" was already in a version of windows that was more than a year old (IIRC, probably am screwing up dates here).

BTW, i should mention that i have only had a couple full system crashes in the few months i have been using this machine. Most crashes are app related. Contrast this with, hell i cant remember the last time XP did a full system crash. Cant you macophiles concede that OSX is a young OS (albeit with a very solid kernel) and that it is to be expected that XP is more stable and faster (due to years of optimization)?

 

[halfadder]

I think you need to do one of the following:
1) Contact Apple and MathWorks Customer Relations (not tech support) and demand satisfaction.
2) Tell the professor, or the department chair, or the dean that you need a Windows PC. Your current configuration is not letting you get work done, period.
3) If you're at a public university, consider contacting your local state legislator. This is bullshit. You're supposed to be working and learning, not babysitting machines that don't work right.

As for benchmarks, the most common is
http://xbench.com

The three diagnostic apps that I've heard of are:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
http://www.symantec.com/sabu/sysworks/mac/
http://www.micromat.com/tt_pro_4/tt_pro_4.html
I have not worked with them personally, I don't know which to recommend.

You can rebind the Expose features from F9 to another key or to another mouse button... Apple -> System Preferences -> Expose

As for Firefox, try a recent February build for the G5 (see above). You could also try Camino or Safari.

I don't know what to say about your problems other than it appears the G5 is obviously not the right tool for the job. I don't really consider myslef a macophile or macaddict, I bought a PowerBook about a year ago out of curiosity and I love the thing. No OS crashes to date and I've done just about everything with it at some point. All of my desktop rigs are PCs running WinXP though. Mac desktops are too expensive for me and the Mac Mini is too weak. I really do like Mac OS X though, its been fun and interesting and I'm learning Unix with it at the same time. But I haven't really pushed the hardware or software too much. The most advanced thing I've done with my PowerBook has been running UT2004, WoW, and Halo, all of which run pretty well... but my PCs even with Radeon 9600 Pro, run those games better. Plus I prefer a CRT. I've edited some home videos and made some video DVD with the PowerBook too, but that's pretty basic stuff these days. I even use Photoshop CS at times, but the largest files I work with are from my little 5 Mpixel digital camera, so they're about 10 MB each at most, so almost all of the filters happen instantly.

I like my little PowerBook and it's been great for presentations too. I'm happy with Mac OS X 10.3 and probably won't shell out the $100 to upgrade for a long while. I wouldn't die if you took it away from me. Or Windows XP for that matter. I could still play my games and do my work under Win2K. If I went back to WinNT 4, I could do work but most new games wouldn't run. I suppose even Win3.1 would let me still do my code, word processing, and spreadsheets.

You've obviously found some points where Mac OS X needs work. I would file bug reports ASAP... it might not help you, but it could help others.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: homercles337

Originally posted by: MonkeyButler
its always such a weird "coincidence" that the only macs that crash are the ones used by mac haters. i wonder why.

Not a hater, did you even read my OP? In lab meeting every week the first order of business is usually, "how is everything running now?" This is usually followed by a 10 minute discussion about how app X is acting weird and crashing, and how app Y will only launch if you do a, then b, without c. I just think that macophiles are more willing to deal with these things, maybe by mac osY ( ) these apps will run like they do on XP. Until then, just consider me unsupportive of osX and all the instability and slow downs that come with it.

I'd put money on administration issues, whether it's not taking care of bad hardware or just not taking care of the system. Try to get ahold of a real admin, they might be able to help.

I am willing to concede on the hardware issue, but only moderately. The available hardware for macs is very limited and pricey. The only companies even making gfx cards are apple and ati. The 6800 vanilla by apple for AGP was nearly twice the price i paid for my 600GT PCIe card. [edit] Unless, you are claiming that any AGP card, mem stick, etc will run on mac no problem. If so, then i concede completely [/edit]

This does not make it proprietary, it's just a small market. As long as you get the right type of ram, it should work (although the machines might be a bit picky). Over all, ram is ram.

 

[uOpt]

On the small files:

MacOS X inherited the filesystem code from FreeBSD which used to have synchronous metadata update and was hence slow (but safe) with creating and deleting files. FreeBSD has long ago solved that problem with Softupdates which is drawning a dependency graph to do it both secure and fast.

However, while MacOS X uses the filesystem infrastruture of FreeBSD, it does not use the BSD filesystem, and hence cannot directly use the Softupdates code. Also MacOS X is to a large part based on FreeBSD around the 3.0 release when Softupdates were brand new.

They might have something similar but if it is really slow then they probably don't. I assume but didn't check that the source code for their main filesystem (name escapes me) is in their publically available source code, that should answer that question.

 

[halfadder]

Apple currently uses journaling HFS+ as the default filesystem for 10.3, you can find the source from their Darwin website.

 

[uOpt]

Is that a full journal filesystem or just an additional journal for the metadata?

I assume the latter but then that wouldn't explain why metadata operations are slow (if they are).

 

[imported_Lucifer]

halfadder: I have had personal experience with both Techtool Pro and DiskWarrior, and are highly recommended. My computer was not capable of burning a cd without getting the buffer underrun error. After using both, got me burning cd's back to normal, and DiskWarrior also recovered some lost data.

As for Norton Systemworks, I hear that it causes more problems with OS X than it actually solves. I see numerous posts like these in the Apple Discussions. Many people are complaining about what System Works did to their computer.

What I dont understand is, if System Works for Mac is that bad, why does Symantec continue to sell it.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer
Is that a full journal filesystem or just an additional journal for the metadata?

I assume the latter but then that wouldn't explain why metadata operations are slow (if they are).

By full journal, do you mean one of those journals that protects the data as well as the file system integrity (what journalling was developped for)?

I believe it's only meta data.

 

[JACKHAMMER]

Originally posted by: halfadder
I think you need to do one of the following:
1) Contact Apple and MathWorks Customer Relations (not tech support) and demand satisfaction.
2) Tell the professor, or the department chair, or the dean that you need a Windows PC. Your current configuration is not letting you get work done, period.
3) If you're at a public university, consider contacting your local state legislator. This is bullshit. You're supposed to be working and learning, not babysitting machines that don't work right.

Contacty a state legislature about his craching Mac, are you serious? Talk about reactionary... :disgust:

 

[hopejr]

There's a reason for the slowness of copying - OS X defragments files <20MB each time they are copied/written to/read/moved.

The only programs that have crashed on me are apps that I've written and accidentally had endless loops writing to memory and eating up all 512MB RAM in a matter of seconds, and the Help Viewer because it's crap. Finder crashed once when I plugged a dodgy flash drive in that didn't even work in Windows. Apart from that, I've had no problems. BTW, I have a 1GHz iBook G4 with Panther 3.8.

I also use Office 2k4, Photoshop CS, Dreamweaver MX 2004, among others, and have no problems. Your G5 is just dodgy. That happens on the rare occasion.

 

[Wyck]

hehe, better add the FBI to that list. Seriously though, a few hardware tests and an RMA may save the day. And some calming herbal tea.