I hate Apple.

I too used to use Gentoo, though it was far from my first Linux OS, and Linux was not my first Unix-like OS. I'll spare you the recounting of my entire computer-use history, except to say that I've used a wide variety of operating system over a period of decades, both as a user, sysadmin, and a developer.

I've hated Windows since it was invented, and hated Microsoft before even then, back in the DOS days, when it was a grabage OS that undeservedly dominated the 8-bit market. In some ways it's gotten better (particularly on the stability front), but in others its gotten worse (its dominance on the desktop market is complete).

Apple is like Microsoft with a smile on its face. Everybody's switching to it because it's cool, sleek, and trendy and even Linux is trying to emulate it. But its walled gardens, dumbed down, crippled and bastardized OS'es and "fuck you", "my way or the highway" attitude towards technical users, developers, and sysadmins make me want to puke.

Most users don't know any better, but I really don't get all the technical people who've switched to it from Linux and still sing its praises. They should know better. The most common attitude I hear from them is that they'd rather their OS "just work", and that they're too busy to spend a lot of time tweaking or making it work.

To that I say that they're really not as technical as they think. Someone who loves technology would pick the technically superior solution, the solution that gave them more choice and power, even if it required more of them as users, rather than picking the dumbed-down, technically crippled solution that may be easier to use by non-technical users (or users who don't care about technoogy, or are too busy to care). They would pick the three-button mouse over the one-button mouse.

Some examples of crippled and dumbed-down aspects of OS X off the top of my head (I should really keep a list, as I run in to something nearly every day):

- massive and pervasive lack of choice
- no focuse-follows mouse
- no tiling window managers
- X is not integrated with OS X's crappy windowing system,
so you can't use X and still effectively interact with non-X gui apps
- the Finder is a horrendous piece of shit
- mouse-centric interface, forcing clicking through everything to
configure the machine
- no standard package manager (no, homebrew/macports, etc are not a
good substitute until they can install everything and do it
without conflict with the rest of the OS
- no standard way to uninstall software
- no more server-level hardware, forcing the use of Mac minis in
racks because of:
- license limits to running OSX only on Apple hardware, so you can't
run it on standard server-level intel/amd hardware
- tons of closed, proprietary, non-standard garbage like mDNSResponder, mds, etc
- a feeble culture of open-source compared to Linux/BSD
- default installs stuck with ancient versions of *nix utilities like bash
- etc, etc, etc
- and don't even get me started on the Apple Store or iDevices

I wish I never even knew any of the above, but I've been forced to find out because I'm forced to use OS X at work. I've long suspected that OS X is garbage, but now I know first-hand. It's like Windows all over again.

I guess I should be grateful that it's a *nix underneath, even if it is crippled and bastardized. But the world would be far better off if Microsoft and Apple never existed.

</rant>