Weasel Boy's Journal: Mac OS X looks greener from the other side of the fence

Dark Paladin suggests that the key to loving MacOS X may be not knowing MacOS 9 and below. Maybe he's right. I've been watching MacOS X mature for years, but I still haven't quite been pursuaded to switch.

Mac OS 9 is just too good.

Do I know what I'm missing? Sure I do. I have an awesome dual-screen Athlon running Red Hat at work, and am no stranger to Windows. My roommate runs OS X. It looks very pretty.

I'm still not switching. Mac OS 9 is too good.

My tower also boots into MacOS 8 (as well as Linux). That was a fine system, too. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

What do I stand to gain from OS X?

Memory protection -- I don't have problems with rogue apps in MacOS 9. My MacOS 9 system is very stable. Memory protection is overrated.

Multitasking -- Cooperative multitasking actually works very well. It is often more responsive than my X-windows desktop, despite having a CPU half as fast. Preemptive multitasking is overrated.

Unix -- Oh joy, I can run thousands of nonintuitive CLI utilities and inconsistent, mentally taxing X programs. Does this program use alt or control for its accelerator keys? Can I paste with the mouse, or do I have to use a menu? Can I copy from this window and paste into that one? Only under some conditions! Yeah, gimme some more of that Unix lovin'.

Aqua -- I really need my desktop picture to bleed through my windows. Give me a break, I only have a 400-MHz G3 and 256 MB of RAM. I don't have enough resources to run Aqua. Funny how OS 9 runs fine on it, though.

Broken HI guidelines -- Some things in Classic MacOS are just better thought out than their OS X counterparts. A photograph of a hard drive mechanism to represent a volume of storage? Sure, I know what it means, but my mom doesn't. Nor does she want to. Go back to school, propellerheads. Learn the difference between "we can" and "we should".

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'll stop using Mac OS 9 when it no longer meets my needs. And not a day sooner.