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> On Monday, February 10, 2003, at 04:53 PM, Christian Hedemark wrote:
> > Fred writes:
> >> In some cases. I have had printers stop working after I
> >> suggested an upgrade to Jaguar to one customer. I'm still
> >> upset about this. I'm sure that she is, too.
> >
> > If you only upgrade the first CD, you don't get printers (I learned
> > this, too). You need to pop in the second disk an install the printer
> > drivers. Then you're good to go.
>
> Yeah, but...
> There is also the issue that most printer manufactures want to sell you
> new printers -- consequently they don't provide CUPS drivers for many
> printers that still work quite serviceably in OS 9.
I don't want to belabor this point b/c the job is long over, but the
according to the company's website (epson), the driver did work in Mac OS
X, but not w/ the jaguar upgrade. This is probably really rare, but it
happened. According to Apple's website, downgrading jaguar was not an
option. We upgraded b/c the customer had some other problems w/ something
that I attributed to a bug.
It's tough telling a paying customer that after paying $120 dollars for an
"upgrade" now they have to buy a new printer. The Mac OS X gui made me
feel very powerless. I am not an apple hater as I have had a great time
with my mac classic. I used it for years. I jumped ship when I noticed
that the most commonly used software for writing (which is what I use my
computer for) was MS word. Every move apple did alienated me more and
more. The final nail in the coffin was the iMac. Mac OS classic was
getting worse and worse. When 9 came out, I stuck to 8.6, which IMHO, is
still the best Mac OS around.
I learned linux, which for a mac user, wasn't as bad as I thought. I now
use vim for all my writing needs and it "just works". Since vim is so
x-platform, os really doesn't matter in that regard.
I was excited about OS X. However, I found out that unlike macos 7.5 and
below, one could not get a free download eventhough apple claimed to have
used a lot of free software in it. Worse, I found out that eventhough it
supposedly has a lot of *BSD in it, it would not run on old ppc which
could at least run NetBSD. So I still don't have a machine at home to test
out customer problems which runs OS X. When I went to troubleshoot an OS X
box, I was disappointed at how little my mac classic knowledge helped.
I keep hearing linux users rave about OS X, which is great if it "just
works" for you, but I never got anything to "just work" in OS X. I managed
to get one customer's computer to boot back into OS 9, and he was the
happiest guy in the world (his son "upgraded" to OS X, leaving him
confused).
I find that OS X is a lot like cygwin under windows. Yes, windows can run
X and all that other unixy stuff, but it's much more work than a decent
linux or bsd distro. It doesn't "just work" for me, as a fiction writer,
as it would take a ton of configuration to get things the way that I want.
I know one person who is trying to run the icewm desktop in place of aqua
so it's probably possible, but I'm sure it's not as easy as "apt-get
install icewm".
For those out there who never tried OS X, don't blindly buy it. Test it
for at least an hour. It's a sad day for apple when I feel that a
commodity win2k box could do everything that macos x does for less money
and with less hassle.
Fred Ollinger
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