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What do you like most in OS X?

timbloom

timbloom

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
I was just curious what people liked most from OS X.
What do you think makes it such a great operating system from your own experiences.

Myself, I already seem to take it for granted when I use OS 9 or Windows. I like the multithreading and Quartz.
 
Multitasking and Stability. I have had only one kernel panic since I started using OS X in the summer of 2001. Under OS 9, it wasn't uncommon to have multiple crashes in one day, mostly due to the lack of real pretected memory. When one app went, the whole system would go with it.
 
The stability in X is a big draw, that's probably the best thing for myself, crashes were way to frequent in XP for me. I also like the look of Aqua and the dock is pretty cool as well.
 
the sheer power of osx's extensibility is a major draw for me. from os 1-9, the core system did not change a whole lot and adding anything new meant dealing with extensions, controlpanels and that mess. all of the macos technologies are incorporated into the foundation of osx, but it can also be improved with much greater ease than os9 could. the ability to edit interfaces of applications (that you did not write) without recompiling, several built-in scripting languages, things like joy and f-script, inputmanagers, the list goes on.
 
UNIX UNIX UNIX UNIX UNIX

and then having games and Office and other regular applications available.


Did I mention UNIX?
 
One word...stability. Compared to my PC running win98, OSX is so much more stable. I don't have to reboot 2 or 3 times a day now that I switched. It also helps that it's one less M$ app to deal with.

Glenn
 
its modern. scaleable, quartz extreme,
multi tasking. and every update seems to
at a bit more speed to my powerbook.

i love being able to surf the net, have a dvd
going or possibly a cd burning 😀 you can do
so much at one time....and im not even on
a dual processor 😀 actually i dont think i ever
watched a dvd while burning a cd, probably
not possible on my powerbook but im sure
you could do it on a 1gig dual.

what i dont like about it is the fact that theres
not much you can do if your having a problem
with the os.....you pretty much have to do a
reinstall if you want your system back to
normal. for instance, try installing norton,
then try to regain your system performance
without reinstalling your os.
 
just a note about stability... i decided i'd try to keep my computer on for as long as possible... so far i'm at 16 days 23 hours and 35 minutes. that's really good for me... i still haven't even updated to 10.2.4 yet because i want to keep this uptime going.

i know it's not really impressive, but i'm happy that i can fold proteins and do normal work on this 350 mhz g4 for weeks on end. purty darn cool.
 
Style, stability (gotta love that UNIX) and communications to start with, but it's the core audio and MIDI services that really clinch it, no more OMS😀 😀 😀

It took me 15 minutes to set up my audio and MIDI interfaces under OSX, Logic runs like a ba***rd and the new ProTools is slick.

Oh yeah, I haven't crashed it in 8 months🙂
 
it's minimalist contemporary design...

put X on a new iMac, stick it in a room furnished by B&B Italia and it's right at home. i adore that.

and the fact that the design is really insignifigant (yet perfect) because underneath you've got some serious power. i can honestly say i have the best OS in the world in so many areas... ease of use of course, stability, power, integration, the list goes on.

pnw
 
i like the dock a lot...also..let me tell you a little story.

one evening i was bored and i decided to test my little ibook, i don't have the grandest computer but it knew it had a grand os. so i decided to open as many programs as i could until it crashed. i remember in my windows days last year i barely could have 4 things before it crashed. anyway...i started the test...program after another...big ones too...adobe products, macromedia, photo products and audio...i started went through my whole list...then on to utitlities...by this time my system is almost toast its slow as hell...but i keep going...unfortunaltely the test could not be completed....i ran out of programs.
 
Originally posted by kishba
just a note about stability... i decided i'd try to keep my computer on for as long as possible... so far i'm at 16 days 23 hours and 35 minutes. that's really good for me... i still haven't even updated to 10.2.4 yet because i want to keep this uptime going.
Click to expand...

That is one thing that always happens to me, when I want to see how long i can stay up without crashing, I will always get up into the teens, but then an update comes out. (kind of like when you wash your car it always rains the next day). And I just can't hold back from doing updates, I am addicted to them. I need to go to Update-Addicts Anonymous.
 
Originally posted by howard

...by this time my system is almost toast its slow as hell...but i keep going...unfortunaltely the test could not be completed....i ran out of programs.
Click to expand...

I tried this too, to no avail, but to see how many apps I could run without pageouts (using virtual memory). I eventually got to a point where all of the gig of ram that I have was used up, but jeez, it just runs and runs.
Also, just a suggestion, if you don't want to scrounge through preference files, dont add things to the dock until each icon becomes only one pixel! I did that and I had to find the dock's plist file and delete it for my dock to be useable again. No way I was going to go in and remove each of those things 1 at a time from the dock. I could hardly move my mouse over it or my system would halt for about 45 seconds. The dock icon cache was 60 megs, and most of the things in the dock were generic icons.
I never did hit the dock's limit though.
 
Originally posted by howard
i like the dock a lot...also..let me tell you a little story.

one evening i was bored and i decided to test my little ibook, i don't have the grandest computer but it knew it had a grand os. so i decided to open as many programs as i could until it crashed. i remember in my windows days last year i barely could have 4 things before it crashed. anyway...i started the test...program after another...big ones too...adobe products, macromedia, photo products and audio...i started went through my whole list...then on to utitlities...by this time my system is almost toast its slow as hell...but i keep going...unfortunaltely the test could not be completed....i ran out of programs.
Click to expand...


yea but did you try quiting all the open apps?
after i max out my system with a bunch of
apps....it usually takes a LONG time for the
system to regain the speed it had before having
so many apps open. like in photoshop, if my
system maxes out the ram....then i quit PS,
the system usually crawls for awhile...then
slowly the system comes back to life after a
few minutes waiting. i hope they fix this. im not
sure why the system would still be slow AFTER
quitting an app. anyway....osx rocks.
 
Originally posted by beatle888
yea but did you try quiting all the open apps?
after i max out my system with a bunch of
apps....it usually takes a LONG time for the
system to regain the speed it had before having
so many apps open. like in photoshop, if my
system maxes out the ram....then i quit PS,
the system usually crawls for awhile...then
slowly the system comes back to life after a
few minutes waiting. i hope they fix this. im not
sure why the system would still be slow AFTER
quitting an app. anyway....osx rocks.
Click to expand...

yeah i got them all to quite...i just kept hitting apple q for about 15 mins...and yes my system was slow for awhile..i restarted shortly after..but it didn't crash and that impressed the hell out of me

another thing that should be noted...all these programs were just open, i wasn't really doing anything cpu intensive with them, they were just taking up tons of ram...and my ibook is fully loaded with ram
 
is the os suppose to perform normal after having
so many apps open? if so im sure the'll fix it
sooner or later.
 
Originally posted by beatle888
is the os suppose to perform normal after having
so many apps open? if so im sure the'll fix it
sooner or later.
Click to expand...

The OS does, but your processor and ram might not be able to hold up all those programs running at once, once your ram is used, it has to use the hard drive (the slowest part in most machines these days). Swapping memory back and forth to ram and hard drive. yuck. It all ends up being one nasty mess. Even if you have a well-threaded OS like 10.2, your still going to hit limits, especially when running way too many intensive apps at the same time. I can run tons of apps without it affecting it, but once you hit a certain amount, each app exponentially increases the load on the system where managing the multithreading ends up taking more processor than the programs.
 
and what about after you quit all the
applications? SHOULD the system go back to
normal performance level? or is it expected to
run sluggish? i seem to notice a major slowdown
after maxing out my ram, THEN quitting all
programs and say launch safari (for instance). if
i do this, safari (or any other program) runs
terribly slow, even though its the only
application open at this point.

it seems that a restart is the only thing that
gets the system up to its normal capacity.
actually, i think a log out, log in would work too.

oh, patience works too 😀 its just that it takes
so long for it go get back to full performance
levels.
 
I often find myself with 17 or so apps open at a time. Now that I don't use Omniweb, it's not a problem at all. Omniweb has memory allocation problems and can wind up using well over 100 megs if left running long enough. I was showing a friend Inkwell recently, but it was kinda sluggish, so when I told him I had 17 apps open he was quite shocked and didn't think that was so bad.🙂

I think I got 30 days uptime once, but I usually get sidelined after 15 or so days cuz of updates.😀
 
I think it would be the fact that I don't have to allocate memory to applications anymore and that there is pre-emptive multi-tasking in Mac OS X.

To me, UNIX' stability has always been suspect. I came from the other side where UNIX was considered a flaky operating system. Still, Mac OS X is generally much more stable than Mac OS 8.x or 9.x. 🙂
 
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