found drama

One of the things that is truly rockin’ about OS X is that it is (for all intents and purposes) FreeBSD 4.4. So it has been nice to switch to Mac and w/o having to fret over the kind of memory management woes that used to be so stymie’ing when “preferring” to use them at work. (e.g., “Photoshop is out of memory” errors and knowing for a fact that you have 256 MB of free memory and just not remembering how to re-assign that 256 MB to Photoshop so that your filter will finish processing…) But it’s not just what the improvement leaves behind that’s nice– it’s what we gain: re: access to a world of *nix apps that are either already ported to X or else easily ported w/ a few minor tweakings. All through the glory of X11. One of the things that is so interesting about it though is the weird discontinuity. Thus far, I’ve compiled/installed GIMP and installed OpenOffice both to run through Apple’s X11 beta 3 (i.e., XFree86 4.2.1). So without any significant headaches (mostly thanks to Fink), I have a fully featured graphics package and a fully featured productivity (e.g., word processing and spreadsheets) package all at my finger tips through the joys of open source. But they don’t mesh w/ precision into Aqua. They run on top — but they don’t look the same. And that’s all just a matter of appearances and really doesn’t/shouldn’t matter. But it is something that one notes. In the case of OpenOffice, for some reason it doesn’t seem to bother me all that much. For whatever reason though, GIMP rubs me the wrong way. OpenOffice is accessible (so far) and relatively easy to navigate. GIMP practically mocks one and almost makes a concerted effort to conceal even its simple features. *shrug* I’m just getting started. Unlearn Photoshop? Unlearn MS Office? Maybe that’s a little bit of what will be necessary. And I feel like I could probably get by w/o touching Office again. GIMP as a replacement for Photoshop I’m not so sure of… Here’s to continuing the experiment…

About Rob Friesel