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Why do people want their OS to be unstable?
Authored by: bryanzak on Oct 04, '02 12:11:47PM

Why do people voluntarily add things like crapxies and APE to their OS X system? It just brings back the bad old days of crappy extensions on OS 9 patching things until they break.

Is it so important to have some stupid FruitMenu or something? Are people really willing to trade stability for some behavior they can't live without?

I really don't understand this. It seems so obvious that APE and the crapxies are a Really Bad Thing, yet they are still very popular, why exactly is that?



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APE is at the application-layer...
Authored by: robg on Oct 04, '02 02:30:36PM

Read the APE web page. It cannot cause system instability. Perhaps it may cause an application crash, but that's about it -- it functions at the application, not system, level.

-rob.



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Re: Why do people want their OS to be unstable?
Authored by: escowles on Oct 05, '02 05:59:28AM

Personally, I like to make every process as efficient as possible - keyboard shortcuts at all costs, single mouse clicks, and only if absolutely necessary anything more than that. So OSX bothers me because I can't switch from one window in one application to a specific window in another application, unless they both happen to be visible on screen. You have to switch to the other app, and then switch to the window. I switched over from Linux, so I've generally got 5 or 6 terminal windows open at any given time -- you just can't keep that many visible on the screen. Add a couple of browser windows, some PDFs or Word docs, and it quickly gets hard to manage screen real-estate and application/task switching.

It's this kind of frustration that makes people want to change the basic behavior of the OS/GUI. The only reason a lot of this stuff is unstable is that Apple won't make public APIs for this stuff in a misguided attempt to prevent people from customizing the GUI.

In the end, it comes down to how much effort you're willing to put into it. If you want to mod things, you have to put up with reinstalling your mods after most software updates, incompatibilities with some software, and sometimes extra instability. For me, it's not worth it. I got over not having the Apple Menu by putting my Applications folder in my Dock. It's not as good, but I can live with it. Maybe if I've got some spare time, I'll write a Dockling that will do it properly. MacOS has never had a decent taskbar (like Win9x, Gnome, KDE, etc.), but I'll live with juggling desktop real estate. But I think it's naive to say that there's no good reason for people to want to hack the OS, when Apple gives them no choice.

-Esme

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