How's the switch?

First off, I'd like to say Macs are extremely slick when things are working together. Like you wouldn't believe, it can't do a lot of things Windows can do, but it is good at what it does. It also definitely took a lot less effort making things work nicely.

OS X can actually support dual screens without forcing you to jump through hoops just to make the wallpapers different. As a bonus, you never get things stuck off screen when you're disconnected from a monitor like you do in Windows. Well, sometimes you do, but it's not as frequent.

The templates in Pages are a billion times better than whatever comes with Word. The screen savers are nicer. It comes with built-in East Asian character support instead of needing to be installed later because apparently Windows decided it doesn't want to give you the option during the initial install process. Basically, I'm satisfied with how everything is on a Mac the first time. With Windows computers, the more "ready to use" the manufacturers claim, the more time I'll be spending uninstalling bloatware later.

The problem is when you need to get some work done and Numbers is built to make your graphs pretty and not to actually crunch numbers. Maybe that's why artists like Mac so much, because they never have to do fucking math. MS Office for OS X is apparently like its Windows counterpart but infected with polio because Microsoft decides it hates Mac users (incidentally, my Chem 100 assistant prof hates Mac users too). Open Office for Mac is so terrible. It's clearly running over a windows emulator of some sort, and it has it's own tool bar. It's better than MS Office in that it is free and Calc has more tools than Excel for Mac (see point: previous), it's worse in that it has its own file formats that Office apps can't actually open. So I have a mess of redundant files in different formats floating around until I figure out what I should save things as. To add to the confusion, I still have not found a way to change the default application for opening things in OS X. Also, OO integrates horribly with OS X, needing to open terminal, and then an emulator before actually initializing Open Office itself. Meaning it starts up slower and uglier than even Photoshop CS2.

Quicktime can't actually play .avi files properly despite installing DivX codecs so I had to install VLC player. That's okay though, Windows Media sucks in comparison to MPC and Winamp too. Plus, I didn't need splitters and FFDShow to get .FLVs working on VLC.

I spent a large amount of time trying to make Frostwire for Mac store its shit in the data partition, but no matter how I change its preferences it still creates folders in my Mac partition. I gave up and just installed it Windows-side.

Spaces is a marvelous concept, but there are enough flaws that I decided not to use it. One is that I'd like the ability to have separate spaces on each screen when using a monitor, after all, that is what a second screen is for. It's a shame that they overlooked this with such fine dual screen support otherwise. Secondly there are bugs with apps showing up wherever they want to. Photoshop decides to open up anywhere the hell it wants despite being assigned a space. Even more infuriating is that if I hover the cursor where the font selection toolbar should be when Open Office is open, it will switch to that space for some reason. I hope this stuff gets fixed somehow, because I'd love to use Spaces if it worked.

Finally a pet peeve, Finder keeps leaving .ds_store files all over my data partition which is clearly visible in Windows and Explorer likewise keeps leaving thumbs.db files all over the same partition that is clearly visible on OS X. It makes me want to shoot myself.

Additional Note: Adding to the point that you can't do math on a Mac, it's funny because Maple, the software used by mathies to do inane shit like calculate pi to 10 000 digits (significant figures dammit!), came with two installation CDs: one for Windows and one for Linux.