Slashdoters discuss today the possibility of people finding MacOSX slow in general (regardless of hardware) or not. What do you think, is the whole MacOSX 10.2.x experience slower than other modern operating systems, generally speaking? Let’s allow users to vote and decide over this!Note: The Poll is now closed. Thank you for participating.
so it seems to me that a lot of people are saying its slow compared to such and such os on this other platform. well, here’s the thing. osx thrives on it look. that will slow things up versus any version of windows (minus maybe xp) and i’m sure other various x windows setups.
you will not buy a mac if you dont like the ui, because that is what makes a mac a mac. if you think its too slow, dont use it. you cannot say it is better or worse than any other os based on its speed, for 2 reasons.
macs thrive on ui. moreso than any other os out there. point? you use osx because you like the ui, not the speed.
window, beos, x, osx, all fine uis for their target audience. to compare the speed of one versus the other and declare that os better is the same as comparing the “prettiness” of the various uis and declaring the “prettiest” best.
to put a point at the end, yes, osx is a resource hog. people like it. apple told you it was when you bought it. hence apple told you this os/ui is made for high end machines. so there. thats it. osx is “slow” by design. but you know what? the command prompt used to lag on the old machines too.
and for the record, i may have the most unbiased view here. i HAPPILY use windows, osx, and fluxbox (x).
If your system crawls to a halt just by resizing a dialog box in Windows XP…
..your system sucks, or you’ve misconfigured it greatly.
Yeah that’s about the gist of it C, I can’t be fucked. Scientific or not when I press BACK on the god damn browser I would like it to refresh and bring back the cached page as quickly as possible and not be herky jerky and take multiple seconds to do it. That’s about as scientific as I need to get. I realize there is probably multiple factors governing why it acts so slowly, GPU, CPU, HD speed, etcetera. Dollar for dollar though Mac is a fucking rip off as post #1 stated.
I don’t compile code or the various other cpu intensive tasks that people who post on this message board do. What they do with it is fine, I just want my god damn motherfucking browser to be instant and for that GOD DAMN dock to stop it’s fucking bouncing whenever something happens in the background, is that too much to ask.
Hey lets set the animation speed for 750ms for a menu to slide down AND THEN lets make that non-configurable. Sure our software/hardware has the power to make it pop up instantly but we want it to slide down real pretty like; And that I think is my main issue with OSX, lack of configurability out of box and the wasting of time.
Call me fickle, a simpleton, not [H]ard or whatever but it’s just that simple and so I’ll just stick with the cereal-box trinket celeron chip for everything except what is REQUIRED to be done on the mac speed demon.
aivars
I am running a TiBook 667 DVI. The UI is 90% of the time about as responsive as my Inspiron 8200 (1.6, 512DDR). Using Chimera of course. IE on OSX is terrible and Entourage, while nice, also leads to some sluggishness.
Each operation is a tad slower, a little less snappy, but I can plod along in Word.Excel,Vectorworks, Omniweb, listen to Itunes, Multiledger my accounting, and print to anyone of six printers and on 3 computers. No system crashes, no loss drive data.
Meanwhile my friend with his fancy XP and 2+gig speed demon, works faster every moment except when he had to add a printer, MP3 player, borrow my label printer, his system bit the dust as he tried for the upgrade drivers. He has twice lost his hard drive.. Of course that maybe a hardware problem and not XP’s.
So the hare and Turtle story or I prefer the race horse and Clydesdale (Brewery Horses) analogy, OS X is a workhorse hauling tons of work a little slower, XP a race horse which can get the work done at frantic pace.
I am just too old to be frantic anymore. OS X is coming along fine, I can be patient. Frantic is not my style.
Jim
Right now, Ive got itunes playing some Dave Brubeck, while ripping the cd its off of, browsing osnews.com, chatting in Irssi, logged on fire and ichat, have mail checking every 5 minutes, and switch tasks in an out between chimera .6 and apple works for a paper im working on for school.
It switches tasks just as well as my athlon/nforce desktop, if not
better. Im really quite amazed at the speed its doing things. ripping an mp3 on my win2k box while playing another takes the whole system down. Switching between kmeleon and word isnt nearly as fast either.
I cant play games, except maybe ones by maxis, but for day to day, work my ibook really smokes my pc, regardless of being less then half the mhz, less then a quarter the memory bandwidth, and much slower hard drives.
I hate os X less then windows, but im not super happy about it either.
aivars, couple things here:
Several of the options you claim can’t be disabled can be quite easily from System Preferences.
Does your momma know you use words like that? Here’s hoping to see your post deleted you homophobic troll.
I have the exact opposite experience. I’m comparing my iMac G4 700 at home to my Dell P3 700 at work.
My Dell at work can play MP3’s, compile my C++ project, check mail and surf the net.
My iMac has a lousy modem which I can’t check mail and browse the Internet at the same time, this is something I can do on my Athlon (another computer at home) with a 56K modem.
If the Mac you use actually peforms in the way you describe, there is something seriously wrong with it. If you treat it the same way you speak, it could be pretty messed up. I hope your post is deleted too – sexual slurs are not something any of us need here.
You get used to the speed of your computer, I have a 300MHz AMD K6 and it was quick in the beginning with windows but with BeOS it felt even quicker, (except for displaying a large number of files, listview is slow)… The problem is
once you work with a faster machine at work for a while the old at home feels slow so you upgrade. So I have a 1GHz Athlon this thing was really fast, browsing with IE is faster than anything else, so windows Improved, but it’s not perfect. It still behaves awkward under heavy load and windows got it’s priorities a bit messed up or a lousy scheduler. But it does have the apps i use daily…
There are many reasons why Mac OS X seems slow:
1. Mac OS 9.x was very fast and no one remembers 7.5.x – 8.6.
2. Windows XP rarely runs on 3 year old boxes and uses the graphics subsystem which was introduced with NT 4.0 which violates the kernel to gain speed.
3. Linux doesn’t have a complete, heavy-duty GUI.
4. Application developers haven’t caught on to Mac OS X performance enhancement and have, sometimes, left their Mac OS 9.x enhancements in which actually detract from performance in X.
I have found, on both a PowerMac G3/400 and a dual G4/800, that performance is very good on both, especially when the machine is busy. Each release of the O.S. seems to bring a performance enhancement. Still, hiding UNIX is not cheap or easy and it does show up in sluggishness sometimes. This is exacerbated by the virtual memory system being used with UltraATA drives. My G3/400 has an Ultra2SCSI drive and slows down less than the dual G4/800, as the system gets busy but both systems are still quite responsive.
Office X apps start in about 1 sec on my dual 1.25 ghz G4…oh please make the pain end…
Please let’s get real here.
May Mac starts up and shuts down twice as fast as my W2k box…
I’ve spent a lot more of my computing life around Windows boxes than around Macs and Macs are a wonderful breath of fresh air.
I now manage all of the Macs for a major publishing firm.
1 guy(me) = 350 Macs…not too bad.
Face it, most /.ers are elitest freaks who need to get a clue.
Linux UIs suck and Windows just plain spits chunks. It’s a half baked OS with little thought to human interface design.
I have macos 10 on my Grahite (366Mhz 320MB ram) ibook and I think works fine. Every so often, when too many pop-up ads come up in IE, the thing grinds to a halt. My girlfriend has a tangerine ibook (300Mhz 320MB RAM) but I find it unbearable on that.
This said, I installed mandrake 8.1 ppc on it and it flew. I became a Linux convert and installed the newer Yellow Dog 2.3 which went WAY slower than OSX ever did with less decent apps so I reinstalled OSX on it.
Well i heard the context switching on OSX is about 400microseconds…
AmigaOS has context switching of 4 miscroseconds…
sounds to me as though OSX has some responsivness issues to me
How fast are context swiches? What’s the performance of the memory manager & the process scheduler compared to other systems?
Who cares? The important thing is the user-experience. If that’s bad, the overall OS is bad. It’s supposed to be a transparent tool for manipulating content. When it gets in your way, that’s a problem. Why do so few people understand this? Oh, because most of the people on these tech sites are techheads and geeks who care about intangibles like that.
If your car handles like a pig, it doesn’t matter how cool the design is or how many horses the engine has. It’s still a pig.
Windows just plain spits chunks. It’s a half baked OS with little thought to human interface design.
If you paid any attention to Windows XP, you’d know that Windows suffers from too much thought on interface design. Granted, it’s focused on marketing, so that’s why it sucks, where it does (because the design doesn’t all suck; but the behavior mostly sucks throughout).
No. Macs aren’t the greatest thing ever for UI. Apple long since abandoned the right to be called UI experts and OS X is part of the problem. Many Mac “experts” don’t want to hear objectivity about thier beloved UI, so I won’t bother to get into it. Several people have done so, countless times before, on this site and all the Mac-devotees just ignored them or flamed them.
Well, since you are into comparing Windows and Mac OS X, why not tell us what your specs of your machine is? You better hope it all together fetches the same price as the most expensive Mac at the time you bought it.
Then you start comparing with Windows 2000. For my machine that worth $200 now, at best, it beats hands down comparing the boot speed with a iMac G4. If I just give it another processor, boost up the RAM, add Windows XP, it would beat your Mac.
Speaking on Windows XP, my Windows XP laptop, a HP Omnibook, starts up faster than a Dual 1GHz running 10.2, and from the benchmarks I have seen, 1.25Ghz isn’t all that different.
So if I buy a new PC and say it is faster than my 68k Mac, would you get angry? Think about that.
Personally speaking, comparing with other modern (e.g. less than 2 years old) OS, I would say Mac OS X has the best user interface. Yet I still think the UI is crap, especially when comparing with two previously assets in UI they had, NeXT and Mac OS 9.
What Apple did with Mac OS X is focus on beauty rather than productivity. I would probably consider Aqua if all that animation can be turned off, plus the grey and white stripes, plus being able to change the colour theme to something other than blue and graphite, plus being able to make the buttons look more flatter, I would probably consider using Mac OS X (I know I can theme it, but the animations aren’t gonna go away).
Very well said Jace.
Something to consider — I bought a iBook 700 that came with OSX 10.1.4 loaded on the hard drive. Bought the Jaguar 10.2 UPGRADE CD-ROM, and used it to upgrade my 10.1.4 to 10.2.
Upgraded 10.2 seems to work OK — a bit sluggish — so I upgrade the memory in the iBook from 256 MB to 640 MB.
Nice speed bump from the memory upgrade, but not earth shattering in terms of GUI performance — added RAM allowed me to have 19 different applications opened simultaneously, without everything grinding to a halt — finder remained responsive, and system just worked.
Upgraded via the system preference OS software panel to 10.2.1 — per se, did not notice too much difference in performance, if any.
For reasons not worth articulating here (my stupidity, not the iBooks fault caused a serious problem with OSX), decided to scrape the hard disk clean and reinstall OSX 10.2.1 directly from a friends install CD-ROMS that came with his new iBook 800 — figured that this would save me lots of time, because I would not have to run additional updaters, etc.
Well, don’t know what is going on with Apple’s different OSX CD-ROM installers, but my iBook 700 with the fresh installed OSX 10.2.1 is fairly snappy — selecting menus is quick, with much less hesitation, GUI stuff in general is quicker.
YMMV — might suggest that any of you who have complaints about sluggishness scape your HD clean by reformatting, and reinstall the OSX 10.2.1 directly from one of Apple’s brand new OSX installer CD-ROMS.
BTW, Windows 2K Professional on my PIII-866 w/768 MB RAM and 7200 RPM HD is snappy as far as GUI activities, IE responsiveness, but can bog down dramatically if you try to run several apps simultaneously — to the point that you might have to use the task manager to kill one or more stuck apps just to reclaim some level of responsivness back — OSX RARELY has this problem — in OSX, one can TRULY run MULTIPLE apps without everything grinding to a halt.
And then there is OSX’s Print-To-PDF function, or it CUPS-based GIMP-Print drivers for nearly ANY printer that you could think of — speaking of printing — how about a printer subsystem that ALWAYS prints without headbanging (unlike the occasional if not predictable print job disappearing act that my Win2K box periodically tosses in for grins).
merci
bousozoku: 2. Windows XP rarely runs on 3 year old boxes and uses the graphics subsystem which was introduced with NT 4.0 which violates the kernel to gain speed.
Actually, Windows XP blocks that. It uses emulation for drivers and games that bypass the kernel now. That’s why harddcore gamers are still camping out at Windows 98.
bousozoku: 3. Linux doesn’t have a complete, heavy-duty GUI.
I would say KDE is pretty heavy duty. Unless by heavy duty you mean all the eye candy you could think of in the world that sucks up performance and slows down productivity.
bousozoku: 4. Application developers haven’t caught on to Mac OS X performance enhancement and have, sometimes, left their Mac OS 9.x enhancements in which actually detract from performance in X.
That is Apple’s fault. They want people to move to Cocoa, not realizing that ISVs do have customers not using Mac OS X and porting a Mac app to Cocoa cost a lot of money. Apple could very well improve the performance of Carbon, and they just leave it that way to get people to use Cocoa.
its open to tweaking for performance, just like OS 9. however, many people don’t know that. i get more performance out of my G3 400 / 512 mb ram with X than i did with 9. however, this is after mad tweaking, turning off unused fonts, disabling components i am not using, until i need them like samba, apple talk, Internet DRM (especially this one), etc. i reccomend two programs, Diablotin and MOX Optimizer.
just like with 9, the OS is shipped with every bell and whistle running, so novice users never have to deal with the meat of a machine when they want to turn something on. yes, all the servers, protocols, and everything are always on by default. turn them off, lower overhead on your hardware, and X flies with the best of them.
Well, not if you compare it to the website thetrainline.com….
And then there is OSX’s Print-To-PDF function, or it CUPS-based GIMP-Print drivers for nearly ANY printer that you could think of — speaking of printing — how about a printer subsystem that ALWAYS prints without headbanging (unlike the occasional if not predictable print job disappearing act that my Win2K box periodically tosses in for grins).
Actually… The more I use Apple’s OS X, the more I feel like I am using Windows (NT based version). I bought and installed a shiny new Epson Stylus Photo 850(?) recently. Printed ok the first few times. Then, my girl went browsing some recipe sites, tried to print and all the print jobs mysteriously went… NO WHERE. We rebooted the machine (a Windows problem solving tactic) and all the missing print jobs suddenly printed. From that moment on, it printed ok.
So… I’m not happy with THIS element of OS X either.